Strength & Love for 2002
Sermon Review
03 February 2002
(1 Thes 3:12-13)The two qualities that Paul prayed for God to work in the Thessalonians were love and courage (strong hearts) - two qualities that make one gigantic difference in life. Courage…A woman and her husband interrupted their vacation to go to a dentist. "I want a tooth pulled, and I don't want Novocaine because I'm in a big hurry," the woman said. "Just extract the tooth as quickly as possible, and we'll be on our way." The dentist was quite impressed. "You're certainly a courageous woman," he said. "Which tooth is it?" The woman turned to her husband and said, "Show him your tooth, dear." Courage is a necessary quality to live the Christian life, not just visiting dentists!
Love: MD Elisabeth Kubler-Ross once said, "I've never met a person whose greatest need was anything other than real, unconditional love. There is no mistaking love. You feel it in your heart. It is the common fiber of life, the flame that heats our soul, energizes our spirit and supplies passion to our lives. It is our connection to God and to each other."
As we approach this year, we would do well to seek to embrace Paul's prayer for ourselves - to have God work love and courage more and more into our lives.
Love: Basilea Schlink, the women who founded the Evangelical Sisters of Mary, in her book 'My All For Him', titled one small chapter 'Love is the Highest Calling'. Is this not true? Is it not indeed the highest calling for Christians? In 1Cor.13, the love chapter in the N.T. God reveals to us through Paul that without an attitude or motive of love, knowledge, tongues, matyrdom etc. is pointless, and that love is greater than faith and hope. As we travel through the N.T. the emphasis on love puts us on the spot like Jesus did to Peter (John 21:15ff.). In the N.T. disciples are told to love God with all their heart etc., to love their enemies; that love fulfils the law, that loving others is forever an unfilled debt to fill; that love is to be genuine and not feigned; that the very sending of Christ and the provision of salvation flowed from love; that people are to be rooted and grounded in love; to come to comprehend the length & depth, height and breadth of Christ's love, and to experience it rather than just have knowledge of it; that the Holy Spirit attempts to reproduce love in the believers life; and we are even told that God is love! If we dismiss the integral place that love has in Christian faith and experience, there will not be much left.
Paul prays that the God would help the Thessalonian's love to increase and overflow for each other and everyone else. What a lovely prayer - one that God appeared to answer when Paul later writes to them again in 2Thess.1:3. We probably use many different measuring sticks to determine if we are maturing as Christians - how our commitment to prayer, Bible Reading, Fellowship, our involvement in the local church etc. is going. I wonder if we are game to measure how loving we are? It seems to me that this is the true test. Are we growing in love? Are we becoming more compassionate, kind, thoughtful and considerate? Are we becoming more concerned with the welfare of others than ourselves? The truth is that we probably all fall short when it comes to being loving. Yet this is not a reason to dismiss honest personal evaluation, or to stop continued attempts to rectify coldness, indifference, and hardness in our hearts. However, it is a reason to make admissions to God about our desperate need for surgery in our own hearts - that we fall short and need acts of grace within ourselves in order to grow in love. Love is said to be a fruit of the Holy Spirit (Gal.5). This means that there is every reason to try to be loving, but not without earnestly seeking the grace to be so. The fruit of the spirit is not a checklist to see primarily what we need to try and cultivate in our lives. It is a checklist to see how involved the Holy Spirit is in our lives! It is a measure to see if we are indeed walking in the Spirit or living in the Flesh. If we really want God to increase our love this year, and cause it to overflow to each other and 'everyone else', we need to own up to our lack of love and to repent of it, and seek the power of the Holy Spirit to 'grow' it in us! To pray for it and to have others pray for it as Paul prayed for the Thessalonians.
Courage: Paul also prays for strength in the hearts of the Thessalonians, so they would be holy and blameless at the return of Christ. When I recently preached on Jude17-25 I encouraged all to have 'growing, gardening, going, and glowing' as personal goals for 2002. By gardening I meant that we were to deal with the weeds and insects that choke out the life of God in our lives.
This is not easy, but if we want to arrive 'holy and blameless' we need strong hearts - that is, courage to deal with issues of the heart. Courage to deal with the worries, cares, and attractions of wealth and possessions, and anything else that chokes our spiritual life so effectively. Remember, weeds do not normally die by themselves, nor dig themselves out, or apologise for cluttering up your garden. Instead they try to ingratiate themselves in our good graces. We all need prayer for the courage to keep our hearts tilled, soft and receptive to the Spirit of God, ready for cultivation - ready for the fruit of the Spirit to grow and flourish in. And we need the courage not to give up in doing this. So many people give up just when they are about to win, others give up once they have won. Still others persist even when they have lost, and eventually win. In 1985 Steven Jobs was fired by Apple Computer, a company he helped create. Some industry people referred to him as a rags-to-riches-to-rags story, and said his career in technology was finished. Steven didn't agree. He founded a new company, NEXT, and in December 1996 Apple Computer bought the company for $four hundred million dollars. We are not to give up, but we need to learn to fight smart - to seek God to strengthen our hearts so we will indeed weed them.
Conclusion: The writer to the Hebrews wrote, 'we are to approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need' Heb.4:16. To grow in love and find the courage to deal with anything that will stop us arriving blameless and holy, we need to be getting down on our knees seeking the grace of God to work marvels of grace in us, and those around us. The new covenant is about finding the laws of God written in our minds and on our hearts (Heb.8:10) ie. to be transformed, new creations in Christ etc. It is not about simply trying to do what God asks, but being a 'new creation'. Paul wanted the Thessalonians to find the grace of God in their lives so that they could be more loving to other Christians and everyone else, as well as find the strength of heart to be holy and blameless at Christ's return. What did he do to help this happen? He prayed. So should we.
Blessings