Here in Galatians, Paul tells us to do good to all. He says, Let us not grow weary while doing well, for in due season we shall reap. Therefore, verse 10, because of this, as we have opportunity to do good to all, especially, as he highlights this, the household of faith, which is but the church.
To do good is arguably another way of saying to show love. Now, you think Paul is saying do good, but have anger and hatred in your heart towards the person you’re doing good. No, I don’t think you do.
Now, if you’re supposed to show good to them with your outward actions, you’re supposed to follow through with your heart. Typically, if you do show good with your outward actions, you have some inclination of love towards them, or you’d be kind of begrudging them and not doing it. You wouldn’t do it at all, making excuses.
So, this makes sense. We are to show love to all, and as Christ pointed out, the New Old Testament does as well, as a matter of fact, even to our enemies. But that doesn’t mean we’re supposed to show love and do good to everyone equally.
No, it doesn’t. I should not have to say that, but that’s where we are. It’s not just society, it’s in the churches.
Not just the churches, it’s in Reformed churches, our particular part of the body of Christ. This is where your children are. This is what they hear.
They hear it in schools. They hear it, perhaps, in your homeschooling curriculum. They’re going to hear it at Christian schools.
This confused understanding of love, as though you just simply say you’re supposed to love them, and then you drop everything else you do in life, and you go love whomever or whatever cause you wish to push and promote to your audience. It’s the environment we breathe and live and have our national existence in, I would argue. The left doesn’t, and the right doesn’t.
They all cry out, love! If you really love, you’ll have this law. You’ll have this policy. You’ll vote for this person.
For many years, Dr. Coppes was on the Denominational Diaconate Committee. The Diaconate Committee takes care and coordinates resources and monies at the denominational level, the national level, for those in financial and material need. And one man, apparently from the committee, as I recall, argued that Christians should give up… I don’t think he said all that they have, but you know, all the excess stuff and extras you have, and you have too many clothes and too many shirts and too many cars, and give them up.
Give them to the poor. Well, when he was asked about his boat, you’re going to give up your boat? Oh no, I’m no, I need my boat. What was that man doing? He was using love like a club.
And hitting people over the head with it. For his cause. Which he wasn’t even committed to.
N-O-P-C. It’s there. And it’s been flowering, I’ve seen in the last 20 years.
In politics and on TV and the like. We used to call them bleeding heart liberals. Not just the liberals anymore.
A recent headline declares, in a news article, Rejecting illegal immigrants is rejecting Jesus Christ. That’s a big club. Who says it? Says Amnesty Advocate.
These people are using love like a club. Whatever you agree with the OPC man or the title of this news article, they’re using it like a club. It’s an old tactic, as I mentioned.
They did it for a long time in politics. In society. Several decades ago.
Even a decade ago. And they’re still doing it now. But not as much.
You don’t hear about it as much. If you really love the poor. Really love the poor.
Then you’ll put my guy in and he’ll get all the money for them. Or raise your taxes. Or X, Y, or Z. If you really, really love.
That’s an old. And it works. It pulls on people’s heart strings.
Or more precisely, it makes them feel guilty. And maybe they have some guilt. But it’s now misdirected.
Or maybe it’s properly directed. I don’t know. That’s not relevant.
To it being used as a tool against you and your children. In the church and outside the church. Don’t you love single women? Don’t you want to take care of them? What about the children? Think about the children! You heard that one, right? One way or another.
In advertisements. In groups. And of course, what’s interesting in a lot of this is, people pushing this have money behind the cause they’re pushing.
But I suppose that’s another sermon. What do we think about children? What do you think about children? What do I think about children? What do I think about immigrants and the stranger? I do think about immigrants. And I do think about the stranger.
And I do think about children. But I think about them in the context of how God designed it. To think about my children first.
And to think about my neighbor first. And to think about my community first. That’s where I can make, what? As you have opportunity, do the most good.
Have the greatest opportunity. Know the people. And therefore exercise a kind of love that’s more personal than impersonal.
We do. We do think about them. And there’s a way to deal with it.
We take care of those closest to us first. That’s what love does. I preached on love last week.
What is love? And I summarized the best way to understand love is to think about how you take care of yourself. Love your neighbor, as Christ says, as yourself. That’s the rule of thumb.
You wonder what you should do. Well, you think about taking care of yourself. You think, well, yeah, I would like someone to teach me how to take care of myself.
I wouldn’t want to just get a handout for myself. Because that’s not going to help me in the long run. And the like.
