Let's see if I can figure this out.
About 10 years ago or so,
Aaron and Arden and I decided to take a canoe trip.
Anybody here been canoeing?
Raise your hand if you've been canoeing.
Okay, now have you ever,
anybody here canoed down a river more than five miles?
Okay, pretty good.
We got a couple folks.
Yeah, so Aaron and Arden decided to take a canoe trip
and I, and we drove up,
we drove up at night actually,
and set up a camp the night before
at a campground up in Michigan.
We got there about 2 a.m. and it was dark,
and we bust out the tent, set it up,
and then we got up at like 7 a.m.
So we only got about five hours sleep,
and we broke the tent down,
and we drove to the place where we're supposed
to rent the canoe,
and as we got the canoe and we're loading up
all of our stuff and putting it out,
firstly laid it out by the canoe
because you got a lot put in there,
and our understanding was we were taking a canoe trip
that was about 19 miles.
It turned out to be 32 miles,
so it was really long,
and the second day we were canoeing in the rain all day,
so that was troublesome.
But one interesting thing happened
that pertains to the text that we're gonna read today.
We arrived at the place,
beautiful, sunshiny day,
about 8 a.m., sun's out, birds chirping.
We're pulling all the stuff out of the trunk,
and Sherry, you may not know this about my wife,
but she is an excellent packer
when it comes to camping trips,
going on vacation, anything like that.
She's really good at that,
and I am not really good at that,
and so I relied heavily on her
to make sure that I had everything for the camping trip.
So we get everything out.
So everything is coming out of the trunk
and sitting on the ground,
and then we're gonna move it over to the dock
next to where the canoe is,
and we got it all out,
and the only thing left in the trunk
was one neatly folded tarp.
And I said, well, we've got a tarp,
the tarp that we put under the tent,
and I said, I don't think we need that tarp.
And Aaron and Arden and I all looked in the trunk,
and that was about the only thing left in the trunk,
and I said, then again,
your mother probably packed it for a reason.
I can't think of what that would be,
but we're gonna take it anyway.
So we took the tarp out of the truck,
we put it down with the stuff, we closed it,
we got to the canoe,
we load all the stuff in the canoe,
and we put it all in there,
and by that time I had forgotten that we had two tarps,
one for under the tent and one on the top,
and the other was like 10 minutes,
I wasn't thinking about it.
We got it all loaded up,
and it was pretty tight in the canoe.
I mean, it was the three of us,
and Aaron was about 12 or 13,
and Arden was about 10 or so,
and it was pretty tight.
Maybe the tarp didn't really fit,
you know what I'm saying?
But it was already in there,
but then the water was having trouble fitting,
so I'm like, take that tarp out that I don't need,
I can get the water in there.
I thought, but man,
I'm sure she put that tarp in there for a reason,
I don't know what it is,
because we already got a tarp to put under the tent,
but I'm gonna find a way,
and we fiddled all around with it,
we found a way to put the tarp in,
and so then we got a picture of us
kneeling down, it's on my wall in the house here,
we wanna see it next to the canoe,
in a sunshiny day,
and we jumped in the canoe,
and we started canoeing downriver.
That night, it looked like it might rain,
not really a big deal gonna be inside overnight anyway,
and so we got most of the camp cleaned up and stuff,
and had the tent set up,
and we set up kinda under,
partially under a tree,
maybe that would help a little bit,
if it rained heavy or whatever,
and about two in the morning,
Arden wakes me up,
and he said, dad, I'm getting wet.
Now we all heard the rain,
it was raining like crazy,
he said, dad, I'm getting wet,
I said, what are you talking about getting wet?
I said, we're in the tent,
I said, I don't think the tent's leaking,
he said, well, I don't know if it's leaking from below,
or if it's leaking through the side of the tent,
but one way or another, I am getting wet,
and so I got over there,
and I'm groping around in the dark,
my flashlight and whatever,
and sure enough, the tent was leaking,
the wall of the tent was leaking,
water was coming in,
it was starting to soak his sleeping bag,
and everything that was by the wall,
and then I remembered that tarp,
and I got up, and I got outside,
and the pouring down rain,
and I got that tarp,
and sure enough, it was big enough,
and I put it over the top of the entire tent,
and then I tied it down to the cords,
so basically, we made a tent over the tent,
or we covered the tent with the tarp,
and the tarp was definitely enough to keep the water out.
