B-log

Recap:

• Intro - making love
• Part 1 - love gives life meaning
• Part 2 - love takes time
• Part 3 - what happens when you hurry love 

Continuing my unintended trend of interweaving this conversation with music videos, here’s a classic “on-topic” song, by the greatness that is Johnny Lee - Looking for Love:

I actually thought it was Mickey Gilley who sang it, but I think he just covered it for the epic John-Travolta-as-the-Urban-Cowboy movie Urban Cowboy.

But I digress. 

Probably many people can relate with the disappointing, depressing, downer realities of this song…of looking for love in all the wrong places. Good grief, I know I did. As a result, I experienced (and expressed) a lot of the “not love” antitheses that are explained in part 3, where God talks about love from the perspective of all the things it’s not. Most of us can identify at least one relationship in our life…maybe current relationship, hopefully past relationship…that was marked by selfishness, arrogance, pride, blame, and/or other ugliness.

God doesn’t limit love by explaining what it isn’t, though. He moves forward and reveals the characteristics of love by what love can do…what it is able to accomplish. In reading this list in 1 Corinthians 13:7, note that none of these accomplishments is instantaneous. They take time. And as such, it shows that pursuing love is a life-long, never-ending quest that is worth the investment and self-sacrifice.

Love Bears all Things

This Greek verb for “bears” (stego) means “to cover.” Compare this bear versus bare, which means to exploit. It means to protect. When you love, you are willing to protect those you love rather than exploit them.

Think about this from a practical application. When someone offends you or hurts you, the normal, natural reaction is to recoil from them and to leave them unprotected to face the consequence of their actions. However, when you love someone, the only appropriate response is to cover them, to cover their offense with grace. 

It’s not just a matter of “putting up with their junk.” It means actively reacting to a wrong with grace. It means approaching others with a disciplined intentionality to respond to their ugliness with kindness, to their tactlessness with mercy, and to maliciousness with love.

Love Believes all Things

When you believe all things in love, it means you opt for the most favorable option. Job’s friends didn’t operate out of love, they blamed him for the problems befalling him. When you love people, you want to believe in the best option possible.

At this suggestion, most people would say, “Don’t be naïve.”  However, this is exactly what God wants. He wants you to be naïve. That doesn’t mean you are being stupid. It means that by faith, you are believing that the other person is capable of something far better, far superior than what is typically expected.

Believe that other people won’t let you down. Believe that others won’t habitually hurt you. Believe that others can overcome their dysfunctions. Believe that God loves these “others” at least as much as he loves you, and what he has accomplished in you he can accomplish in others. You see, in doing this, you evidence much more your faith in God than your faith in these other people.

Love Hopes all Things

“Hope” is so much more than just “wishful thinking” or even “lofty ideals.” In the context of love, “hoping all things” means to place a positive confidence or expectation for that person. It means to expect that failure will give way to success, that Christ will claim victory in that person’s life.  This hope is held in close context to the “belief” in all things. 

Again, this idea reflects more of your belief in God than in the other person. If your hope is in the God who parted the Red Sea, who turned water into wine, who healed the sick, who rose from the dead, and who rescued your soul from hell and placed you into heaven, surely you can expect lesser blessings in God’s work in the life of those you love.

Love Endures all Things

This Greek word for “endures” is a military term that means to hold a position at all costs. It means that for those you love, you are willing to endure their offenses, their rebellion, their violence against you. If you have ever sinned or rebelled against your parents, this very concept is why they didn’t pitch you out the first time you messed up. Truly, this endurance is an unending climax of love.

These four characteristics of love presents an ascending order of the love process. When you love with agape love, you first bear all things. When you feel you can’t bear any more, you continue to bear, but you do so because you believe all things. Then when your belief wanes, it doesn’t cease because you hope for all things. And finally, when you feel as though you can hope no longer, you endure. You endure because you love and while you endure, you continue to bear, you continue to believe, and you continue to hope. That is sacrificial, selfless love and that is what God does with you on a daily basis.

Next: Part 5 - Conclusion, the power of love. (Surely, you can predict the accompanying song)

Admit it, you read that title with Phil Collins singing in your brain, didn’t you?

