WHAT MATTERS MOST

This message is adapted from one preached by Rick Warren. Scripture Reference: 1 Corinthians 13

Today we’re going to begin a new series called “Living Real Relationships – With God’s Love.” We’re going to look at the most famous chapter in the Bible on love, 1 Corinthians 13. The chapter mentions a number of challenging issues:

1. If I don’t live a life of love, nothing I say will matter.

Verse 1: ‘If I could speak in any language in heaven or on earth, but I didn’t love others I would only be making meaningless noise like a loud gong or a claiming symbol.’ (NLT) God says words without love are just noise. Words without love are empty. We’re really impressed by great speakers, great communicators. We love eloquence. We love charisma, to hear somebody who really stirs us. God says, “That doesn’t impress me at all. It doesn’t matter how good a communicator you are. Is your life a life of love?”

2. If I don't live a life with love, nothing I know will matter.

 1 Cor 13:2 (NLT) ‘If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I knew all the mysteries of the future and knew everything about everything, but didn't love others, what good would I be? And if I had the gift of faith so that I could speak to a mountain and make it move, without love I would be no good to anybody’. 

You may have a Ph.D. You may be a genius, brilliant, a walking Bible encyclopedia, have incredible knowledge of science or math or literature or history. You may be a genius. But He says if you don’t have love, all that you know is worthless. It doesn’t really matter. Brilliance without love equals zero. We live in a world where knowledge is exploding. It doubles about every six years in our society. We are smarter than we’ve ever been before than any other generation. But we still have the same old problems – war, terrorism, crime, abuse, prejudice, hatred, and violence. Why? Because what the world needs is not more knowledge; it needs more love. Without love, nothing I say will matter, and without love, nothing I know will matter. All the knowledge in the world can’t compensate for it.

3. If I don’t live a life with love, nothing I believe will matter.

There’s a myth that being a Christian, being a follower of Christ, is just a matter of believing certain truths. That is not true. Nothing can be further from the truth. Following Christ is much more than believing intellectual facts or doctrinal truths. It’s a life of love. 1 Cor. 13:3 (NLT) ‘If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it; but if I didn't love others, I would be of no value whatsoever.’ (NLT) 1 John 4:20 (NLT) ‘If someone says, "I love God," but hates a Christian brother or sister, that person is a liar; for if we don't love people we can see, how can we love God, whom we have not seen?’

4. If I don’t live a life of love, nothing I give will matter.

1 Cor. 13:3 (NLT) ‘If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it; but if I didn't love others, I would be of no value whatsoever.’ Can you be in a relationship and give for selfish motives? Absolutely, you can. Giving is not necessarily always loving. Some people give just in order to get back. That’s not love. That’s selfishness. Some people give out of guilt, to try to assuage a guilty conscience so they give and give and give trying to make up for something they did in the past. Some people give to control other people. Some people give for prestige, for glory, for honor. They want a little plague that says, “Look! I'm a great giver!” That’s not love. You can give from a lot of wrong motives, and the Bible says if I'm not doing this in love, none of my giving counts. And nothing I give will matter. A guy told me one time, “I don't understand. I’ve bought my wife everything she could ever want, and she's leaving me.” I said, “But did you love her?” You can’t buy a wife, just like you can’t buy your kids. A lot of parents try to compensate for the lack of time they spend with their kids by buying them lots of things. They don’t need things. They need your time. They need your love.

