Love Is | Week 1 | Full Service

This is where love is defined for us. It is the verse most often read at weddings but least often lived out in marriages. It's the verse most often preached in church, but least often lived out in the lives of Christians. Okay, it's gonna feel like we're at a wedding in a second, but here's where the working definition of love is that we have to rally around, that we're gonna spend the next five weeks diving deep and dissecting apart.

Paul in one Corinthians chapter 13, he starts and he says, If I speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but I didn't have If I didn't love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging symbol. He said, if I had the gift of prophecy and if I understood all of God's secret plans and possessed all knowledge,

if I had such faith that I could move mountains but I didn't love others, I would be nothing.

If I gave everything I have to the poor and I even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it. But if I didn't love others, I would have gained nothing. But before we move into verse four, which is really the part we're gonna spend the next five weeks diving deep into,

I wanna set up what we're reading here. Paul is writing a letter to a church that he helped start in a city called Corinth. Corinth was like a city like San Diego. It was a port city. It was near the harbors where all the commerce happened. It was a really wealthy city. And it had a really metropolis of people, all different backgrounds, all different countries and different levels of socioeconomic

class were living in this place and they became a wild church. When you read the letter of one Corinthians, this church was allowing things that you and I would gasp if we even read most of it in church because they had just become a wild group of people. But in the middle of one Corinthians, Paul starts to address the biggest thing that is happening inside of the church. And he goes after these things called spiritual gifts, which really freak us out in church. Where we talk about praying in tongues and the gift of prophecy and the gift of healing, all of which Paul says are good things.

He says, but when done with the wrong motive, when they're done out of any heart posture other than that of love, those good things become bad things. And he starts and he says, even if I could speak all the languages of the angels, if somehow God told me all the mysteries of heaven and I knew all the secrets that God had

but I didn't have love, I would just be a loud gong. I would be a loud symbol that would just be obnoxious to people. Here's why we need to lean in this morning and listen. What Paul is telling us is if the church

becomes known for really truly anything other than people who are motivated out of, who are driven by a deep love for this world, then all of the things that we can do, even good things, giving our money, sacrificing our time, serving people, done with the wrong intents, we will miss the heart of God completely.

So the question is what is the definition of love that we have to live to? Here's where Paul specifically starts to define what love is. He says, love is patient. Love is kind. It is not jealous. It's not boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way.

It is not irritable. It keeps no records of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice, but it rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up. It never loses faith. Hopeful. It endures through every circumstance.

Here's why this matters, because prophecy and speaking in unknown languages and special knowledge will become useless. Love will last forever. He says our knowledge is partial and incomplete. Even the gift of prophecy reveals only part of the whole picture.

But when the time of perfection comes, he's referring to the second coming of Christ. When the time of perfection comes, all of these partial things will become useless. When I was a child, I spoke and I thought and I reasoned as a child, but when I grew up, I put away childish things.

Now we see things imperfectly like puzzling reflections in a mirror. But then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely just as God now knows me completely.

Friends, there's three things that will last forever, faith, hope and love. The greatest of these is love. Paul says why should you and I care about love? It's because it's the only thing, literally the only thing that will go with us into eternity.

All the rest are good things. Spiritual gifts are awesome. Paul says we should desire them. He says, I praise God that I pray in tongues more than all of you. Right? He doesn't vilify the spiritual gifts, but he says the spiritual gifts done with the wrong heart miss the heart of God completely.

They must be motivated out of love and it's not a love that we get to define. He says the love that God has for us, the love that we're called to reach this world with, it is a love that will require you to put away childish thinking. This type of love will require you to be an adult.

He says when I was a child I used to think like a child. I used to go, oh, this is how I feel, therefore because I feel this way maybe that means this is what I'm supposed to do. Goes, no, that's how kids behave. But adults

go, this is the standard that God sets. This is the standard that God has created for us. Therefore, I will choose to follow, submit to and honor it even when I disagree.

And notice what he uses, he starts this whole thing and again we're gonna spend the next five weeks looking at the specific verbs or adjectives that he uses to describe love. But the first one that he starts with in verse four, he says, this adult type of love,

this love is patient. And if I'm honest with you that word frustrates me.