Here, it’s about who should we love. Not what love is. But who should we, therefore, think about? We’re supposed to think about others.
Paul admonishes us. What are those others? And what does that mean? So let’s see how this assertion is true. That is, we should have more love towards those closest to us.
And we see that in two ways. In the creation and the Creator. And I pray that this sermon will be a life preserver for you and your children as you drown in a sea of too much love.
So-called love. The creation teaches to first love those nearest you. Love, as a background first, love is not an abstraction.
We have the old idiom, actions speak louder than words. And if someone talks about love and loving everyone and loving strangers and loving immigrants, but lives behind a fenced community and gives 1% of his millions to charity, what do you think about that person? It’s all talk and no action. To them, apparently, love is an abstraction.
You just kind of talk about these people you’re supposed to take care of, but in the here and now, you don’t really see these people, and you don’t therefore take care of them. Love is not an abstraction, and it should not be. You can talk about loving humans, yes, talk about it.
What are you going to do about it? Not a whole lot. There’s, I don’t know, 95% of the world you can do nothing about with your funds. You can pray about them, but even then you’re not praying for every individual person.
It’s just a broad swath, so your love really isn’t exercised that much in that regards. As it were, the more abstract, the thinner the love is, perhaps is one way of looking at it. When someone tells you love means taking in illegal immigrants, and we ask them, all illegal immigrants? What about criminals or chronically lazy people or terrorists? Well, not those immigrants.
Oh, so now you’re talking about an abstraction again. This is the idea of just, you got to, it’s not just anybody. There are particulars to the idea of love.
Whatever illustration I wish to use, and I want to pick ones that we can all hear about in the media and in the church. It’s unfortunately used that way as this abstract club to hit people over the head. When you start asking these details, right, concrete details that make an impact in real life.
How would I exercise this? Who would I exercise it towards? No, no, no, no, no, just love them. You don’t really mean that. They don’t really mean that.
Don’t fall for it. They’re using broad sweeping abstract rhetoric to paint anyone against their policy as unloving and make you feel guilty and pound you in the ground with it. It’s in both parties.
I’ve heard it. And I guess non-parties in between, politically and socially. It’s all over the world, all over our nation socially.
So love is not an abstraction. Love begins in the concrete with taking care of your own health. Talked about self-love in the last sermon.
That’s very concrete. You see yourself, you’re there, you feel yourself. It’s very real to you.
You take care of your own life and your own health and the health of those nearest to you, starting with your family. You can’t get any nearer than that. Because being born in the family itself tells you how you’re supposed to prioritize.
How you raise your children sets their path. Proverbs talks about that. Common sense talks about that.
You only have them for a short time and that’s the time to teach them good habits. And already a lot are being developed in the first five or six years. And what’s the first thing that’s obviously developed? Who are they with the most? Those nearest to them, their biological family.
And the kids are told this natural inborn inclination, which is tainted with sin, love, is directed towards the parents. Not consistently, not perfectly, that’s the problem of sin. But it is there and it’s good and proper.
Nature teaches us, God’s creation teaches us, you take care and the children and the parents, of course, are focused on their kids. And that’s good and proper. Love, yes, I love my neighbors and I love my city and I love my state and I love my nation.
But I love my family first. I love all men, but especially your family. To paraphrase Ephesians, Galatians 6, 10.
It’s a moral principle to love those nearest to you is intrinsic. By love of those near to you, which I didn’t describe yet and I’ll describe now, the family, your friends, your community, your church, I mean relationally close and physically close. But the two don’t always go together in our day and age.
And that’s another problem in my opinion. We’re too quick to run away, run off from our families and live in another part of the country. How are you supposed to take care of your parents then? We’re all, geographically, that’s a new thing in the last 50 to 80 years.
So, relationally especially is my point. Historically would have been geographical too. But geographical is still there.
It’s who you live with. It’s who you’re close to. You can’t do a whole lot of stuff with someone who’s 2,000 miles away from you.
Or even 100 miles. You don’t see them very often. Out of sight, out of mind.
Ever heard of that one? It’s very real. It’s very true. Makes it hard.
So it is important, geographical. And geographical, as I said, includes your neighbor. That’s why Christ uses that.
Of course, out of the Old Testament as well. It’s concrete. It’s your neighbor.
He doesn’t say all humans abstractly. But here’s a particular instance. Not just your family, but the guy next to you as you walk through life.