One day you’re going to stand before God when you die. And God’s going to evaluate your life. When He evaluates your life, He’s not going to look at your bank account. He’s not going to look at your list of accomplishments. He’s not going to look at your grades. He’s not going to look at all your sports trophies. He’s not going to look at your endorsements or your PR list or your resume. God is going to evaluate your life on one basis – your relationships. God is going to ask, “How much did you love me and other people?” That’s called the Great Commandment. Did you love God with all your heart, and did you love your neighbor as yourself? That is all that matters in God’s eyes. All the other stuff is superfluous. How well did you love? The Bible is very clear that love is the primary objective of life and love is the supreme value in life and love is the greatest power in life. That’s why we’re going to spend 40 days focusing on it. If love is that powerful, if it’s the primary objective of life, if it’s the supreme value of life, if it’s what matters most in life, what in the world is it? What is love? Without a doubt, love is the most overused word in the English language. We use it to refer to so many different things, different emotions and feelings of affection. I’ll say, “I love my wife and kids. I love God. I love my country. I love really spicy food. I love lying on the beach.” I love a whole lot of different things in varying degree of value. We have love letters, we have love songs, and we have love stories. But nobody stops to define what love is. So this week I decided to look up the definition. I went to my 24-volume World Book Encyclopedia, and I looked up “love.” I discovered it has no article on love. In fact, it had one line that said, “Love: See sex and emotion.” So I looked up the article on emotion. I already knew about sex. I read the entire article. It mentions the word “love” one time and never defines it. So then I looked up this article on “sex.” Three and a half pages – fascinating article. It mentions “love” four times and again never defines the term. I thought, isn’t that typical? We know far more about sex than we do about love. Almost nobody knows about real, mature, godly, Christ-like love. We just haven’t the slightest idea. In fact, the world doesn’t know anything about love. Almost all of the love songs that are “love” songs are really lust songs. They’re not about giving. They’re about getting. “Give it to me! If you don't give it, I'm going to take it! And if I don’t get it, I’ll go somewhere else!” That's not love. That’s lust. Love can always wait to give. But lust can never wait to get. When a guy says to a woman, “If you love me, you’ll let me,” she ought to say, “If you love me, you’ll wait.” Love can always wait to give. But lust can never wait to get.

So what is love? It’s going to take us seven weeks to unpack that question. There’s so much about it. We’re going to go deep, and I guarantee you it’s going to surprise you. Let me just start by giving you a couple of definitions right now. This will just scratch the surface. We’re barely getting into this great subject of what does it mean to be a truly loving person.

1. The Bible says that love is a command.

God commands that we love each other. It’s not optional. If we don’t do it, the Bible says that we are sinning. The Bible says this in 2 John 1:6 (NLT) ‘Love means doing what God has commanded us, and he has commanded us to love one another, just as you heard from the beginning.’ Some people say, “I can live without love.” No, you can’t. You can exist without love, but you can’t live without it. And you can’t please God without it because the Bible says God has commanded us to love each other. Because it is commanded, that brings up a corollary, and it is this: Love is not a feeling. We know that because you can’t command a feeling. You can no more command a feeling that you can command the wind. You can no more command a feeling than you can command the mountains to move. Feelings cannot be commanded. Love is not a feeling. It creates feeling. It produces feelings. Love causes feelings, but love is not an emotion. If you think it is, you have a very shallow understanding of love. It creates emotion, but love is not an emotion. So you need to understand that. When people say, “I feel love,” you’re feeling an emotion, but love is more than that. God would never command you to do something that he doesn’t give you the power and the ability to do. And you can’t always control an emotion.

2. The Bible says that love is a choice.

We choose to love, and we choose to not love. It’s a choice. The Bible says in 1 Cor. 14:1a (NLT) ‘Let love be your highest goal…….’ That means make a choice. Love is a choice. We choose to love or to not love. That destroys another myth that we have about love. We think love is uncontrollable. As if one day I'm just walking along and I'm instantly in love – no control over it. Even the terminology we use is kind of accidental – I fell into love. Like it’s a big ditch or something. I fell in love. As if I have no control over my choice to love or not love. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had men or women say to me, trying to justify a separation or divorce: I just don’t love him/her anymore. As if that's totally out of your control and now because you don’t love her that gives you the right to divorce her or leave her. Love is a choice. You need to rephrase that: “I'm choosing not to love him any more.” Because it is a choice, and you could choose to keep on loving even if they didn’t love you. That’s your choice. In fact, the truth is, acting in love when you don’t feel like it is actually a higher level of love than when you do feel like it. It’s one thing to love when the flowers are in bloom and you’re on a honeymoon and things are going your way and you’ve got a lot of money to spend and things are going great. But the real test of love is when things are not going great in your life, when you’re out of money and when you’re sick and don’t feel good, the pressure is on and you’ve lost your job. You choose to love in spite of how you feel. That’s a higher level of love. Loving in spite of your feelings. Loving in spite of your emotions.

Love is giving a person what they need, not what they deserve. That’s what God does. That’s how God loves you. God doesn’t give you what you deserve. If I got what I deserved from God, I wouldn’t even be standing here, and you wouldn’t even be alive either. But God doesn’t give us what we deserve; He gives us what we need. That’s called grace. That’s called love. Love is giving to another person without any guarantee of getting anything back. If you’re doing it to get something back, that’s not love. Love is committing to the well being of another person without any guarantees that they’re going to give back to you. That’s love. It’s a command, and it’s a choice. It is not a feeling.

