Love comes naturally to everyone. You ever thought about that? It may be the love of self that comes naturally, but naturally it comes. Some people readily love their friends and family.
We know unbelievers, if you think about it, who are quick to defend and guard their family’s reputation to take care of one another, while others struggle with loving their family, even if it was the best family in the world. Others love strangers more readily than people they know. It’s an odd kind of love, but that’s where we are.
Often people love all kinds of people without clear priorities. One day they put more focus and emphasis on their spouse, another day upon their children to the neglect of their spouse, so their love bounces back and forth. Bounces around from one commitment to another, to neighbors and friends, it becomes unclear who they love the most.
Others are fairly balanced, prioritizing their family before strangers, for instance, in terms of love and exercising that love as they ought. So love is manifested in exercise, all kinds of schizophrenic, confused ways, and even orderly ways. If we think about it.
So the question then is, given all that, do you understand what love is in the midst of such confusing ways of exercising it? What is love? How should you practice love? How can we love ourselves, or should we? Who should we love? Why are these questions even being asked, Pastor? Because of the times we live in. Schools tell their students that love means having multiple partners. Politicians tell us love means eradicating all voters.
Churches tell us love means never disciplining anyone for anything. That would be mean. Love is not mean.
It’s all over society. It’s in Christian schools. It’s in Christian churches.
A rank ignorance and or confusion of what love is, what it looks like, and how it’s exercised. Think about it this week. If you’ve not thought about it before, you’ll see it in the media.
Well, if you don’t do this, if you get rid of this tax policy or that policy, then you don’t love the poor. You don’t love adoption, or you don’t love something. They’re quick to jump on the love bandwagon and bash people’s heads over.
Christians do it as much as unbelievers. Not picking on one side more than the other. So these next two sermons, I’ll go over some answers to these questions.
Some a little more detailed than others in their answers. So first let us start with understanding what love is as we see pictured here in one of the classical passages of 1 Corinthians 13. What is natural love? Love, we have the same noun in both cases, natural love and supernatural love.
There’s an overlap apparently. There’s a similarity of course. There’s no formal definition of love in the Bible.
Not a lot of formal definition of all kinds of things in the Bible. It’s not written like a textbook for college or high school. There are letters and historical books written to people with issues and concerns like you and I. It’s tempting, I suspect, as it was for me for many years, to think 1 Corinthians 13, there’s my definition of love.
Grab these verses, put them together and give them the Webster, right? Go to the dictionary.com. There’s your definition. However, Paul doesn’t write, the Holy Spirit doesn’t write, this is it. I’m writing the definitive answer, definition of love.
This is love and nothing else. It’s not there in a text. It’s not even written that way.
Love is described here more than defined. And in fact, it’s described elsewhere in the Bible. Love is talked about many places in the Bible, especially it seems in the New Testament.
It talks about sacrificing yourself for one another. That is to your friend in particular. There’s no greater love does a man have than this to give his life for his friends.
That’s not here in 1 Corinthians 13. That’s missing, isn’t it? So you can see already, just upon reflection, elsewhere it talks about love coming from God. 1 John, right, John the Apostle of Love talks about love a lot in there.
And he describes it in ways not described in 1 Corinthians 13. Again, more evidence that this is not the defining definition of love. And that’s important this day and age because again, politicians and Christians and confused people, people well-meaning will go to 1 Corinthians 13 and use it in a situation when they shouldn’t.
We’re gonna cover some of that later. So what is love? If I asked you to love your parents or your spouse, you come to me for counseling, I need help, my family, and I say, well, the first thing you need to do as a husband to the wife is you need to love your wife. Would you ask me, pastor, give me a dictionary definition of what love is? You may ask for a few examples that you’re a little weak on being creative perhaps, or thoughtful is usually the case for the men.
But you’re not seriously gonna say, I’m not quite sure what you mean by that, pastor. What do you mean by love? You know it intuitively, that’s how God made us. That’s why I use the word natural love.