Because I don't know if you've been to the Queen Creek Marketplace lately on Friday or Saturday night, I'm like, does everybody and their mom go to Chick fil A on Friday night at 06:00? I was there Friday, 06:00 and I literally stood in there for twenty minutes to wait for my mobile pickup order. Luckily it was the Lord's chicken so I was willing to wait. But I'm like, I put my order in twenty minutes ago before I left my house and I still have to stand in this crowd and this kid behind the counter keeps saying that this is his pleasure and I'm like, there's nothing pleasurable about this, sir.

This is frustrating, right? I don't do patience well. I'm the guy that will always pay $2.99 to get my Amazon shipment in four hours instead of two days. Yes, I want it now. If you could have a guy bring it to me right this second, I would pay $3.99

for that. I am four drones. I am ready for the robots to drop my packages off at my house. Why? Because I can't wait for anything. I'm wildly impatient. Yet here's the crazy part, the God that I surrender to, the Jesus I've submitted my life to as I examine his life, it is the perfect picture of a man who was never

in a hurry. Jesus was on this earth for thirty three years. He only even began his public ministry when he was 30 years old.

It's not that he couldn't have started earlier, he just knew it wasn't his time yet. When he was 12, 13 years old they found him in the temple teaching in ways that they said there's something different about this guy. He teaches as if he knows all of the old testament.

He could have started at any point but he was intentional to start at the perfect time. And then he had three years with 12 knuckleheads to train them how to change the world. Yet the crazy part is when you look at Jesus' life, there's not a single story of Jesus running anywhere.

He never rode a horse from town to town. Often his mode of transportation that he preferred was a donkey that walked. He was born on a donkey. His final march into Jerusalem was on the back of a donkey. He was never in a hurry. He was never inconvenienced by people. When people would interrupt him, he would tell his disciples,

you're missing it. These kids, this is the moment. Don't tell them to go away, let's embrace this moment. It was almost like Jesus embodied what patience and love is supposed to be. And here's the truth of following God is it can be a really frustrating thing. Because we have to try to wrap our human understanding of time

and we have to try to wrap it into God's existence outside of time. And scripture tells us that for us a day is like a thousand years to God. And what God is thinking about generationally,

he's brewing something that takes a long time to come to fulfillment. And the truth is, is the best things that God will do in our life often come slowly to us.

It's a bit like the Thanksgiving meal that we're all about to prepare in a few days. The best parts about it will take the longest to make. But the truth is, is all of us want the end product of it without going through the process of slowly preparing it.

And if you follow Jesus for more than five minutes, I'm telling you if you're anything like me, you're gonna be frustrated because God is always gonna ask me to slow down and to be patient and to listen to him. And there's patience all over the Bible

when it comes to us in our relationship with God, but in one Corinthians chapter 13 when Paul is defining the love that God has for us that we're supposed to use to reach this world, It's actually a word in the Greek that has nothing to do with our vertical relationship.

The word that Paul uses in one Corinthians 13 is a Greek word that has everything to do with how we connect to each other. The word, if you're taking notes, it's macrothumia.

It's a Greek word that's actually made up of two different words, macro and thumos, which best translated translates to long suffering. In the King James version, it literally puts that there instead of patience. It says love suffers longest, which I'm like, that's a weird way to say anything. Let's just say long suffering, right?

It's actually a term that is used to describe a liquid that has a high boiling point. But what's the point of all of this? Paul is saying the adult type of love, the love that begins to pursue people the way that God pursues us, it is one that built into it understands that suffering is a part of the process.

That we are going to be disappointed by people. People are going to let us down, but we know that God loved us this way when we let him down. Therefore, maybe just maybe we can love people this way as well. Why should us sitting here today, why should any of us sitting here this morning

care at all about growing in patience? Why is patience something that we have to be super intentional to pursue? Why is it something that seems to be so hard? Why is it so unnatural to us? The first thing of why I think patience matters if you're taking notes is this, everybody sitting in this room is wildly different.

And I know that's not like a rocket science thing, but all of us in this room are really different. Paul says this in the chapter before one Corinthians, in one Corinthians 12,

which again is a continuation of what he writes into chapter 13. He says, You and I have to understand, there's different kinds of spiritual gifts, but it's the same spirit that's the source of them all. There's different kinds of service but we serve

the same Lord. God works in different ways but it's the same God who does the work in all of us. What Paul says is that the reason that there's so much tension in the church is because God has built us differently. He's wired us differently. He's given us different spiritual

gifts that if you're not careful, you will begin to compare yours to the people around you and you will think that one is better than the other. And the problem with church is we forget that the goal is unity not uniformity,

right? Jesus' prayer for his church, he said, God, as I leave, would you give them the power and the ability to stay united? He didn't say make them all the same.

