Today, I tag team preached with my good friend Ryan. He introduced the summer series we're doing which is a series on the fruit of the spirit. Then I was left with a whole 8 minutes to preach about an hour's worth of material. Needless to say, I cut back on quite a bit of the material. I sent my notes to Ryan earlier last week and he said I had about an hour's worth of material. I had it trimmed down to about 20 minutes or so but still ended up cutting out about two thirds of my sermon. For some reason, I really want to share what I was going to say that I didn't get a chance to say.
As I stated before, my sermon topic was love. A good way to start a sermon is to come to the table with a working definition. I started this off by asking Ryan and Amanda to put a clip of the song, "What is love?" from SNL days but they wouldn't do it, so I sang a tune of it for everyone's enjoyment. I then went on to explain that love is self sacrifice. God is love. He showed us how to love by laying down His life for us, and we are to lay our lives down for others. It is not a sentimental feeling, although that is hopefully part of a healthy relationship between a man and a wife.
After that I asked the rhetorical question, "How do you love someone?" The obvious answer is that you spend time with them. How much time are you spending with God these days? How much time are you praying? How much time are you reading the Bible? I gave the example of my friend that I met with this past week who I had challenged a few weeks prior to get back into Scripture reading and he more than stepped up to the challenge. I challenged him to read a chapter a day in the book of Proverbs for the month of May. Now he's reading through the entire Bible in 90 days. That is very tough to do but such a great discipline to cultivate.
Here's where I skipped some so I could fit it in all before the time was up. What I wanted to say was that if you don't read Scripture, it's a lot like only eating regurgitated food. The preacher tells you the Word from the pulpit and his own interpretation, and then you chew on that. This is good and biblical, but you also need to read the Bible on your own. If Paul in the New Testament challenged his readers to test what he said against the Scriptures, then surely we should challenge our hearers to test what we say against the Scriptures.
Love also keeps our hearts free from idolatry if our love is directed towards God. Anything that you love more than Jesus is an idol. Anything that you turn to in your time of hurt and heartache is your idol. We think we've moved past that since we don't worship Baal or Ashtoreth poles but idolatry is just as alive and rampant today as it ever was. We worship money, time, sex, power, food. My friend Ryan also pointed out that a lot of people in suburbia worship their families. I think I must've pushed some buttons on that topic because not too many people could look me in the eye afterwards.
Mother Theresa said to do small things with great love. This is so huge to me. For part of high school and part of college, I wanted to do something huge for God, something extraordinary. Then I read that and thought, "Well, that matters much more than fame, doesn't it?" It's something that we all can ascribe to, doing small things with great love. Are your Christian acts of service done with love or out of obligation? How can you transform those acts of service? You infuse love into them.
Love your neighbor as yourself proves to be an extremely difficult command to follow. If we realize that everyone is our neighbor and we really followed that command, we would end material poverty. There are other types of poverty which some people don't realize, but material poverty is the main one we think about. When we travel to developing nations we're astounded at first by the level of extreme poverty. However, the longer we stay the more we realize that we're spiritually poor towards God while the Christians in their nations are rich towards God like we could only ever hope to be. Don't get me wrong, addressing and trying to fight physical poverty is one of the noblest things a person can give their lives to. However, if it's not done with love and a pointing towards Jesus then it's worthless.
I'm going to stop there before this blog gets unbearably long, but hopefully it gave you something to think about.
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