We all have it. Whether we exercise it consistently or well enough is a different question. Just like you all have patience.
You know that, right? You ever think about that? You are having a cranky day, you’re arguing with somebody or you feel needled by your children, the crying baby, and the phone rings. You pick up the phone, hello, how are you today? All of a sudden you’re exercising what? Patience and self-control. Unbelievers do it and you do it.
The same with love. So, we know it instinctively. It’s not clearly defined as a scientific definition in the Bible.
To better understand love, let’s look at these verses here in 1 Corinthians 13, which paints the picture of love. That’s why I use that language. Before we do, we see in particular elsewhere in the Bible that love is a command, love is a disposition, love is an action.
This isn’t the only verse that talks about love. Matthew 22, 37 and following. Jesus said to him, and we read it together after we read the Ten Commandments.
You shall love the Lord your God. It is a command. You can command people to love.
God does it. Christ does it. And he says to love your neighbor.
It’s not a suggestion. It’s a command of God. Love is a disposition, of course.
It’s your love with your heart. If you just have, as it were, loving actions, but you’re mumbling on your breath and you hate your neighbor, you’re like, this guy’s not really loving, is he? I’m glad he’s doing nice things, but he sure is a complainer. It’s a disposition of the heart.
And of course, love is a command. Love is an action. What does Christ say about it? If you love me, meditate.
Well, you should meditate in the Bible, but he says more than that. Keep my commandments. Here, the disposition and the action in 1 Corinthians 13, given that background information, is especially highlighted, isn’t it? It uses intense language at the beginning to drive a point home to the Corinthians, who apparently weren’t showing a lot of love.
We know they had schism and they were fighting one another. That’s why he complained about it in the Lord’s Supper of 1 Corinthians 11. So given that background, we see Paul’s hammering home.
You need to show love for one another as brothers and sisters in the Lord. I’ll just talk about being helpful and showing lots of action, but having not love, the heart disposition, as well as the action. It’s just a bunch of clanging cymbals.
No one’s hearing you. The list here, as I said, includes actions as well as heart attitudes. Love is not prideful.
That’s a heart attitude, isn’t it? Some actions of pride clearly show pride, given the context. Other times, it’s not so clear. People are quick to jump and say, well, that’s a prideful act.
Not necessarily. It’s first of the heart before you see it in the actions. He talks about being envious.
That’s clearly a heart problem right there. There’s that disposition of the heart. There’s also actions as well.
Love is not just a disposition, but an action. He shows here, love suffers long. That’s a passive action.
You put up with a lot. Long suffering for those you love. Love is kind.
I don’t think he means kind in your heart disposition, but by your actions. Love does not parade itself. There’s a negative, but it’s still, you shouldn’t be doing that.
You should be acting more humble. It’s the flip side, obviously. Love does not behave rudely.
Again, another action. We know what rude is. Shouldn’t act that way.
You say you love me, and here you are talking this way to me, like I’m dirt. The actions of love are what we are used to. We are used to in practice.
When your spouse or your friend shows indifference to your legitimate concerns, you’ve had a hard, long, hard day, and your friend is, yeah, heard it before. You’re like, what? I thought you loved me. Why are you yawning over my concerns? So we know, again, even this list here is not as though, if we didn’t have this list, we’d be like, I don’t understand.
Unbelievers understand, but they suppress that truth in unrighteousness, and God knows we are weak, so he gives us the Bible. I’m not saying we don’t, we need it. We need it, yes.
But my point is, it’s there even without the Bible. Even people who don’t have the Bible understand you shouldn’t be rude and indifferent to people you love, because it’s built into how God has created us as humans. It’s natural.
It’s a natural love that all of us have. When someone’s easily provoked or quick to assume the worst, those are clearly not acts of love, as he highlights here in 1 Corinthians, most of it being negative. It doesn’t do this, it isn’t done doing that, and the like.
This list is an impressionistic painting, it gives you the impression of a lot more going on there. In this case, it’s not just an impression, there is more to love than this list. It’s not an exhaustive list.