Make them look the same, behave the same, vote the same, believe the same, come to the same conclusions on every issue. He says, no, no, no, they're gonna be wildly different. But in spite of their differences, show them how to fight

for unity. Sitting in this room are people that have all kinds of differences. Here's a few of them that I see. All of us in this room have different spiritual gifts. There's all kinds of different spiritual gifts. And the beauty is that all of us have different ones.

And it's when we collectively bring them together that this thing becomes the ecclesia. It becomes what the book of Ephesians called the manifold wisdom of God. The motley crew that is the body of Christ. But the sad truth is the most divided time in our country's week is Sunday mornings between nine and 12:00

because what do we do? We all go in our different corners. We all go to the churches where we look the same and we believe the same and our spiritual giftings are more aligned. And I think in doing that, we miss a lot of the beauty

of the complexity that the bride of Christ is supposed to have. But it's not just spiritual gifts that make us different. Inside of this room, every single one of us have different hearts. What do I mean by that? We're not all motivated the same way. All of us are gonna see the same things and come to completely

different conclusions. Some of you last week, you listened to Malanga talk about what God is doing in Africa and there was something in your heart that was like, man, we've gotta get to Africa. Some of you were like, man, I've gotta get to Buffalo Wild Wings to watch the football game after service.

That doesn't mean, here's the danger is what we then do is we go, well, this one's good and this one's bad. It's not good or bad, it's just different. Different is okay. It's actually a beautiful thing. Because when you bring your different and I bring my different and we collectively together remember,

yes, they're different but they come from the same God, they come from the same source, maybe just maybe our differences when leveraged are what make us a force to be reckoned with. It should not surprise us if Jesus' greatest prayer for his church was that they would be united,

that the greatest ploy that the enemy would have to destroy us from the inside out would be one of disunity, of division and getting us to go, no, no, no, focus on what makes you different.

Focus on why you're better than this other person because you have this gifting and you're wired this way. That's what you should lean into. You're right, you've got to get your family, you gotta get your friends and you need to go to a church where they all believe the same things that you do.

And I'm telling you, it's a lie from the pit of hell because it's not just our hearts that are different. All of us in this room, we have wildly different abilities.

This is a really good thing. If everybody had my ability, it would be a miserable church that nobody would want to go to. When you look at what it takes for us as Rock Point to pull off a weekend, no exaggeration, it is a literal small army. When you look at kids ministry, guest services, security,

audio, visual, all the teams that it takes to pull this off, no exaggeration is a small army. And the beautiful part is what we do is we put leaders that are in their giftings that are able to leverage their strengths and together we become something bigger than we're able to be individually.

In this room, we all have wildly different personalities as well. This is something that when you get married, you begin to realize like, wait, why did God have me marry this person? Like we are so different.

My wife and I could not be more different. Like I would love if all of you wanted to come to my house after service for a barbecue. Like that would make my day. My wife would literally, no exaggeration,

she would die. Like she would just fall over. Like the introvertedness, it would just completely overwhelm her, she would die. For you to come to my house, my house has to look like I don't live in my house even though I tell my wife, people know we live here. Like they know that we do. When I was a youth pastor, I learned this the hard way. Right? We bought a house right across the street from the main high school that I was reaching students at. And so I gave a bunch of the kids my garage code. Forgot to tell my wife that I gave them the garage code.

She came home and she's like, why are there 20 high school kids playing Xbox on my couch? I was like, oh, yeah. I'll be home in a couple hours. I'm done with some meetings and that conversation didn't go well that night. Mine I had to change the garage code. Know, like, we're different.

But the beauty that I've learned over thirteen years after lots of tension with my wife is that God intentionally knew what he was doing in bringing us together in spite of our differences. And as we can leverage those differences, as we can lean on each other's strengths amidst our differences,

we become a powerful couple for the kingdom of God. If I was married to myself, I'm telling you it would be a disaster. God knew what he was doing when he put the people in your life that are different than you, even though there's moments of tension.

The last difference that I see is sitting in this room, and this is where I really want us to lean in this morning, is we all have different experiences. The way that I grew up, the home that I grew up in, the socioeconomic class that my family comes from,

the form of Christianity that I grew up in, it's not the same as yours. Some of you in here are from completely different countries than us. You come from different states, you come from different backgrounds, you come from different family cultures and it's all beautiful. But if we're not careful, we will begin to forget

that people sitting here that we deal with are the summation of all of their life experiences that are very different than your life experiences. We as the church have to remember what is our goal.