3. The Bible says that love is a conduct.

It’s a behaviour. It’s an action. It’s a way of acting. Love is something you do. The Bible says in 1 John 3:18, “Dear Children, let us stop just saying we love each other, let us really show it by our actions.” (NLT). Love is not something you feel. Love is not something you say. Love is something you do. It’s behaviour. It’s actions. It’s an activity. It’s more than just talk. It’s more than just sentimental feeling. It’s more than a nice pretty Hallmark card. It’s not sentimentality. Love is something you do. A guy was telling his girlfriend all the time, “I would die for you.” She said, “You’re always saying that, but you never do it.” Love is something you do. This week, we’re starting small groups to study living in real relationships with God’s love in detail. This first week we’re going to look at opening up our eyes to being observant to opportunities to love. Did you know that every minute of the day God is putting around you – right in front of your nose – opportunities to grow in love? Opportunities to demonstrate love. The problem is most of the time we’re too busy. We’re too distracted. The problem is we’re thinking about achievements, not relationships. So we’re looking around and focusing on everything else and then the opportunity to demonstrate love passes by. How many times have you thought: I need to write a letter to that person. I need to make a call. I need to give a word of encouragement to that person at work. I need to go next door to my neighbour’s and do such and such. And you have all these great intentions of loving and showing kindness and showing unselfishness, but you didn’t do it. And the opportunity bypassed you. Now it’s gone. Over. You’re not going to get it back. And you have missed an opportunity to grow in love, missed an opportunity to do that which matters most. Love is a conduct.

4. The Bible says that love is a commitment.

1 John 4:16 says, 1 John 4:16 (NLT) ‘God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them.’ Our relationship with God is largely affected by our relationship with other people. Love keeps on. Love is durable. Love keeps on giving whether you like it or not. Love keeps on keeping on. I want to warn you. If you decide to get onboard with this 40 Days of Love program that we’re going to do to learn how to build authentic relations and you think, “I really do want to go deeper in love. I don’t want to be a shallow lover. I want to be a mature lover. And I want God to love people through me. I realize it’s the most important thing in life. It’s what I'm going to be evaluated on. It’s what matters most. So I'm going to make a commitment to grow in love.” I need to warn you: that commitment will be tested. God will test, “Are you serious about being loving?” Because mature love is always tested love. There is no mature love without it being tested first. My suspicion is that all of us need a lot of work in this area. I don’t know anybody who’s got this one down pat. We all have a lot of growing to do in mature love. How do you do it? How do you build a life of real deep love? Again, it’s going to take about six weeks to unpack that question. It’s really profound. But I can give you some things to get you out of the starting block. Five things that you can do this week that will help you get on the road to becoming a truly great person of love. Because this is what matters most in life.

1. Learn how mature love acts and responds.

Personal change always begins with a change in perspective. It involves getting God’s perspective on what love is really like. Because, as I said, the world knows nothing about real, deep love. Get God’s perspective on what love is all about because God is love.

2. Start your day with a daily reminder to love.

The first 10 minutes of your day sets your entire mood for the rest of the day. If you’ll get up in the morning and say, “God, I just want to remind myself that the most important thing is love. Loving you and loving other people. What matters more than accomplishments are relationships.”

 If you’ll do that at the start of the day before you get busy, and pause and say, “Help me to remember this because it’s so easy to forget. Whether I get anything else done in life or not, if I love you and I love other people today, this is not a wasted day.”  If you don’t do that, you’ll get halfway into your day and then comes the conflict or the crisis or the confrontation and all of these things, and you’re tempted to be unloving because you didn’t start the day with that in mind.

3. Memorise what God says about love.

The Bible is filled with advice, inspiration, truths, and principles on how to become a loving person. The problem is, you don’t have any of these in your mind. When you’re in a situation when you’re tempted to be unloving, to be jealous or envious or angry or impatient or judgmental or critical or any of the other unloving acts we’re all tempted to do on a daily basis – when those situations occur, because you don’t have any of those verses in your mind, your Bible is usually at home on a shelf and it’s no good in that situation. But if you will memorize a few verses of what God says about love and put them in your mind, then when you’re in a situation where you need them, God can bring them to remembrance – “Remember what I said…” Some of you have never memorized anything out of the Bible. So when you get discouraged or when you’re depressed or when you’re angry or when you’re worried or when you’re fearful, there’s nothing for God to bring to mind. So you don’t have anything that God can use because your Bible is setting at home on a shelf. We need to reprogram our minds, repattern our thought life from selfish thoughts to unselfish thoughts to be more loving in the way God wants us to be.