We’re all born with a natural love for those like us. Birds of a feather flock together. That’s a natural proverb.
I believe it’s borne out through general observation. Thousands of years. That’s called science, as Tripp reminded us.
And now science is catching up with science. The social sciences. The statistics, and I looked it up a number of places, show, as does experience, for instance, that opposites do not attract.
Marriage. People who marry, marry someone who has enough commonality with them that they’re not going to be confused all the time when they use an idiom or when they have certain expectations that the other person doesn’t get. Right? You’d be in conflict all the time.
Duh. Science is like, oh, I guess we have to… We’ve known this for thousands of years, people. It’s only in the last 50 to 70 years where they’re pushing multiculturalism that we’re all like, well, maybe diversity in marriage is… No, you don’t want… The statistics show you marry people similar to you, similar enough that you’re comfortable living with each other.
Otherwise, you don’t want to be in the same room with one another. We can’t all be equally good friends with one another. That’s just the way God designed things.
It seems so common sense, doesn’t it? But here I am having to talk about this because we’re getting it wrong in our society and, again, in our churches. It’s part of being in a family. You’re all similar.
You have a pattern. It’s symbiotic, as they say, between the husband and the wife. They create the environment to which the children are raised in themselves and it feeds back on themselves.
Of course, the husband should be the most dominant as the head of the house. But in his love, you know, his wife has influence as well and that creates this atmosphere of expectations of what’s proper, what’s not, and the like, and habits and patterns. So you’re born with it.
You’re born in a family and you’re going to find someone who’s similar to your family or meshes enough. Enough. There’s always differences.
We know this. So it’s natural. That’s my argument.
It’s natural. Otherwise, we’d have a rift in our families and we know what that’s like. We’ve seen it.
And we already have enough rifts as it is with sin, let alone adding more confusion by having such diversity and differences in our marriage. I can never get my head wrapped around why an atheist would marry a Catholic or a Catholic would marry a Jew. Practicing.
I mean, there are practicing Catholics who marry practicing Jews. You’re like, what? Is it only physical? You know? Really? That’s all marriage is? If they even have that, because after a while you have such differences, you don’t even want to be with each other physically. We know that.
We live in a fallen world and fallen world twists that which is natural. So we want some examples of loving those nearest you more than others. You’re doing it right now.
You’re doing it right. You’re doing it naturally. You don’t even think about it.
You come to church. It’s a church that you’re already, as it were, on the same page with. If there’s enough of a difference, you’d have a dissonance.
You’d be always, I’m always arguing and fighting with the pastor and my neighbors because they’re so different, so odd and weird. Yeah, exactly. But even more fundamental than that, you’re sitting with your family.
You don’t come to church and say, oh yeah, I’ll go sit with that guy over there, and my wife will sit with that person over there, and my kids will sit over there, and that’s kind of creepy. We do it instinctively. You drove here with your family and not someone else’s family.
You plan on feeding your family this afternoon and not someone else’s family. There’s a guest. You may take them over, I’m sure.
On the flip side, what would you do if your mother started cooking for your neighbor’s kids instead of your kids? You’re on your own. Oh, well, it’s all love, and your neighbor’s mom should feed you, right? You’re supposed to love them. Right? This is where we are, isn’t it? Think about what we’re doing in our society.
Turning everything on its head. Now, that may seem a little extreme, pastor. Liberals aren’t really like that.
Well, no, they want to destroy families. They just get rid of the family, and there is no proper relationship, biological nearness anymore. You just should find a stranger and do what you do with strangers in Hollywood.
Well, why don’t you just bring the children to your home, and it’s like having extra kids. And so, mommy feeds them every day at lunch with your kids. How long do you think your kids are going to put up with that? Mommy, can I have a little mommy time now, please? These strangers, yes, they’re my neighbors, and I’ve been with them for 20 years, but I haven’t lived with them, and now you want to show them love? You see, it’s important to prioritize love, isn’t it? And even without the Bible, we have an instinct to know you take care of your family, you take care of your friends, and people near you, and not just ignore them and pick someone off the street because it’s all about love, because you have some guilt complex.
So, time, money, and talent, we all have it. Yes, you have talent. But you don’t have it in infinite abundance.
You are finite, and your resources are finite. You can only spend so much time and so much space because you can’t be everywhere at once. That itself teaches you can’t love everyone equally.
You must, therefore, what? Prioritize your time, prioritize your talent, prioritize your money. And if it’s not for your family, you’ve got a problem. If it’s not for your wife or your husband, without kids, you’ve got a problem.