Our goal is unity in the body of Christ. Why? Because we know that love is the greatest weapon that God has to reach this world with and he will use us to be the hands and feet of that. The enemy will try to come in and pervert that and distort that and say, no, no, no, it has to be uniformity.

And it's just not true. Friends, we can sit in this room, look at the same things, come to different conclusions, but as long as we're not talking about the essential core issues, which there's not really that many of in the Christian faith,

these things we don't divide over. You can't have a different opinion of whether or not Jesus is the only way to get to heaven. You can't have a different opinion on what the Trinity actually is. These are things that we unfortunately do have to divide over. But what typically happens is we have all these non essential issues over here and then we get really freaked out, we get offended and then we leave and we go to another church. We go, you know what, we're gonna take our kids, we're gonna go to church down the street because I was offended here.

The world has convinced you and I that the worst thing that can happen to us is that we would get offended. I'm telling you right now as I read scripture, the worst thing that can happen to us is not that we get offended, it's that we don't love well the person who does the offending.

Don't hear what I'm not saying, I'm not saying that we stay in abusive relationships and we stay in hurtful situations, but if you come here to Rock Point and you hear something from this stage that offends you, my ask is that are you offended at what the person said or what the scriptures say?

And maybe if it was somebody who said something off the cuff, did you give him an opportunity to clarify? Did you give him the opportunity to pursue reconciliation? Because what the enemy would love to do is to continue what he's been doing for the last two years.

You know how many people have switched churches in the last two years because they said something that offended them? If you haven't been offended sitting in church here, you're just not listening close enough. You should have been offended a long time ago.

Why? Because the gospel is kind of an offensive message. It says you're the problem. It says that I'm the problem. And here's the problem with our differences when we don't realize them. These differences left alone will eventually lead to misunderstandings. This is where the division comes.

It's these differences because you go, well, this is how I see the world. This is how I view the world. This is what I do. This is how I believe. And then we look at somebody to go, well, wait, how did they come to different conclusions?

That then if not given a chance to reconcile will lead to misunderstandings that cause division. The truth is most of the denominations we have of the Christian church are these exact things played out over a long period of history.

And I think a lot of the divisions break the heart of God because we divide over non essential issues.

We divide over things that aren't that big of a deal. When we as Rock Point say we're a non denominational church, basically what that means is that we don't really take super hardline stances on some of these secondary issues.

That means there's gonna be people in this room who think praying in tongues is a thing that not saved people do. And there's some people in this church who are like, no, pray in tongues all the time. And what I'm saying is that both of us can sit in the same church and go to the same heaven because it's not an essential issue. So

what do we do? We sit here and we go, okay, awesome. Look, we're all different. These things if left undealt with can lead to misunderstandings.

How do we practically begin to be people that say, look, we wanna grow in this love. We wanna grow in our patience with people. I got a couple things that I want us to look at real quick. The first thing we have to do is we have to remember how patient God's been with us. Paul, the same guy that gives us a definition of love in first Corinthians 13, he writes this in first Timothy chapter one to a young pastor named Paul.

I'm sorry, to a young pastor named Timothy. He says, but God had mercy on me so that Christ Jesus could use me as a prime example of his great patience with even the worst sinner. Here's the why,

because then others will realize that they too can believe in him and receive eternal life. Paul is encouraging a young pastor to go, remember, God was patient with me. This is a man who literally killed Christians.

He said, even when I was a mess, God didn't strike me with lightning. Even when I was a mess, God didn't kill me off. He loved me in the middle of my mess. He came for me and he rescued me in the middle of my crisis. And then what he did is he began to use my life as an example of what the radical

counter cultural love and patience that God has with the rest of the world. This is what our lives are supposed to be. It's why Paul says we're supposed to be a living epistle. Our lives are supposed to be a book of the Bible that people read and they go, man, if God was patient with that dude,

maybe just maybe he will be patient with me in the ultimate goal of our lives. Why do we do any of this? It's because we're hoping that eventually people will receive eternal life. In the balance hangs people's eternal destinies. Friends, the stakes could not be higher.

