Reflecting God's Agape Love in Our Lives

Well, again, we understand that love, agape love, is rooted and grounded in the character of God. And the love that we are called to manifest to each other is the love that comes from God and a love that mirrors and reflects his character. So when we look carefully at these admonitions about how we are to demonstrate love, we learn at least by way of analogy something about how God exercises his love toward us. [00:00:42]

Number one, love reveals what the right Christian spirit is. What kind of spirit we are to display as people is defined by love. Second of all, love reveals to those who profess faith in Christ whether their Christian experience is genuine, because if we have no love, we are not born of God. Remember John said those who love are born of God, and all who are born of God love, in this sense of agape. [00:03:07]

Love reveals an urgent need to guard against envy, malice, bitterness, and other dark spirits that overthrow the work of love. The insight there of course is that with a spirit of envy towards another person, I can't really love another person and envy them. I can't feel malice to somebody whom I really love. And so bitterness, malice, envy, jealousy, these are the vices that work against the virtue of love. [00:05:00]

And finally, in his summary, he said love calls us to love even the worst of our enemies as it tempers the spirit of the Christian and is the sum of Christianity. Well, looking at this as the brief overview, let's take a look now at the text itself where we read in 1 Corinthians 13 these words, "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love I have become sounding brass or a clanging symbol." [00:05:38]

And so what he's saying is if you were the most gifted, charismatic person that ever lived, but you don't have the gift of love, you're nothing more than a sounding brass and a clanging symbol, just clashing noise. And then he goes on, "And though I have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but I have not love, I'm nothing." [00:07:56]

Now, one of the things I want to say in terms of drawing this to our contemporary situation: we have this idea in our culture that talent covers a multitude of sins. If somebody is a successful movie actress, or a movie actor, it doesn't matter how many affairs of adultery they are involved in. If a person is an outstanding athlete, it doesn't matter how many illegitimate children they have, because we don't look to our leaders to be role models, if they're talented, if they're able, that's all that counts. [00:08:57]

And the same is true in the church. If a person is educated and is knowledgeable, and is sophisticated as a professor or as a theologian, he's above criticism in many ways. Or if a person's a golden-voiced orator, great preacher, doesn't matter. We will still exalt these heroes despite their behavior. That's not what the apostle is saying. What the apostle is saying is, "I don't care how gifted you are, I don't care how accomplished you are, I don't care how celebrated you are, if you don't have agape you are nothing in the sight of God." [00:10:04]

And there are still people who are resting their hope and their confidence on their performance to get them into the kingdom of God. When Jesus said, "If you are workers of iniquity, I don't know who you are. Please leave." I mean now that's scary. That's particularly scary for somebody who's involved as I am in what we call full-time Christian service. And I often wonder that. [00:11:13]

And it's scary when Paul says, "I don't care if you have prophecy, if you understand all these mysteries, and you have all this knowledge, and if you have enough faith to move mountains, you don't have love, you're nothing." And then listen to what he says, "And even if I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing." [00:12:15]

Love suffers long and is kind. Have we seen those words in other places in Scripture? How many times does the Bible describe the character of God as being longsuffering? Longsuffering. I was in the medical center the other day for an MRI on my shoulder, and as I was in the waiting room an elderly man brought an elderly woman in the waiting room in a wheelchair. And when I saw her come in, I could see that she was in distress. [00:14:45]

We find it very difficult to suffer for a long period of time. We want the pain to be over in a hurry. It's one thing to be short-suffering, and it's another thing to be longsuffering. But this longsuffering is not just related to physical pain and the endurance of that kind of thing, but it also has to do with enduring hostility from other people, insults from other people, slander from other people. [00:18:08]

To be a kind person is not to be a mean person. To be a kind person is to be patient, to be friendly, to not be nasty, and mean, and bitter in one's spirit. One of the great privileges of my life earlier was in the early days of the beginning of the ministry of prison fellowship, I was on the board of directors and I was in a meeting one day with Chuck Colson and we were talking about creating a logo for the ministry. [00:22:05]