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SERMON TOPIC: Love

Speaker: Ken Paynter

Language: ENGLISH

Date: 2 February 2014

Topic Groups: LONG-SUFFERING, LOVE, PERSEVERANCE

Sermon synopsis: In one of the most powerful and poetic chapters of the Bible, 1 Corinthians 13, the apostle Paul describes the sort of love Christians are meant to embody:
'Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.'

Longsuffering heads the list, and I think that's significant because to love freely and consistently in the other ways Paul names requires a readiness to go the distance. We can't reserve our love for certain situations or special people, and we can't withdraw it when people disappoint or fail. Longsuffering is both a prerequisite and the bottom line.

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Love.

Grace to Keep On Loving .

In one of the most powerful and poetic chapters of the Bible, 1 Corinthians 13, the apostle Paul describes the sort of love Christians are meant to embody:

"Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails."

Longsuffering heads the list, and I think that's significant because to love freely and consistently in the other ways Paul names requires a readiness to go the distance. We can't reserve our love for certain situations or special people, and we can't withdraw it when people disappoint or fail. Longsuffering is both a prerequisite and the bottom line.

Grace to Keep On Loving .

How do we find it within ourselves to continue to show love to someone who has hurt us or others? Giving the person the benefit of the doubt can help, and so can remembering that we also hurt others through thoughtlessness, blunders, and unloving choices. But the surest way I know can be found in another translation of this same passage. In the New International Version, the phrase "love thinks no evil" is rendered "love keeps no record of wrongs." Hurts are real and take time to heal, but when we resist the all-too-human urge to replay them in the courtroom of our mind, when we choose rather to forgive and truly forget, God gives us the love and grace to keep on loving. And everyone wins.

Mark 12:31 … Love your neighbour as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.

Luke 6:31 Do to others as you would have them do to you.

Luke 6:35 But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked.

Love.

One of the deepest needs of the human heart is the need to be appreciated.

Every human being wants to be valued.

This is not to say that everybody wants to be told by others how wonderful he is, no doubt there is that desire, too, but that is not fundamental.

We could say that every human being wants to be loved, but this is ambiguous.

For some people, love is something passionate; for others, it is something romantic; for others, love is something merely sexual.

Love.

There is, however, a deeper love, a love of acceptance. Every human being craves to be accepted, accepted for what he is.

Nothing in human life has such a lasting and fatal effect as the experience of not being completely accepted. When I am not accepted, then something in me is broken. A baby who is not welcome is ruined at the roots of his existence. A student who does not feel accepted by his teacher will not learn. A man who does not feel accepted by his colleagues on the job will suffer from ulcers, and be a nuisance at home.

Love.

Many of the life histories of prisoners reveal that somewhere along the way they went astray because there was no one who really accepted them. A life without acceptance is a life in which a most basic human need goes unfulfilled. Acceptance means that the people with whom I live give me a feeling of self-respect, a feeling that I am worthwhile. They are happy that I am who I am. Acceptance means that I am welcome to be myself. Acceptance means that though there is need for growth, I am not forced. I do not have to be the person I am not! Neither am I locked in by my past or present. Rather I am given room to unfold, to outgrow the mistakes of the past. In a way we can say that acceptance is an unveiling. Every one of us is born with many potentialities. But unless they are drawn out by the warm touch of another's acceptance they will remain dormant.

Love.

Acceptance liberates everything that is in me. Only when I am loved in that deep sense of complete acceptance can I become myself. The love, the acceptance of other persons, makes me the unique person that I am meant to be. When a person is appreciated for what he does, he is not unique; someone else can do the same work perhaps even better than he. But when a person is loved for what he is, then he becomes a unique and irreplaceable personality. So indeed, I need that acceptance in order to be myself. When I am not accepted, I am a nobody. I cannot come to fulfilment. An accepted person is a happy person because he is opened up, because he can grow.

Love.

We all as humans need to be loved and it is no wonder because we are made in God’s image and God is love, He does not love, He is love, it is His very essence.

God is Love.

1 John 4:7-12.

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.

Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

Love for God.

John 14:15-24.

If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.

I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may be with you forever; that is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not see Him or know Him, but you know Him because He abides with you and will be in you. “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. After a little while the world will no longer see Me, but you will see Me; because I live, you will live also. In that day you will know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you. He who has My commandments and keeps them is the one who loves Me; and he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and will disclose Myself to him.” Judas (not Iscariot) *said to Him, “Lord, what then has happened that You are going to disclose Yourself to us and not to the world?” Jesus answered and said to him, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our abode with him. He who does not love Me does not keep My words

Love for God.

John 15:9-17.

“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.

My command is this:

Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business….. This is my command: Love each other.

Love for our fellow man.

The law of God hangs on two commands to love him with all our heart, soul, mind and strength and to love our neighbour as ourselves and in fact we see in Scripture that we cannot love God whom we have not seen if we don’t love our brother whom we have seen.

1 John 4:20,21.

For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.

Galatians 5:14

For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: Love your neighbour as yourself.

Love for our fellow man.