These Thanksgiving meals that we have with our aunts and uncles and cousins and long lost relatives that drive us crazy, maybe just maybe, what God wants to do in us is show them through a practical simple way of being patient and loving towards them,

the God of the universe that was patient with us. But when we begin to forget how patient God is with us, all of a sudden it's really easy to be impatient with other people. For me, right before bedtime when my kids are supposed to be brushing their teeth and they're doing literally

anything other than brushing their teeth and I want to wring their necks and cuss them out and choke slam them to make them brush their teeth, I have to stop and remember God when I'm doing everything else than what it is you've asked me to do, you never respond with anger to me. You're always patient with me.

Is how we love our kids an accurate picture of how God loves us? Man, it's been a convicting week where God said if I loved you the way you love your kids sometimes, I would have had to have taken you out a long time ago. When we forget how patient God is with us, it becomes really easy to become impatient

with other people. Here's the second thing we have to do if we wanna grow in patience. We need to learn to understand. This is where I think the real meat of this message is. There's something I saw this week in Proverbs that really blew my mind when comes

to us learning to love each other and to be more patient with people. Proverbs 19 says that a person's wisdom yields patience. Notice this, it's wisdom that leads to patience and then in Proverbs 14 it says it a different way. It says that whoever is patient has great understanding. This is powerful if we see it.

The author of Proverbs says that if you look at somebody and you go, man, that's a really patient person towards the person they're interacting with. It says that you're looking at a person that has great wisdom and understanding of the person they're dealing with.

There's a direct correlation in our ability to love and our ability to be patient with somebody to our level of understanding and wisdom of who that person is.

Because it's really easy when somebody on the freeway cuts us off to get really frustrated and just give them the number one sign out the window and be like, what is wrong with you? But if we could stop and we could hear their story

and they could tell us about the hard morning that they've had and how they've been rushing out the door and all of the things that led to where they are today, what would happen? We would go, oh, I understand that. That makes sense to me. I get it. And that understanding would give us patience with that person.

Here's where I think the church collectively needs to learn understanding. We are at a time where our culture, our churches, our nation, our society has never been more divided than we are today. The division seems to be growing more and more and more and more every year. I am legitimately

concerned in two years what's gonna happen in the presidential election. Not because I'm scared of who's gonna get elected into office, I'm scared of what it's gonna do in a lot of your lives when the person that you don't want, whether it's Biden or Trump or DeSantis or whoever, fill in the blanks,

they're the ones that's gonna be elected. It's all, this must mean it's the end times. And then there's people in the church that voted for them, no chance they're going to heaven.

And I'm telling you right now, for those of you who lean really far to the right, you're gonna be shocked when you get to heaven one day. There's gonna be Democrats there. And for some of you who are like the Democrats are the path forward, you're going to be really surprised when you get there and there's Republicans

in heaven, right? And again, I think that the left is trying to completely get rid of God and I think the right is trying to actually take the place of God. I think both are crazy. Do I vote with my conscience? Yes and amen. But what we cannot do as the people is draw a hard

line in the sand and say, this is what happens if you're a Christian. This is what you have to do. Because there's people that I love that know the Bible better than you do. And when they look at the issues and when they study scripture, they land here and I land here. But what I don't get to do as the hands and feet of Jesus is look at them and say negative things about them and blast them on social media and tell them how terrible they are. What we're supposed to do if we're gonna love that person well is we have to seek to understand them. So instead of talking badly about them, try to have a conversation

with them. Ask them, how do you get here? Because you'll be shocked. They're not like, well, I worship the devil and the devil says this is how I have to vote. You go, holy cow, they went through a process. They sought God. They read scripture. They prayed. And this is where they landed on the issue. It's different than where I land but praise God. Let's all go to church and move on because all of these politicians are liars at the end of the day anyways.

Our hope, friends, our hope cannot be in an elephant or a donkey. It has to be in the lion of the tribe of Judah. His name is Jesus and he's coming again and he's gonna wipe away all of these structures that we've put into place that we think we're gonna find hope in. They're all gonna disappoint us.

There is a reason that God has given you and I two ears and only one mouth. We as the people of God, we need to learn what it means to seek to understand again and not try to be understood. Maybe just maybe you could stop talking and just listen, ask good questions and you will be shocked at what happens.

You will realize, man, we have so much more in common than I thought we did. Really at the end of the day, all of us want the same thing. We want an opportunity to raise our kids, to give them the best shot that we can, to live in a place that is free of tyranny,

to be a place where we can openly worship our God. And yes, I also want the people who worship other gods to be able to do the same thing. All of us are after the same thing. Maybe just maybe we as the people of God need