We have a problem in this nation. And I’ve seen it seeping into the churches. Be weary, brothers and sisters.
You must prioritize love. Consider friendship in the Bible. Love your friends, right? That’s what a friend is, someone you love and you are close to, or relatively close to.
I know we have degrees of friendship, and I’ve even preached on that. No other word than love. Proverbs 25, 17, however, tells us what? The one you love, that person who’s not of your family, a friend, typically is what a friend is, not of your family.
Seldom set foot in your neighbor’s house, lest he become weary of you and hate you. Why? Because he’s not your family. He’s not the one you’re supposed to have so much love with.
It’s like you’re living with the guy. No, you live with your family. That’s who you’re supposed to love and focus, and put your efforts upon.
Who do you love? You love your family first. That’s the priority under God. We haven’t gotten to God yet.
Now that I quoted the Bible, let’s go to the Bible. The Creator teaches you to love those nearest you first in priority. Time, money, effort, talent.
Not just natural revelation or the creation, but the Creator. In the Old Testament, we have, I think, 10 commandments. One of those commandments, yes, honor your parents, your mother and your father.
I would submit to you, when it says honor, it does not exclude love. Honor your parents, but you don’t need to love them. One thing you learn about the commandments is God emphasizes certain things because those are particular sins that seem to be common.
The common sin in families is children not obeying their parents. They’re not honoring them. They’ll say, I love them.
I don’t know too many kids, unless they’ve been beaten, and that happens, unfortunately, that will say, I hate my parents. And even then, they’ll say, I love my parents. That’s how strong love, you’ve seen those, right? What they call the Stockholm Syndrome.
Kind of a similar thing in families. Just like, wow, that’s how much God is imbued into the biological family. That even when their parents are abusing them, they’ll say, I love my parents.
I don’t want to turn them in. Well, the Bible, it gives us in the fifth commandment, honor your mother and your father, and I believe that includes love. I know it includes love.
Love your parents. Love them children, and love them adults who are children grown up. So we have that.
We also have the example of the family in the Bible. And again, I missed some of Tripp’s lecture on this, but as I recall, I heard that he emphasized or hammered home the idea that family is not just a nuclear family historically, and that’s certainly true. That’s exactly true.
You see it in the Old Testament, right? Who are they? It’s Abraham and his children, his children’s children, and they’re all together. They’re all, what, near each other. And so you see that example in the Old Testament of them taking care of one another, even to the point of killing all the men of a city.
Wrongly. But they took it seriously. I have to protect the honor of my sister.
And Abraham and his family did not take care of other families or strangers. They showed love to strangers, but showing love to strangers does not necessarily entail making them a member of your household. Especially if you don’t know who they are.
They’re strangers. I don’t think Abraham was ungodly because of that. They took care of the strangers.
We know that he met three of them. The angels fed them and they went on their way. And the strangers expected nothing more, unlike strangers today.
The Old Testament differentiated between strangers, sojourners, and natives. And I won’t go into the details of that. I went through that in Deuteronomy when I preached on that.
You see the word stranger, sojourner in some translations. One is that which lives with them permanently but are not formal members of Israel. The other is one who is not living with them permanently, kind of like sets up shop, sells a few things, and leaves after a few weeks.
The latter, they don’t get much. They’re not supposed to be killed. It’s the negative.
You shouldn’t steal from them, yes. But they don’t really get any of the positive laws and protection. But the stranger does, who’s in their midst, who’s living with them, they do.
But they don’t get all of them. There’s a differentiation in the law. They don’t get the full protection of the law.
These, I suppose you can call them immigrants. Not quite because they’re already there. They don’t get the full rights.
The most godly nation in the world, which it was. God did not give them wicked laws, I believe, but godly laws in accordance to their situation and providence. And they were godly.
That’s part of the argument in Deuteronomy. The world will look at you and say, what kind of a nation is this with such marvelous laws? And that law from God differentiated between the natives, as it were, those who properly own the land, Israelites, and the stranger who’s living with them but wasn’t given full rights. Differentiation of love.
Who do you love first? Those nearest you. In the New Testament, you have the second greatest commandment. Love your neighbor, it says, as yourself.
It uses a concrete imagery there. Love your neighbor, not love mankind, not love the stranger. Although those are there and applied and mentioned in various ways elsewhere in the Bible, but strangers are the furthest of the circle.