We got back in, got it zipped up,
and I said, does it seem like it's leaking now?
And we said, no, it's not leaking now,
but the sleeping bag was already kind of wet,
but it wasn't leaking anymore.
I want you to think about that tarp,
and how that tarp got to be in our camping supplies
as we look at a single verse today
from 1 Corinthians chapter 13.
Would you go with me to 1 Corinthians chapter 13?
Amen.
Thank you for those of you who are excited
to be where we are in the word of God.
Sorry about not turning that microphone there on.
Tommy, it's on now.
Okay, so today's sermon title is Unreasonable Love.
We've been looking at love for a while now.
As we've been working through,
we really started when we hit chapter 12,
and we looked at the manifestations of the Holy Spirit,
and then in 31, it says,
but earnestly desire the greater gifts,
and I show you a still more excellent way,
and everything from that moment on has been about love,
honing in heavily on love.
And today we're gonna look at love,
the love that God calls us to as an unreasonable love.
We're in 1 Corinthians chapter 13 verse seven,
and it is kind of the continuation of a sentence,
and it is really four phrases,
and it is this, talking about love.
Love bears all things, believes all things,
hopes all things, endures all things.
And so we're gonna break those down first
before we get into the points,
because I guarantee you,
because I had done this many times,
if you've read through this passage of scripture,
while all of those phrases sound good,
they don't necessarily tell you what to do
when you're trying to love someone
unless you break them down.
So the first one is bears all things.
Now understand that this word bears
is a tough word to translate from the Greek
into the English, it does not translate well.
So if you have a version of the Bible
other than the New American Standard,
you may have something else there, okay?
And the reason is because what the word really means
is to erect a cover over something.
So when it says we bear all things,
we're talking about erecting a cover over something.
Proverbs 17.1 says,
"'He who conceals a transgression seeks love,
"'but he who repeats a matter separates intimate friends.'"
And so basically what we've got
is somebody did something wrong.
Remember how I talked about inspirational moment,
the romance movie, they figured out
that they had an ulterior motive,
they did something wrong,
all of a sudden they don't wanna talk to him anymore,
it's gonna kick him out, be done with him,
I love you and I wanna be with you for the rest of my life,
but now you did something wrong,
so now I'm done with you forever, that kind of thing.
Well, that's not love.
And, "'He who seeks to conceal a transgression seeks love.'"
But it's not just simply putting a transgression
out of sight, right?
It's not just simply saying you did something wrong,
I'm gonna forget it,
or I'm just never gonna mention it, right?
It's not like that.
It's something more than that.
Proverbs 10.12 says,
"'Hatred stirs up strife,
"'but love covers all transgressions.'"
And then in 1 Peter 4.8,
none of these, by the way, are the same exact word,
but they're all the same kind of definition
or same meaning.
1 Peter 4.8 says,
"'Above all, keep fervent in your love for one another,
"'because love covers a multitude of sins.'"
So even though that's not the same word,
it has the same nature as what he's talking about here.
Some years ago, I was working at Radio Shack,
and I was a salesman,
and it was kinda like toward the end of my time
at Radio Shack,
and in the middle of my time at Radio Shack,
I was making a bunch of money,
selling a bunch of stuff,
and it was when cell phones hit the market,
and so I was selling a cell phone every day,
and cell phones were $1,200 to $1,500,
depending on whether they were a sale or not,
and it was like a book with an antenna,
and I'm selling this,
and I'm programming it and getting it to go, blah, blah,
and then $1,200,
so every time it's $1,200,
I made $90 in commission every time I did that,
and almost everybody bought a service plan
because they knew they couldn't fix it themselves,
so there, and then we got 10% on that,
so every time I sold a service plan,
I got another $40.
So sell a cell phone, make $130,
and I was selling one every day,
plus anything else that I was selling,
so I was making really good money
for the middle year that I was there,
but now this is toward the end,
not making a great deal of money anymore,
other people are selling cell phones now,
and it's kind of like not as active and stuff,
and I helped a guy put together a huge satellite order,
and so this back in the day,
you could have a satellite dish in your yard,
and you could watch HBO for free,
and you could watch Showtime for free,
and all these things,
and they weren't scrambled then, right?