Perfect love, as the Apostle reminds us, casts out fear. But the list is very powerful, and it’s something that we should teach our children, have them read it, even memorize it, some of these verses, if need be. But love is not an abstraction.
This list is not a list of abstractions, they’re concrete things either of the heart, we understand what a prideful and humble heart, the difference between the two are, or your actions, being rude or being kind and considerate. It is not an abstraction, but we have objects to this love. We are to love somebody, we’re supposed to love ourselves, our family, and others.
Is there an audible gasp there? I said love ourselves? Where in the world did I get that from? This is where I got it from. Love of self is important to understand love, and I wanted to highlight this in this sermon here because the sermon is about what love is, to understand love, and this is what I mean by that. If love is commitment, and it certainly has commitment to it, and it should, if you love your family, you are what? Committed to your family, and your actions should show that commitment, that disposition of your heart.
It’s you that I’m focusing on, not your neighbor. I’m not taking care of your neighbor and their kids and their dog, I’m taking care of you. And my family has commitment, strong element to it, then we are committed to ourselves, and ought to be, in a proper sense, in a proper proportion, and this is what I mean.
If we take the commands to love in a confused, abstract, absolute way, which you hear often in liberal churches, for instance, then you ought to be dirt poor and dead right now. You understand why? Because if you really loved your neighbor, your poor, poor neighbor, he’d have everything you own, and so he could be rich. Or you give it to all the neighbors and spread it out evenly, like a good communist or socialist.
We’d all be equally poor, even dead, but why are you eating? Give it to someone who’s starving in Africa. Give up your life, aren’t you supposed to be sacrificial, isn’t that what love is? Nobody, not even the liberals, live like that. It’s just all hand-waving, as they say, in the argument, making it look like you’re going somewhere and you’re really pounding someone’s conscience over the head, and you get that.
You see the commercials for that? Oh, these poor people starving, now it’s dogs, at least give me people, come on! People starving in America, let alone Africa. So you can’t stop feeding yourself. You shouldn’t stop feeding yourself.
You shouldn’t stop taking care of your body. Oh, I’ll just going to be sick and, no, what do you tell, what do you tell the mom? Mom, I know you like to be the nurse of the family, but you’ve got to keep yourself healthy as well, then you can’t help us if you’re sick. Or maybe the dad does that.
You’ve got to stay healthy, because if you’re not healthy, if you don’t what? Love yourself in the sense of taking care of yourself and being properly committed as we are called by natural revelation, that’s what we’re born as, we’re not born, you know, I want to starve myself today, I don’t feel like putting any clothing on, I like to be out in the elements and kill myself by lightning or something, and hail in the environment. You see that? It is built into us, it is natural, and it’s in the Bible. Leviticus 19.34, the stranger who dwells among you shall be to you as one born among you, and you shall love him as yourself.
It’s a comparative, it’s not absolute. But the assumption is you take care of yourself, there’s a natural love of yourself. And you ought to take that as a referent, that’s what it says, that’s a referent.
Look at that, how do you take care of yourself, and think of, in proportionate ways, how you would do that to others. It assumes a natural love for ourselves. Matthew 22, oh, here’s Jesus, didn’t I read this before? And the second is like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
That’s the words of Jesus. If we didn’t have that kind of love, we would be dead, we wouldn’t be taking care of ourselves. And that’s not how God designed us.
It’s comparative, as I said, as you love yourself, you ought to love others, because it comes so naturally. And I take it more as a rule of thumb, as opposed to a hard and fast absolute command for every and all circumstances, and you’ll see what I mean by that. That is the command to love your neighbor as yourself.
You gotta sleep. What are you doing sleeping? Just go to bed for two hours, and the rest of the time you should be awake doing good works for poor people down, again, I’m picking on Africa, but down in the South, where we had two hurricanes. People without homes.
What are you doing sleeping? Because the doctor says I need at least eight hours a day. Most Americans don’t get that. About a third of Americans don’t get that.