1 John 4:7-8.

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.

Romans 5:5.

And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us. You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Love in marriage.

There is no escaping the importance of love in the life of the Christian and the Church, but because Hollywood has distorted the concept that many have of love we need to look at God’s Word to get the true picture and definition of what love really is.

1 Corinthians 13:1-7 & 13.

If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

Love in marriage.

Love is:

Patient.

Kind.

Rejoices with Truth.

always Protects.

always Trusts.

Always Hopes.

Always Perseveres

Love does not/ is not:

does not Envy.

does not Boast.

is not Proud.

is not Rude.

is not Self-seeking.

is not easily Angered.

does not keep a record of Wrongs.

does not delight in Evil.

does not Fail

Love in marriage.

Love.

There are 3 main words in the Greek for love.

Phileo.

A friendship, sharing, conversation. (emotional needs more at the forefront)

Eros.

Physical love, our word erotic in English is derived from this word. (physical needs more at the forefront)

Agape.

Unconditional love that will cause one to lay down their life for the other. (Only God loves like this)

Love in marriage.

Woman are more inclined towards Phileo.

Men are more inclined towards Eros.

This may in some ways be an over simplification of the differences between men an woman, but as we look as we look again at 1 John 4:12 we will see that the spirit that ensures a successful marriage is one of been a giver and not a taker.

We see that if we love our partner in the way they need to be love by exercising our free will and putting their interests ahead of our own, God will perfect his own Agape love in our lives in response to our obedience and we will love each other with an unconditional love.

Love in marriage.

1 John 4:12.

No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

Love in the life of a child.

" Touch is so important that an infant deprived of affectionate touch will literally perish from a syndrome called “failure to thrive”. Babies can thrive without sight, without smell, even without hearing. But they cannot thrive without being touched. At the beginning of the last century, the mortality among children under two years of age, living in orphanages in Europe and in North America, was almost 100 per cent. These children were being well taken care of physically. They had all the food and health care they needed. Yet they died in their hundreds. Their physical needs were being taken care of but no one was allowed to touch them. At that time, it was thought that cuddling infants would spread infections and make children morally weak. In 1920, Dr J Brenneman, a hospital paediatrician, introduced a rule in his ward that every baby should be picked up, carried around and “mothered” several times a day. Death rates fell immediately.

Love in the life of a child.

Romanian orphanages are a good example. There has been lots of research to show that a babies development (in fact up to 6 yrs) is dependant a lot on physical contact (love, not just touch).

Neural pathways don't develop, they become apathetic and then some will die. When the neural pathways r not created in the early stages, if u then say, send the child to a loving home, those pathways can never be created, the space for them has been shut down. Lots of love can help some children, but they will never be what they could have been. Very sad. Its not just orphans in homes like that but in families that may live just around the corner from u!

Love by David R. Hamilton PhD

Any mother intuitively knows that her children need love. Now, a wealth of scientific evidence is shining light on why this is so.

The Budapest Early Intervention Project (BEIP), a project that examined the health and development of children in Romanian orphanages, found startling evidence that when infants and children are starved of love and affection, their bodies do not grow as they should. In fact, for every 3 months in an institution, a child loses an average of one month of growth. One piece of good news from the project is that when children are adopted or fostered from such institutions, growth returns to normal, providing the child is removed before the age of 2. They often quickly adjust emotionally too. After this time, hope is not gone. It merely seems to require more skilled (perhaps experienced) foster or adoptive parents to help the child to adjust. Much of the reason for this seems to lie in the development of the brain.

Love by David R. Hamilton PhD.

The brain grows rapidly in the first few years after birth but, contrary to most people’s assumptions, this is not entirely according to a genetic program. The program runs in the context of the child’s environment. If the environment is rich in love, affection, attention and positive emotion, then the brain receives the emotional nourishment it needs and grows according to plan. But where the child doesn’t receive this emotional nourishment, the program runs differently and brain growth in some key areas (as well as whole-body growth) slows down. There is a wealth of research now accumulating in this area. Some even suggests that a parent’s love can have health effects later in life. This makes sense, especially if part of the brain’s growth is laid down in early infanthood. Thus, the way the child (and eventually, adult) responds to life situations, particularly stressful ones, will be linked with this. It seems like emotional deprivation as an infant can leave the adult less able to deal with stress, like love is the vital nutrient required to build parts of the nervous system.

Love by David R. Hamilton PhD.

Love in early childhood seemed to confer some sort of resistance to these typically lifestyle associated conditions. Love aids the building of healthy biology. And, of course, we should bear this in mind not only in how we care for our children but in how we treat each other all of the time. Love and kindness do more for our own selves and for others than we can possibly imagine. As I have written in other blogs (and in my book, ‘Why Kindness is Good for You), kindness is actually good for the heart, an effect facilitated, in part, by the effects of oxytocin (the love hormone). So with that in mind, I’d like to leave you with one of my favourite quotes. It’s by Mother Theresa. She said, “Spread love everywhere you go. Let no one ever come to you without leaving happier.”