Imagine concentric circles, a smaller circle in the middle, and a bigger circle, and yet a bigger circle. The smallest circle is you and your family. Then the next circle of love and responsibility, now your friends in the church and your community.
They kind of all overlap historically because churches were local churches to local people. Again, that has changed in the last 60 to 70 years. And then the larger community or the city that you know less.
I mean, people further away from you, you know less, you have less commitment to, and that’s natural. And it’s a necessity. You break down that order, you end up with kind of chaos.
We’re getting more and that of our nation today. You’re too much similar with each other. We’ve got to bring in more confusion.
What’s wrong with being similar? That means the greasing between us is like is a lot more smooth than having friction. I’d rather be poor, I’d rather be poor and have peace, as the proverb says, than rich and plentiful with the house of strife. It has lots of political implications and church implications as well.
So the New Testament talks about your neighbor and assumes the concentric circles, I would argue, because the Bible and Christ assume natural revelation, which he gave us. So that neighbor emphasizes closeness plus circumstances so that you have the parable of the Good Samaritan. He’s not like, well, I’m walking down the road and I see this guy in a ditch here, he’s dying.
But you know, he’s not my neighbor in a technical sense. He doesn’t live near me. He’s just a stranger.
No, he’s the person who’s with you, given your opportunities. You see that word there in Galatians 6 is as you have opportunity, and he has opportunity. That neighbor is the person near you, and he’s literally near him, plus the circumstances.
That defines partly what the neighbor is. But ordinarily, you’re not going out, leaving your family for days on end because you have this great love and desire to help everyone who’s on the side of the road. Your heart’s so big.
That doesn’t mean your heart’s big, it means your heart’s confused, massively confused. Take care of your family. Take care of those nearest to you.
And if everyone did that, we’d have things in proper, good order. You see, Christ spent more time, effort, love. Love has actions.
I don’t think it was hate upon his church than the world. And even within that church, who’d he emphasize? Who’d he spend time for? Three years. The disciples, even a smaller group, even within his own church.
And as some would argue, he had a smaller circle of three disciples, and John, the one he loved. It’s natural. I don’t think Christ is making a new law.
He didn’t come to make a new law. He came to establish the old law and die in our stead for breaking that law. Romans 3.28 Paul, Romans 9.3 For I wish that I myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my countrymen, according to the flesh.
What does he mean by countrymen according to the flesh? He means biological Jews. He’s a Jew. They’re a Jew.
They’re unbelieving Jews, but his heart still goes out for them. Do you think he was wrong to have a love of his fellow countrymen? What you hear today in the schools and the colleges and churches is yes, that’s bigoted. He’s not sitting here saying, I wish I could be accursed for the Syrians.
He says that. He says, I wish I could be accursed for the Jews, my fellow countrymen. It was a natural love we have.
It’s what I call patriotism, as opposed to jingoism, which is excessive patriotism, the wrong kind of patriotism. Paul has this, and I think it’s good and proper. It’s not because the Jews are special.
We’re not dispensational Syrians. We don’t have a problem with this. It’s because they’re his fellow countrymen.
He even says so after my flesh. He was not bigoted. And then we have Galatians 6.10, do good to all, especially the household of faith.
He’s prioritizing love, especially. This is what you should emphasize. This is where you’re gonna spend your time, your effort and your money and your prayers is upon the household of God, the church.
But to protect from another error, of course, that doesn’t mean you don’t ever show love to anyone else. I’m so busy with the church, I can’t show love to anybody else. That sometimes happens.
There are circumstances. I don’t doubt that. But Paul says both.
But the emphasis is what? Over here on the household of faith. And the same again with everything else in our concentric circles, with our family, our friends and others. I don’t think this is bigotry.
It is a prioritization of love, which we are called to do. The liberal view that’s been pushed for the last hundred years has been Paul doesn’t understand love. Paul is wrong here.
And look, he wouldn’t take care of the widows. You know Paul would not take care of the widows, right? No, he says that. He says the church shouldn’t take care of the widows.
The family must take care of the widows first. And even if that after that happens or cannot happen, the widow has to be of a certain age and she has to prove that she’s done good works and then the church can take. He builds a wall, a fence they have to climb over.
And here is the power of that text, the accompanying text of Galatians 6.10. This is in 1 Timothy 5.3 and following. 1 Timothy 5.3 and following. The power of those verses is this.