If you didn’t, you do now.

Then again, maybe you’re a fan of the Supremes rendition.

But I digress.

For review, read 1 Corinthians 13:4-7

Your love must be expressed (in action, not words) by verbs that are expressions of time.

If it is not, it’s fair to question if your love is really love at all (at least in terms of how God demonstrates it perfectly and empowers you to reproduce). In fact, the next 8 expressions of love (after patience and kindness) in 1 Corinthians 13 are shown in the negative. They reveal the bad anti-love results that happen when you hurry love:

Jealousy is the thought that you deserve the blessings that someone else has received. Jealousy is the outcome of an inflated self-estimation and a disregard of the other person’s circumstances.  You see other’s blessings and you don’t take the time to understand why that person is blessed. It is a sense of injustice and greed that you want what the other person has. In the context of love, it is simply impossible to be selfless and sacrificial while at the same time being jealous of that same person.

Bragging. This word is used only here in the entire New Testament and it is tied to jealousy. When you brag, you are actually attempting to make others jealous of you. This can never be confused for love. Philippians 2:6-8 reveals that Jesus, “who being in the very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death - even death on a cross!”

When you love others, you don’t brag about yourself. Don’t ever be motivated by the thought of making someone envious of how swell of a person you are. Bragging brings attention to self and is expression of pride.

Arrogance. Arrogance, like bragging, is based in pride. Arrogance is that inclined nose-snobbery that sometimes comes with a sense of accomplishment . Those people who act holier-than-others are making the grave error of placing their emphasis on their part in any spiritual accomplishment, rather than Christ’s grace, mercy, and presence that makes any accomplishment possible. That snobbish elitism is boorish. It contradicts a loving spirit and turns people away from Christ.

Be more like John the Baptist, who totally subjected himself when Jesus arrived on the scene. John had every opportunity to be arrogant. He was the predecessor to the Messiah; he had his own following of believers. Instead, John confessed that he wasn’t even worthy to carry Jesus Christ’s sandals and he said to Jesus, “I must decrease so you can increase.” John was not arrogant because he loved people and he knew and was secure in who God had made him to be.

Unbecomingness. A simple synonym for this is acting rude. Rudeness comes in so many forms, demonstrating both a lack of love and a total lack of respect. Whether you are rude to people by ignoring them, by replying with smart-aleck answers, whether you belittle them, or are just plain mean or insulting, rudeness is the ugly face that proves that love has no home in your heart.

When you start looking at every person as God’s precious creation, remembering that each person is just as valuable to Christ as you are to him, rudeness is replaced with cooperation, patience, care, concern, and ultimately, Christ. 

Seeking Your Own. Seeking your own is also called selfishness. Much of the time, we make good excuses saying things like. “You know, I really do love people, but I don’t want to talk to them about God (or Jesus, or faith, or church, etc). I don’t know what to say, or I might get rejected. Besides, I have to spend Sunday nights getting ready for work.” What you are doing is putting selfish motives (or fears) ahead of the need of that other person. Imagine if Jesus had acted this same way. He never would have left the glory of heaven. He could have said, “You know, I really like it up here. People down there are so mean. I know I’ve got that cross waiting for me, but really, I’m just in no mood to go through that. Besides, I’ve got a lot of other things I can do instead.”

Fortunately for you, Jesus said, “Just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.( Matthew 20:28)” 

Provocation being incited to anger. If your temper explodes at a moment’s notice, you’ve got a problem. Never minimize your anger with a statement like, “I get angry a lot, but it’s always over in a few moments.” The bombs that destroyed Nagasaki and Hiroshima only took a couple of moments and their devastation was immense. Anger can be just like that.

If you are ever going to be angry, do it biblically. Be angry without sinning. Only get angry at the things that anger God. Be angry at sin. Get mad at injustice. Then, do something about it. Fix it. At the same time, show incredible grace and compassion to other people.

Keeping Account of Wrong Suffered. Garth Brooks has a song called, We bury the hatchet, (but leave the handle stickin out) The Greek verb represented by this antithesis of love is the negative of a permanent recording of an accounting calculation. It’s like the other person’s offense against you is marked down with indelible ink in your life’s ledger, forever unreconcilable.