And so I put, this thing was huge,
a $4,000 satellite order.
I went to, I got him everything that he needed.
I spent about two days on this thing,
so $4,000, I was making about 300 bucks in commission,
and, but I was working my butt off,
even down to like, he needed batteries
for the remote for the thing,
and I went, and we didn't have the exact right battery,
so I went and got the batteries from another store,
I mean, I was, everything.
And at the end of that sale,
after I worked my butt off for almost two days,
and I was happy to be making the money,
he said something like this,
he said, I'll never be back to Radio Shack,
I'll never shop here again,
and I said, why is that?
I mean, we've given you good service,
we sold you what you wanted to buy,
why would you say that?
And he said, actually, I've never gotten good service
from Radio Shack, ever, from you or from anyone else.
No one's ever helped me the way I should be helped
at Radio Shack, and I had really gone the extra mile,
and I put myself out there, and I was mad,
but I wasn't gonna show him I'm mad,
because I'm a salesman,
a salesman never shows you when he's mad,
and so I was like, okay, and I rang out the whole order,
and the whole time I'm fuming,
and I just wanted to just say, you're a jerk,
but I didn't say anything,
and I helped him get everything in his pickup truck,
because he had a pickup truck sitting outside,
big satellite box, this big long,
he's gonna take it home and assemble it, whatever,
and I put it in the truck,
and after I went back, I was so mad,
and this is me not saved,
I'm showing you something like what I was like
when I was not saved,
and I went in the back, and I punched a speaker box,
speaker box about this tall, this wide, like that big,
and there's a speaker box that would sit
at the end of the shelving,
where extra parts of stuff would sit,
and occasionally I had done that,
I'd come back and punch the speaker box when I was mad,
make a big hollow sound,
and it would crumble a little bit under my weight,
and I'm thinking I feel better,
because I punched the speaker box, right?
Except, unbeknownst to me,
someone had moved the empty speaker box,
and put an actual box with an actual speaker in it,
right in the same spot,
so it looked just the same, but it had a speaker in it,
and the speaker was like 100 pounds,
these are these big, old, huge speakers,
like the ones we used to use back in the day,
and I punched that box,
and it did not give, not in the slightest,
and right here, I felt like just a twinge of pain,
but what happened was I got a boxing fracture in my hand,
so I went to the doctor, about 10 days later,
I kept putting it off, telling myself it wasn't broken,
it was just a sprain or something,
and it was not getting better, it was getting worse,
it was swelling, and I went to the doctor,
and he said, oh yeah, you broke your hand, took an x-ray,
so took my hand, and he put one thumb on each side
of the bone where it was broken, it's healing,
at 10 days healed, and he pushed like this,
until the bone snapped, and said, this is gonna hurt,
and I said, what's the alternative,
and he said, well, you leave it like that,
it'll hurt you for the rest of your life,
not as bad as what I'm gonna do, but it'll hurt forever,
and I said, okay, well go ahead, my mom's standing there,
and he just took the bone, and he snapped it,
like that, I'm like, ah, it was the most painful thing
I've ever experienced in my life,
it was as bad as kidney stones,
but kidney stones lasted longer.
So then, so you gotta go to specialists,
so I go to specialists,
and the specialist puts a cast on it,
and he just says, yep, the doctor did a good job,
he really broke it perfectly,
he probably didn't even have to come see me,
but it's a good thing he did,
so we can make sure it's healing right,
so he puts a cast on it,
and then, after he put a cast on it,
which I thought this was really kinda dumb,
he ordered an X-ray, and I'm like,
doesn't put the cast on it, and then order the X-ray,
you know, that's really weird,
and he said, I can tell it's healing right,
but I want the X-ray, because once we put the cast on it,
we'll no longer be able to tell
whether or not it's healing right, you follow?
But the X-ray can, so we can see in the X-ray your bone,
we'll be able to see that it's still healing right,
so you're gonna go home, go about your life, whatever,
I couldn't drive, because I had a stick shift,
I couldn't drive with my casted hand,
and you're gonna come back in about a week to 10 days,
and get that X-ray with the cast on,
so we can see inside the cast
to determine whether it's healing correctly.