4. Practice acting in unselfish, loving ways.

Love is like a muscle. The more you use it, the more it develops. Practice makes perfect. How many of you were expert drivers the first time you sat behind a wheel? None of you. In fact the first time you got in a car to drive, it felt quite awkward. You didn’t know how much to push on the accelerator. You didn’t know how much to push on the brake. You didn’t even know how to adjust your seat probably, adjust the mirrors. When you had to make a major turn, you thought, “How do I do this? How do my hands go?” It felt very awkward and unnatural. So you began to practice driving. The more you practiced, the better you got at it. Now it’s second nature. You don’t even think about it. When you want to become a truly loving person, you have to intentionally do some things that seem awkward at first. They don’t fit. They don’t seem natural. But if you’ll practice, the more you practice, the more it becomes second nature and you become a genuinely loving person. It’s all learned through practice.

5. Get support from other loving people.

This is so important. You’ll never become a loving person sitting by yourself in your room and reading a book. You only learn it in connection to others, in the context of community, in the environment of relationships. You’ve got to get with people if you’re going to learn to be a great loving person. That’s one of the reasons why a small group is so good. It’s put you in a group who are not part of your family, who are totally different from you, and you have to learn to get close to them. That’s how you learn to love. That’s how you develop skills. You never learn it just sitting back and listening. You learn it in relationship to other people.

There’s so much we have to share about love. There’s no way I can share it just on Sunday mornings or Sunday nights or Saturday nights just in these sessions. We’ve written a study guide to go with it. Every one of our small groups are going to study this same material. If you’re not in a small group, you need to sign up for one.

We want everyone to do five things as part of this course leading up to Easter

1. Attend a study group to get connected to others.

2. Read the 40 Days With God’s Love devotional to get connected to God. We have written a 40-day devotional, 5 minutes a day, to start your day focusing on being loving.

3. Participate in one of our expressions of love community projects to demonstrate love to others. We’re going to give you a list of very simple acts of love that you can choose to do during the next 40 days to put you behind the wheel and start practicing how to be more loving. You can’t do it just sitting here listening to messages. You’ve got to practice.

4. Memorize a short Bible verse each week to put God’s word in my heart. This week it’s 1 Corinthians 14: 1, “Let love be your greatest aim.” If you’ll do this, by the end of the 40 days, you will have memorized and put in your mind 6 verses of God’s word about learning to love.

5. Finally, don’t miss any of the eight messages on building a life of love and growing in relationships.

Jesus said to the disciples, John 13:34 (NLT) ‘So now I am giving you a new commandment: Love each other. Just as I have loved you, you should love each other.’

You say, “Impossible. There’s no way that I can love like Jesus Christ.” You’re right. There is no way that you could possibly love like Jesus Christ and love as much as he loves you in your own power. That’s why you need Jesus Christ in your life. That’s why you need him inside of you and the first step is to say, “Jesus Christ, put your love in me. Come inside me. I open my heart to you.” In the weeks ahead, I'm going to teach you how to let God love other people through you rather than you just trying to do it on your own power. How do you let God put His love through you?

“In this life we have three lasting qualities: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” Why is love the greatest? Because it’s going to last forever. When you get to heaven, you’re not going to need faith, because you’re going to be in the presence of God. You won’t need faith in heaven. When you get to heaven, you’re not going to need hope. You’re not going to need hope because all your needs will be met. You won’t need hope or faith. But when you get to heaven, heaven is filled with love because God is love. The Bible doesn’t say God is faith. The Bible doesn’t say God is hope. The Bible says God is love. And love is going to go on for the rest of eternity. Nothing matters more than what we’re going to talk about the next six weeks.

Prayer:

• Lord, our world desperately needs massive doses of love. There are people here today who are afraid of the future. Yet You’ve said, “There is no fear in love.” My prayer is that we won’t just think and talk and listen about love and be spectators, but we’ll actually become more loving people. In your name, I pray. Amen

As we close, I want you to ask God a question. “God, do You want me to grow in love?” If the answer in your heart, the impression in your mind – the little tugging – is yes, then I want you to pray this prayer:

• “Dear God, I really do want to become a more loving person. I don’t want to be a shallow lover. I want to be a mature loving person. I want to develop healthy, authentic relationships, so I'm willing to take these first steps in faith. I'm going to give You the next 40 days of my life. I know it will be busy, but I want to thank You, God, in advance for all that You’re going to do in my life and in my relationships during the next 40 days. I'm going to focus on what matters most. In Jesus’ name. Amen.”