If the most loving institution on earth, the church, has those kind of strictures, how much more every other institution on earth. You see how, I hope some of you realize this, how false teaching in the church for a hundred years has influenced our politics, influenced our society, influenced everything. Because they’re taught to run around, love, love, love, and have the wrong prioritization, go into ungodly debt for our grandchildren or great-grandchildren to China who does not have our best interests at heart because of love.
I would argue it’s because of greed and love is just a facade. 1 Timothy 5.3, 4. But if any widow has children or grandchildren, it gets pretty deep there, grandchildren. Let them first learn to show piety at home and to repay their parents.
Let them take care of their parents, not the church. Is that the kind of robust Christianity being taught in America today? I fear not. And as Dr. Koppa’s illustration points out, it’s in the OPC.
I don’t know how bad or how strong, I suspect not bad or very strong, but it’s there. It’s tempting because it’s all around us. It is good and acceptable before God, he says, to do this.
And then he continues in verse eight, but if anyone does not provide for his own, especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever. Wow. And what’s interesting there is he says, provides for his own and especially for his household.
The household, of course, is broader than your nuclear family. So those others, perhaps he means his friends or servants, I don’t know, but it still comes down to the church isn’t a charity institution. And the way that people have charity institutions in America.
You’re poor, you come off the street, we’re just here to help you. No, I don’t believe that. I can’t get around these verses.
They’re here. Paul’s very clear. Verse 16, if any believing man or woman has widows, let them relieve them.
Didn’t he just say that before? I guess he’s being emphatic now. And do not let the church be burdened. Whoa.
Whoa. That it may relieve those who are really widows. Because there are circumstances in which the church must step in and help.
You see how all this ties in together now? Who should you love? There’s a prioritization. And it’s there in Paul. He takes it for granted.
He says, you family take care of your family. Take care of your family. And then maybe under certain circumstances, some people like widows will be taken care into the number, perhaps there’s a debate on what that means, perhaps fully paid for.
They don’t have to work anymore. The church will take care of them. But of course, they’re going to do some work for the church probably, and do some good deeds, I’m sure.
So, who do we think we are as a nation, or a society, or a business, or a city, or a state, bypassing what used to be considered natural, the families, extended families, the community, and others, as he says there, take care of others, and his, especially his family, to take care of those in need. You take care of those nearest to you. Today’s society and church ignore this at their peril, and are hurting us right now, I would argue.
And they try to make you feel guilty for it. That’s partly why I preach this. You shouldn’t feel guilty taking care and prioritizing your family, your local friends, and your local church.
That’s what local churches do. I mean, our denomination asks for money, and that’s proper. We’ve made a covenant with them.
But they realize we have to make that decision ourselves. And if we’re a poor, small church, we’re not going to give a lot. And that’s okay.
If they’re godly, and our denomination is godly, they’re not going to try to give us a guilt trip like society does. Give more, give more, give more. Sorry, I have to save up my money not only for myself, but for my children, and for my grandchildren if I can.
Paul mentions that elsewhere. So it’s not just the present, it’s the future. Your talents and your efforts go towards your children as well.
So all this, brothers and sisters, ties into proving what I said in this sermon at the beginning. We’re supposed to love those the most who are closest to us. And God above all.
Why? Because God is the closest to us. Didn’t deny my original premise, did I? He is the closest. He’s in our hearts.
And we’re supposed to love him more than anyone else. And so that even if our family who raised us, and loved us for 50 years, and they’re still around, but if they hate God, and hate the church, and spit at you, you cast them out of your life. Because God is first.
That’s what that means in practice. That’s real love. That’s loving God before you love man when it comes down to the wire.
Brothers and sisters, some of the matter is don’t fall for guilt trip or false love. Protect your children from it. It’s easy to especially get them because children are very emotional.
And sometimes teenagers as well as their brain chemistry and everything else changes. And again, adults have this problem. Teach them to your children and to each other the truth that you should show more love towards those closest to you.
And to love God the most. Let us pray. We thank you God for loving us and for the creation you’ve given us.
May we stand firm in these creation truths, Lord, and ordinances. And your word. May it inform us, instruct us, God.
May we examine our hearts to see if we’re not making excuses for not showing love to others as we have opportunity. By withdrawing ourselves into our family, perhaps, God. But every man and woman and family must make that decision for themselves.
But Lord, may we especially be protected from this false so-called God and the false guilt trips thrown upon us day in and day out. Help us, God, to show love. To show love to those closest to us.
In your name we pray. Amen.