When the Bible says,
he who conceals a transgression seeks love,
when the Bible says, love covers all transgression,
when the Bible says,
keep fervent in your love for one another,
because love recovers in multitude of sins,
when the Bible says, bears all things,
and it means erects a cover,
it does not mean for you to cover up and dismiss
sin or wickedness or evil,
that's not what it's talking about,
that's not what Paul was saying to the Corinthians
that they should do.
It also does not mean, because we know right,
love does not keep a record of wrongs,
we talked about that before,
love does not, is not provoked,
so it doesn't mean blow up about it,
and it doesn't mean keep talking to them about it
over and over and over again until they feel guilty
and finally fix it, or it's nothing like that,
but it doesn't mean to conceal it
so that you never see it again either.
When we get to the points,
you'll see how that actually plays itself out.
So the next one there is, it says,
believes all things, right?
Let's look at it again.
So love, bears all things, believes all things.
So when I first read this, and I've read it for years,
kinda thinking about it but never really
drilling down on it,
I saw believes all things and hopes all things,
and I'm kinda simple like this,
I don't think belief and hope are a lot different.
So I say believes all things and hopes all things,
and I thought it was kinda just like a symmetry, right?
Just saying the same thing, kinda the same again, right?
But it is different,
because the word for belief and the word for hope
are totally different, they mean two different things.
And so to believe something of a person
is to believe that God will do in that person
what God has said he will do.
It's to believe God's promises, it's to have faith, right?
The word is literally faith,
it just has a slightly different ending, right?
And so what it's saying is as I look at you,
even though I see you doing something
that I know is not good for you, not good for me,
not good for anybody or whatever,
I believe that even out of that thing,
something good can come and we can do something,
we can use this, right, for something.
God can use this for something.
So that kinda belief is faith that God's promises
will come true, faith that God will work in that person,
faith even that God, working in that person,
can eventually have his way.
And then hopes all things,
you look at the word hope, that's different.
So for example, when I look at Caleb,
and I see Caleb acting up or doing something
he's not supposed to be doing.
Now my hope is he has a reason for what he's doing.
My hope is God is at work in that.
My hope is that there is a better outcome
because his motivations are actually good,
even though what he's doing is wrong.
That's what we're talking about.
So when you put belief and hope together in this context,
what we're talking about is when somebody does something
wrong, instead of holding it against them,
instead of talking a lot about it or being provoked by it,
instead of failing in our patience,
as we talked about in all the earlier verses,
instead of any of those things,
instead we're looking for God to have God's way
in the circumstances through what's happening.
We hope for a good outcome even though what appears to us,
maybe appears as wickedness or appears as a failure.
And then that leaves us with one more.
And it is to endure all things.
To endure kind of makes sense, it's to bear bravely
or calmly to work through something,
to put up with it, but more than just to put up with it,
to take the hits yourself.
We talked a little bit about that last week.
To be willing to take the hits ourselves
rather than that other person.
So someone lies to us, yeah, we're hurt
because they lied to us, right?
But if you go back and punish them in some way for lying,
then you're gonna feel somehow justified or vindicated
or revenged, or avenged, right?
And so you're gonna hurt a little less.
Yeah, they got what they deserve,
so now I don't really hurt because they lied to me,
but they got what they deserved.
But a person who endures all things
would put up with that lying,
they might confront that person,
they might talk about it because it is a sin,
and we'll get to that in a minute,
but they're not gonna hold a grudge,
they're not gonna fail to forgive,
and they're not gonna keep throwing that person
under the bus, so to speak,
because of the actions that they made.
So when I say love is unreasonable,
I think love seems unreasonable.
We talk about that standard,
and the standards are like, are you always patient?
How long are we patient?
How often are we patient?
Remember the word patient there is every moment.
It's now and into the future.
So every time you check, love is always patient.
So if you love somebody, you're always patient.
How long does your patience last?
It always lasts because it's brand new in this moment.
That's a pretty unreasonable expectation.
The truth is that love, while being unreasonable like that,
is exactly what God is calling us to.
There's a few things I want you to see in the text then.
So the first one is,
this love that seems so unreasonable is patient,
keeps no record of wrongs,
doesn't spend time dwelling in bad actions.
This love that finds it pretty comfortable to overlook
or more accurately to stubbornly hope for the best set
of truths coming out of what really looks
like a bad situation.