If you belong to God through faith in Jesus, the record of your offenses against God have been reconciled. They are no longer there.  The Bible declares that every record of your rebellion has been removed as far as the east is from the west. God has forgiven you and remembers your defiance no more. Ephesians 4:32 therefor exhorts, “And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you.”

Rejoicing in Unrighteousness. Finally, the last negative attribute may just be the most evident of a loveless life. Unfortunately, there is no shortage of examples of people who make bad choices. Even or especially Christians. When you catch news of another “good person” making a bad choice, how do you react? If there is any small part of you that rejoices at the misfortune of another (especially if it is self-inflicted), you demonstrate evidence of lovelessness.

This ugly rejoicing may be expressed in many ways: Hoping that others will slip up or fail, Gossiping or tolerating gossip (by the way, tolerating gossip is cowardice), responding to the news of others’ misfortune with a sense of satisfaction or happiness or justice. 

When love is rushed, love is absent.

It’s easy to define distance in terms of time. You can ask, “How far to the airport?” and the answer could very well be “20 minutes.” You can’t turn that around though…If you ask, “What time can I pick you up for our date?” and the answer will never be, “About 10 miles.” It just doesn’t work that way.

Similarly, people try to define love in terms that just don’t work. A person can ask their spouse, “Do you love me?” and the typical answer might be…

• I bought you flowers a couple of years ago, didn’t I?
• I kiss you every morning no matter how your breath smells
• I pay the bills, don’t I?
• I went to that romantic comedy (or action movie, as the case may be) with you, remember?

People continually try to define love in terms of activities. However, Scripture consistently teaches that i love…true biblical love in all its forms…is always defined as an expression of time.

Read verses 4-7

In these three verses, God beautifully illustrates the components of love. In three verses, God demonstrates the breadth of love like light through a prism. These verses reveal fifteen hues of God’s love. These are fifteen petals of a flower that is love. Alone, they possess limited nobility; together in its whole, it is beauty that possesses its possessor.

In describing each of these fifteen characteristics, Paul always chose verbs instead of nouns. Verbs are expressions of actions. Actions fill time and space, and accordingly, love is always an expression of time. The description is not so much of what love is, but what love does (and does not). Breaking these three verses down into their component parts is akin to taking your day and breaking it down into the hours, minutes, and seconds from which it’s made:

Patience. The Greek word for patience, makrothumeo is a verb that is always used exclusively with people, rather than circumstances. When you love, you must be patient. Patience has to overcome so many differences:

• opinions
• experience
• education
• gender
• background
• expectations
• prejudices
• personal preferences
• and on and on….

You can never successfully be patient in a hurry. You can’t rush it. You can’t force it. You can only develop it from a foundation of love.

Kindness. Kindness is similar to patience because there is a superficial sort of kindness like there can be a superficial sort of patience. A loveless kindness is just like a superficial patience that is nothing more than just putting up with other people. That’s not patience. Being superficially kind isn’t really being kind, either. In fact, the Greek word for kindness is chrestuomai which means a useful, serving, gracious type of kindness. It’s kindness that takes time.

It’s the type of kindness that took Jesus 33 years to express, where he exchanged his holy, eternal, invincible body for a weak, frail, terminal human body. Where he exchanged the everlasting accolades of heaven’s angels for the hate-filled scorn of humanity. Where he exchanged his crown of gold for a crown of thorns, his royal robes for bloody rags, and the throne of heaven for the cross of death.

He took the full measure of time that was required to extend this kindness to you. He doesn’t want you to miss it. And once you claim it for yourself, he empowers you to reproduce it.

That, dear friend, is kindness.

Humanity has had a “love problem” from nearly the beginning of time. It didn’t start out that way, but sometime after their original creation, the first people bought in to a lie and distrusted the love of God. That distrust led to separation, and that separation led to an endless, endemic plight that accounts for every lie since the first, every murder since the first, every betrayal since the first, every….

Well, you get the picture.

By the time the Apostle Paul wrote his first letter to the struggling church in Corinth, they were neck deep in their own “love problem.” They were jacked up, to use a deeply spiritual term. He realized there was no “Control-Z” undo to their problems. So he attempted to re-orient their thinking and, accordingly, change their dysfunctional ways.