Love for our enemies.

Luke 6:27-35

“Listen, all of you. Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. Pray for the happiness of those who curse you; implore God’s blessing on those who hurt you. “If someone slaps you on one cheek, let him slap the other too! If someone demands your coat, give him your shirt besides. Give what you have to anyone who asks you for it; and when things are taken away from you, don’t worry about getting them back. Treat others as you want them to treat you. “Do you think you deserve credit for merely loving those who love you? Even the godless do that! And if you do good only to those who do you good is that so wonderful? Even sinners do that much! And if you lend money only to those who can repay you, what good is that? Even the most wicked will lend to their own kind for full return! “Love your enemies! Do good to them! Lend to them! And don’t be concerned about the fact that they won’t repay. Then your reward from heaven will be very great, and you will truly be acting as sons of God: for he is kind to the unthankful and to those who are very wicked.

Love for the unloved.

Matthew 11:18-19.

For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon.’ The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.

Matthew 9:11-13.

When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

Love for our family.

Satan knows how vital the family is in God’s plan for us to love and be loved and it is for this reason he has tried everything to break up the family unit.

Illicit sex (fornication, adultery, prostitution & homosexuality etc)

In recent ministry that I listened to on TBN the Minister was saying that in his dealings with homosexuals he had found that more often than not they were not primarily looking for sex but looking for love, trying to satisfy a God given need in a God-forbidden way. I think that many of vices and sins that ensnare people are effective because so many are starved of true love and appreciation.

Although we do not condone these sins we should reach out in Love to the hurting and the unloved just as Jesus did.

Love for the unloved.

CHRISTIAN CONTEMPORARY MUSIC STAR NATALIE GRANT WAS NOMINATED FOR TWO GRAMMYS.

Grant was up for Best Gospel/ Contemporary Christian Music Performance for “Alive (Mary Magdalene),” a song she wrote with her husband Bernie Helms, and Best Christian Music Song for the chart-topping “Hurricane.”

The couple went to the Grammy's proud to represent gospel music. Little did they know when they arrived at the Los Angeles Staples Centre that they’d be going to church. To warm up the congregation and open the service, Beyoncé twerked her ample bethonged derriere to the delight of millions. After that, Natalie and Bernie were subjected to Mrs. Carter sitting astride a chair in, shall we say, an extremely come-hither position. Next the high-powered billionaire, Jay-Z ,and his bodacious bride left little to imagination about what goes on in their boudoir when nobody’s looking.

Love for the unloved.

From there, Natalie got to see pop star Katy Perry, who used to sing about Jesus. However, since crossing over into showbiz stardom she’s been circling the vortex of hellish behaviour for years. Katy, wearing an illuminated Knights Templar cross on her chest, pushed the envelope beyond ‘kissing a girl’ in what even the secular media described as a Satanic Ritual, or at best, witchcraft. Right about that time Natalie and Bernie were probably starting to feel out of place among people winning awards for being “Up all night to ‘Get lucky’” It’s unclear which debauched performance prompted Natalie Grant and Bernie Helms to call it a night. Hopefully, they were already gone and missed the church-like mockery that was overseen by Reverend Latifah. Wedding music was compliments of a menopausal Madonna on behalf of 34 same- and mixed-sex couples who tied the knot on what’s supposed to be a music awards show. Refusing to pass judgment on the debacle, after she left Natalie had this to say on her Facebook page, which in a few words said so much:

We left the Grammy’s early. I’ve many thoughts about the show tonight, most of which are probably better left inside my head. But I’ll say this: I’ve never been more honoured to sing about Jesus and for Jesus. And I’ve never been more sure of the path I’ve chosen.

Love for the unloved.

Do you know that God loves you?

Does your wife know you love her?

Do your children know you love them?

Does your family know you love them?

Do your colleagues know you love them?

God’s Love for you.

Do you know that God loves you?

1 John 4:16 (AMP)

And we know (understand, recognize, are conscious of, by observation and by experience) and believe (adhere to and put faith in and rely on) the love God cherishes for us. God is love, and he who dwells and continues in love dwells and continues in God, and God dwells and continues in him.

Knowing that God loves us is vital (even though we are evil)

Matthew 7:11.

If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!

Love for your wife.

Does your wife know you love her?

Ephesians 5:25.

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.

Ephesians 5:28.

In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.

Love for your children.

Hebrews 12:5-7.

My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son. Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father?

Ephesians 6:4.

Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.

Love for your relatives.

1 Timothy 5:8 (AMP)

If anyone fails to provide for his relatives, and especially for those of his own family, he has disowned the faith [by failing to accompany it with fruits] and is worse than an unbeliever [who performs his obligation in these matters].

We live in a world in which many who are unloved and neglected have family who are so caught up in their own selfish pursuits that they have no time for them.

Love for your spiritual family .

John 13:34-35.

A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.

1 John 3:16-18.

This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.

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Unless otherwise stated, Scripture quotations are taken from the NIV:

THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture quotations taken from the NASB:

New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation Used by permission. (www.Lockman.org)




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