This love that in marriage says,
I am not what's best for you,
but I want what's best for you.
This love that in familial love says, I got you.
I see what God is doing.
I see you want what God wants,
even if you don't know you want what God wants.
This love that in a church setting says
that God has made me able to love you,
erecting a tent, protecting you,
continuing to have your best interest at heart
and see the best assessment of you.
That kind of love,
that love then being unreasonable,
discovers three things about itself that are in the text,
or three weaknesses, if you will, that love has.
And so you need to be aware of these weaknesses
if you set out to love somebody
because they will be your weaknesses in loving.
And the first one is this,
once love covers a multitude of sins,
a transgression, a wickedness,
once love does that, once it covers it, it's covered.
And if that person is not walking in Christ,
then that which is covered will not heal.
Do you understand?
Remember the x-ray?
They wanted to check under the cast
because they don't want to come back,
cut the cast off, look at my hands,
see if it was healing properly,
and then put another cast on it for a while.
So he scheduled an x-ray to look under the cast.
So this love that we're talking about
understands that sometimes someone does something to me,
someone hurts me, and I love them,
so it covers their sin, covers their wickedness,
covers their bad choice,
expects good to come out of it and covers it up, right?
But we know that that covered weakness,
that covered sin, that covered wickedness
will not heal if that person is not
in a proper relationship with God.
So because worldly love knows this
and uses it to prove itself necessary
and then by this co-dependent relationships are created.
So let's say Ron Mack does something wrong.
Ron Mack does something wrong and he knows it's wrong.
And then I know it's wrong.
And I say, no big deal, I'm not gonna worry about it.
I'm not gonna say anything about it.
I love Ron Mack, so I'm just gonna brush it under the rug
and everything's forgotten.
Now Ron Mack knew it was wrong
and he knew that I knew it was wrong.
He also knows if he had another friend,
that other friend might have handled that differently.
They might have blown up, got mad,
or they might have said,
well, you need to correct this thing, whatever, right?
And so because of that, now Ron Mack chooses me
to be his friend because it's convenient to be his friend.
It's convenient for him because I don't confront him.
I don't cause difficulty.
I don't get upset.
I don't provoke.
I don't throw a fit.
And so the world fakes this kind of love by saying,
whatever you do is fine, just you do you and I'll do me
and I'm still here if you ever wanna talk or whatever,
but you just do whatever you wanna do
and I'm never gonna confront you.
I'm never gonna talk to you about it.
I'm never gonna get upset.
I'm never gonna let it bother me.
One wicked desire then supplements another,
but this is not love, right?
Because to just let someone stumble into the darkness
and break their foot,
to just let someone run across broken glass,
to just let someone step into a fire
when you could easily say, hey, what are you doing?
Just let someone take a very addictive drug
when you could easily say, hey, that's not good.
Don't do that.
Don't take it the first time.
Any of those kinds of things, those things are not loving.
Love is cautious with this step.
When we deal with accountability,
love prefers not to.
That's the bottom line.
So you don't prefer not to do accountability
because you don't wanna deal with the confrontation,
don't wanna deal with the conflict,
don't wanna speak up, don't wanna have an argument,
don't want it to be a problem.
Those are all human reasons, right?
That's self-seeking.
Love does not seek itself, right?
Rather, you do it because you believe
the best about the person.
Love covers that person,
believing in the promises and the powers of God,
hoping for the best of that person,
even enduring the pain while God brings the conclusion
that good work that he has begun.
But there is a problem.
This is the realm of the first weakness of love.
Paul writes it this way in 1 Thessalonians 3 verse 5.
He says, for this cause, when I could no longer forbear,
I sent to know your faith,
lest by some means the tempter have tempted you
and our labor be in vain, 1 Thessalonians 3, 5.
And that word right there, when he says
could no longer forbear, guess what word it is?
It's the same word as love bears all things.
So in other words, he got to the point
where he could no longer cover.
He could no longer provide the shelter for them.
And at that moment in time,
he realized there was something he had to do.
He had to verify that God was at work in them.
Love asks, and love is most importantly,
looking for the presence of love.
That's how we wind up with Matthew chapter 18,
beginning in verse 15, where Jesus is teaching them.
And he says, if someone sins,
you go and privately show them their sin.