It affects your thinking, it affects your ability, it affects your emotions, for most people, of course. Food. You don’t keep fasting until you’re dead, because you’re going to give all your food to the poor.
It’s a comparative. As you take care of yourself, so you ought to take care of others, and it’s a rule of thumb, because you’re going to get a lot of details. I’m going to flush that out in the next sermon as well.
So that Christians, of course, is helpful for this comparison. We have a concrete example. We don’t need to pick up the Bible.
What was that example again of Jonathan and David loving and taking care of one another? How did that go again? You have yourself. Everywhere you go, you are an example of what it means to love others, because you, by nature, just intuitively take care of yourself. You’re committed to yourself.
Sin exaggerates that, of course, makes it worse. That’s what sin does. We have many characteristics.
We’re all a little different. We’re all different characters. Strengths and weaknesses, even before we’re a Christian.
But as an unbeliever, we use those characteristics, our intelligence, for example, for evil, for sin. It’s not as though you become a Christian, you become smart. It’s not as though you become a Christian, and all of a sudden you have love, and you never had it before.
No, you had love, you just exercised it wrong, it was twisted and abused. Sin perverts the natural order of creation. That’s what it does.
It doesn’t create something new inside of you, but twists what God had already given you. All these characteristics. Love is a characteristic of all of us.
Even peace and patience, excuse me, not peace, but patience, insofar as we put up with our children a lot. Sorry, kids, but the kids put up with us a lot. But again, it’s not for God’s glory, it’s for wicked ends and purposes, for things of this world and not God.
Sin twists that which is natural and makes it worse. And so, what we have here, then, is an example that Paul gives us, that Christ gives us. We’re supposed to love ourselves, that comes naturally, so I don’t think I need to go into details about it other than showing you what that means, because it sounds so crazy.
Love your family. Love one another. I preached a whole series on those, there’s about 50 passages of those in the New Testament.
Love one another, bear one another’s burdens, admonish one another. All the one another passages. The family, of course, take your love of self and subdue it for your family.
Take your love of self and subdue it for your friends and your community and for your church, ultimately, because that’s the second point of the sermon. That’s the title. What is supernatural love? We heard about natural love.
There is a natural love. Unbelievers have this kind of love. Unbelievers can be patient.
Unbelievers can be not rude, kind to one another, but it’s not for God’s glory, it’s because of other reasons in their life. They’re unbelievers. Supernatural love, what I mean by that is natural love plus grace.
You have to be born again to exercise it. It is a fruit of the Spirit, Galatians 5.22. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, against such there is no law. It’s a fruit of the Spirit, this supernatural love, where God, the Holy Spirit, brings us to new life, is within us, and empowers us to bear fruit.
Fruit of both works and obedience to God’s law, and of the heart. These are heart dispositions that work themselves out in our minds and our thoughts and our words. Joy and peace and longsuffering and kindness and goodness and love.
So it may kind of sound the same, even look the same at times. There are unbelievers who exercise self-control that makes us look shameful and slothful, to be sure. But it doesn’t make it a supernatural love, for its origin is in the Holy Spirit, where it is because you are born again, and your motivation, your motives, which no one can see but you, and always God.
Sometimes you confuse yourself. The world does not naturally love God, nor his redemptive kingdom, nor his church and anything associated with it. So you have an object.
Love must love something or somebody, that’s what I mean by object. Natural love has it for yourself, for your family, for your community, and those like you. Supernatural love, however, is towards God, is towards the things of his kingdom, especially the church.
Naturally love enlivened and directed towards a new object. It’s natural love enlivened and directed towards a new love, strengthened and purified and directed towards better things of heaven. Natural love, therefore, is not the end all, but supernatural love.
That’s what we seek. Supernatural love is command, and as I pointed out, it’s a disposition, it’s an action, just like regular love. So too is supernatural love, but again, its origins are different and where it’s going is different.
It’s going towards God. It’s going towards his kingdom. It’s going towards heaven.