This congregation considered themselves be quite a spiritual group of elite people. The members of the church had acquired great knowledge, they possessed the ability to speak in a variety of languages, they had been graced with gifts of prophecy. God had blessed them in mighty ways, yet they were a congregation that was struggling, suffocated by division, infighting, and confusion. Interestingly, Paul wrote (what we call) chapter 13 to show that this church, in many ways, was clueless when it came to love. 

Fortunately, we have the text to help us understand what they weren’t comprehending. Read the first three verses for context.

The Corinthian church didn’t lack for any spiritual gift, but they were not daily living in the source or power of those gifts, Jesus Christ. Spiritual gifts are bestowed differently upon every believer. What a blessing to have and know which spiritual gift you have been given. That said, spiritual gifts are not the evidence of the health of your spiritual life. That health is evidenced instead by your spiritual fruits. 

Galatians 5:22 says, “But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness…”

And the list goes on. What is important here? The first (in rank) fruit of the spirit listed is LOVE. Returning to the original Corinthian passage, notice:

Without Love, your gifts are immaterial (verse 1). Here, Paul writes using the greatest form of exaggeration or hyperbole. He’s saying, even if a person had the greatest ability to speak with eloquence, he may as well be babbling gibberish if he doesn’t operate out of a love motive.

Without Love, our gains are insubstantial (verse 2). Paul’s extremism is continued for the purpose of proving his point. He is saying that if you have the ability to know and understand all life’s mysteries, even being so gifted that you might know the motives of God, that if you operate without love, you are nothing.

Without Love, our giving is insignificant (verse 3). Paul concludes the exaggeration by saying that the ultimate giving, giving up all possessions or the burning up of one’s life, would be meaningless if not driven by a love motive. 

This passage has a simple message for you right now, today. Love gives your life meaning. Your days can be full…full of accomplishment, full of accumulation, and full of accolades. But if you don’t have love, you ain’t got diddly squat.

 ”I may not be a smart man, Jenny, but I know what love is.”

  -Forrest Gump

We all might know what love is, but none of us knows on our own how to really make love.

You might be saying, “Speak for yourself, McAnally.” I’m not talking about that kind of “making love.” After all, this is pastor’s blog, not a screenplay based on a Nicolas Sparks novel.

I’m talking about the kind of “making love” that is reflected in the old Kentucky Headhunters song Always Making Love to You, which recounts how the singer’s love for his lady is “made” in the time while they are apart from one another, or when they simply think of one another, rather than in times of cuddlin’ and smoochin’.

Using this as the shore from which to wade into the shallow end of potentially deep theological waters, this type of “making love” is not the romance, eros, the physical manifestation of love that is commonly expressed between two people. Rather, the “making of love” or the creation of love is only possible because God makes or creates his agape love and expresses it to his creation (at least according to 1 John 4:9).

Ultimately, God expresses the love he makes not in creating us, but in redeeming us, through the death and atonement of Jesus.  The love that God creates is selfless. It’s sacrificial. It’s timeless. It’s epic.

This is the standard. This is the model. This is the ideal. We can’t “manufacture love” the way God does. However, because he loves us, we have been commanded to access the love that he has manufactured, and with it love others sacrificially and selflessly. 

We don’t have too look far to realize that far too often, we fail miserably when we attempt to create love and nurture loving relationships in our own lives.  These failures befall us in so many places:

• More than half of all marriages fail.
• Millions of pre-born children around the world are aborted.
• The euphemism named euthanasia (meaning, literally, easy death) is growing in social acceptance and frequency each passing year.
• Children are growing up in an epidemic of fatherlessness.
• War rages on around the world, replete with genocide, rape, torture, and forced starvation. 

This is the indictment against humanity. It falls upon your shoulders and it rests heavily upon mine. Our total inability to make, manufacture, manifest, build or create love from our own motivations or mechanisms illustrates the vast disparity between God and humanity.

In the posts to follow, we’ll dive into 1 Corinthians 13, perhaps the most famous passage on love. I hope it will help you love God, love others, and love yourself more fully and appropriately. I hope it will help you “make love” better.