And then if they won't hear it,
you go back again with one or two others.
And if they still won't hear it,
then you take it in front of the church.
And if they still won't hear it,
then you treat them as a tax collector or a heathen, right?
Somebody who is unsaved.
You treat them as somebody who does not know the Lord.
And what does that mean?
Well, that means you love them,
but you persevere in the hope and belief
that they will eventually repent and turn to God.
Because we forbear long, because we cover long,
because we go a long way,
this is what leaves no room for gossip or slander.
Let's assume for a moment somebody in the church
or somebody in your family or somebody you love hurt you,
or they persisted in wickedness.
They did something that was wrong.
And that only hurts you truly the worst
because it's bad for them and you love them
and you don't wanna see that, right?
But that's going on.
And you're covering it.
You're covering, I got this.
I'm taking the hits.
I'm enduring in tribulation.
I'm supporting them and I'm talking to them about it,
but I'm trying to get them to get past it,
but I'm covering it.
And then your friend in the church,
your brother or sister in the church comes up
and they talk to you about what that person is doing.
They start to gossip.
Well, did you notice how Sally does this?
Did you notice how she does that?
I have a problem with that.
I see that as wickedness.
I think we should do something about it.
But you're still covering that.
You know it's there, but you're taking the hits for it.
You're covering it.
You're working with that person
to hopefully get them where they gotta go.
So then now this person comes and,
you see, there's no place for that.
That's like, have you ever been sleeping
and it was real cold and somebody came up
and yanked the covers off of you?
But that's what we're talking about, right?
There's no place for that.
There's no place to take the cover off
because love covers.
That's what love does.
But at the same time, there is a time
at which love can no longer cover, right?
So said Paul.
So then that person comes
and they're gossiping to you about them.
And now the truth is,
you've gotta cover that person's gossip.
First you gotta cover the person
that you were already covering.
So you say something like, yeah, it's bad.
You know, I hear what you're saying.
When people do that, I'm not talking about them,
but when people do that, that is bad, right?
But I'm sure that's not what Sally means
or Sally means the best, right?
So we're trying, you know, Sally's taking care of it
or Sally's working on it.
And then the person who come to gossip you says,
well, why are you defending her?
Right, or why are you on her side?
Right, so now you're covering the person
who came to gossip or slander to you
because if you respond to their gossip or slander,
now they have a sin.
So now you've gotta cover the person
you were first covering and cover the gossiper.
And it gets real tiring.
And so you say to the gossip,
okay, you know, don't talk to me about Sally.
If you have a problem with Sally,
you think Sally's in sin and you're not willing
to cover that sin, then you go and talk to Sally.
But you don't talk to me about Sally
and I'm not gonna respond.
I'm not gonna respond to anything that you said today
other than to tell you, you shouldn't be talking
to me about her.
If you've got something to say,
you should be saying it to her.
See, this doesn't leave room
because how long do you forbear?
How long do you hold off before you have to go
to Matthew 18 accountability?
You go until you know it's sin.
That's when you're supposed to go.
And by then you've already had a conversation with a person
and you're working through it with them
and now somebody comes and gossiped you
like Yankee and the cover's off, it's not gonna work.
Right, so now you're covering for them too.
The point is, how long do you forbear?
You forbear until you can't forbear anymore.
Love bears all things.
And so you don't get mad at the person who's gossiping.
You don't throw a fit at them.
You're not provoked, because why?
Because you love them.
But at the same time, you don't take part
in their transgressions.
Because it takes time for us to be able to switch modes
and we're still covering,
gossip and slander are disallowed.
And that's one of the reasons why the Bible says
you can't do those things.
Otherwise you create strife between there.
That's one of the reasons why it says
that the one who lets go or the one who doesn't bring up
a transgression brings about peace, promotes love.
The second thing that's a weakness of love is this.
Love can take the shortcut of making excuses
or being ready to take the excuses of the person
that love loves.
My goodness, as human beings, we are so good at excuses.
We're super good.
We know why we can't do what we don't wanna do.
And if you don't know why, as soon as you try to figure out
why you can't do what you don't wanna do,
you'll find a list of excuses.
I go, it's funny because right now it pops in my head,
scene from the movie Terminator, where he's first there.
It's in the first movie, he's first there.