And it fulfills the law, as we see in Romans 13, 8 and following, oh, no one, anything except to love one another. For he who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandment is you shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness, you shall not covet, and if there’s any other commandment, is Paul unsure about that? Now he’s saying all the commandments.
It is all summed up in this, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. You don’t shoot yourself, you don’t starve yourself, you don’t belittle yourself, and you shouldn’t for your neighbor either. God’s law, of course, guides love, and love should drive our obedience.
That’s the interconnection between the two. It’s not just I love God, I don’t have to obey him, but love should drive our obedience, but the law should guide our love. You don’t love by stealing, you don’t love by killing, and the like.
Supernatural love, as I said before, is directed towards God and Christ, his kingdom, and especially his church. We are to, therefore, love the church. Some can have an outward form of loving the church, insofar as their friends or family are in the church, or they’re sentimental towards the church, or they have a history of association with the church, but it’s not a supernatural love, they’re not committed to the body of Christ, they’re not committed to Christ himself.
It’s a full commitment to the body of Christ and the Holy Spirit and God that shows a supernatural love, because otherwise it looks very much the same as natural love, because it is, it’s natural love on steroids. The Holy Spirit. And that’s most of the commands of the New Testament, by the way.
Those 40 to 50 passages of one another, one another, one another, are all directed toward the body of Christ, not the world. We’re supposed to show love to the world, yes, as Galatians reminds us, but especially the household of faith. That’s where a lot of our effort and energies go towards.
We have enough poor people, in my opinion, in our own denomination, in our own churches. In Napark, that is all the associated Reformed churches. That’s, brothers and sisters, that shows the evidence of a supernatural love in our life.
It’s needful to focus here on the idea of loving the church, because you can talk about loving God all you want, God is not an idol, so you can’t give evidence of loving him by having this idol in your house and feeding it food or putting flowers there or whatever. No, Christ and God tell us, you want to prove your love to me, and then love one another. By this, I shall know that you love me, and the world will know that you love me.
Because it’s natural to take care of ourselves, it’s natural to take care of our family and the friends, but it’s not natural to love the church. That’s a new institution, it’s never been there before. It’s supernatural in origin.
The family is natural in origin, you’re natural in origin, in terms of creation. But it’s, although supernatural in origin, the spirit of God indwelling in us, it’s ordinary in actions, and that’s what I’m highlighting. You don’t need something supernatural, you’re supposed to bear one another’s burdens, you’re supposed to pray for one another, you’re supposed to highly esteem one another more than yourself.
The church, that’s what he’s talking about, in every one of those cases. We are called to love the church, not just in word, but in actions. That’s what love is.
Supernatural love is, directed towards God and Christ, and the kingdom of God, especially the church. Love of God and Christ. Do you love God? Do you love Christ, the Holy Spirit? This is the greatest love.
That’s the greatest love of supernatural love, that comes from above. And with that love in the heart, and seen in our actions towards Him, we worship Him, we read the Bible, we pray to Him, and we exercise that love towards one another. If we love Him, we’ll love the church.
That’s what supernatural love is. Do you understand love? I hope you understand a little better now. If you ask yourself, am I loving enough? Well, a good reference point is yourself.
How well do you take care of yourself? Has this sermon helped you, I hope, to think anew about love? I pray that so. I urge you, and I encourage you, not to berate you, but yes, to examine yourself. Do I understand love in my life, and what have I done about it? Let’s pray.
Spirit of the living God, we’re thankful for that great divine example from the Old Testament, from Christ and from Paul, to love one another as we love ourselves. And Lord, that proportion is important. We’ll hear more about that in the next sermon, God.
We shouldn’t love everyone equally. We should prioritize love, in fact, God, in a way that confuses the world. May we learn thus, Lord.
May we, therefore, be better equipped and guarded, Lord. Put the armor of the truth about our hearts with respect to love, God, because this nation and this world and everything around us has such a confused view of love and wishes to beat us down with a guilty conscience when we shouldn’t be. We pray, God, we pray that we would learn and embrace love.
In your name alone we pray. Amen.