And the guy comes banging on the door
and he gets a list of things in his visor and his eye
to choose from what he's gonna say that fits the situation.
And he chooses some vulgarity, he cusses the guy
and the guy leaves the door, right?
That's us.
We're walking around going,
well, I wanna do what God wants me to do,
but here, this is to my face.
This is to my liking.
I like this.
I like how it makes me feel.
And so I guess I'm gonna do that,
even though I don't think that's what God wants me to do.
Now, what is my reason?
What is my excuse?
Because God is sovereign.
I know he's real.
He's the Lord of the universe.
He's the master of all.
He's the creator of all.
He sent his own son to die for me.
I got all that.
I figured all that out.
But now I don't wanna do what God wants me to do.
So now what is my reason?
Believe me, everybody that is intentionally choosing
not to do what God wants them to do
has a list of excuses to choose from.
They may use a certain excuse with you or with me
and a different excuse with somebody else.
Everybody's got an excuse.
Sin is sin no matter what,
if you've got an excuse or not, bless you.
And so what we tend to do,
what love tends to do because we love them
and because we're trying to forbear
is we accept their excuses.
Now this feels like a win
because the person is uncomfortable when confronted
and we don't wanna make them uncomfortable.
The confrontation is uncomfortable
and the confrontation feels like a lack of patience,
a lack of enduring hardship, a lack of kindness,
keeping a record of wrongs or dwelling on the bad behavior.
But the truth is that God is revealing
in this passage of scripture and all throughout the Bible
is that this is an attempt by the enemy
to subvert these very things.
Just the same as people will say to you,
judge not lest you be judged, don't judge others, right?
Because they know they're in sin and they can't have no,
now it's been exposed,
they have no excuse for why they're doing what they're doing
but they'll say don't judge them.
They're misusing that verse to protect themselves
and the enemy is doing the same thing here.
He's trying to make you think you have to
take their excuses in order to be considered patient,
kind, enduring hardship, et cetera.
The enemy knows what these verses say
even better than we used to know them.
I'm not sure now better than we know them now
but now having looked long into them,
we can clearly see that every one of those excuses
is a bandaid designed to make the person's lack of healing
look reasonable, designed to make the lack of love
and growth in the person look reasonable,
designed to make the reasonableness of failing
in whatever aspects make our faith and hope seem weak
or flawed or ineffective.
So listen, I'm gonna repeat that
because it was confusing, okay?
What we do is we take their excuse
because we say if we don't take their excuse,
that's not love.
And we think we're not being patient
or enduring hardship or whatever.
But actually what's happening there is
we are being required by an unseen force
and I submit to you it's an enemy.
It's your flesh, it's evil spirits, it's Satan,
you take it however you want.
To accept their excuses because their excuse says they can't.
Typically that's what it's, I can't, I'm too busy,
I'm sick, I'm hurting, I don't have the money, whatever.
So their excuse says they can't do what's right
and if we don't agree with that, then we seem not loving.
But the actual goal of that is to break up your faith,
is to disrupt your faith.
All it's really coming against is your hope
and your belief that God can do in them
what God says he can do.
So when so and so says I can't worship,
for example they'll say I can't sing,
I'm gonna pick on people and I don't mean
to throw anybody on the bus,
I'm just using an illustration, okay?
I can't sing because I don't have a good voice.
When you say I can't sing because I don't have a good voice,
you challenge the faith of every believer
that knows that the scripture says,
praise the Lord with your voice.
Sing praise.
So you're actually challenging the faith of your loved ones.
You're disrupting their hope that God will do in you
what God says he will do, which is make a joyful noise.
If you say, those who say well I can't tithe
because I don't have enough money.
You're challenging the faith, the hope of that person
that here's your excuse, you're challenging their faith,
making them think that God is not big enough
to make you able to tithe or give like he says he will.
He says test me in this and I will surely show you,
I will open up the doors of heaven
and pour out the blessings.
That's what God says.
And so God makes promises and then you make excuses
and then people who love you are forced
to accept your excuses because they think
it's not loving to not do so,
which actually challenges their faith and their hope.
And by the way, love believes all things,
love hopes all things.
So at the moment that they are challenged in their faith
by your excuses, they now fail to love you.
What they are doing is not love.
You get it?
That's what the enemy is all about.
He is trying to strip the love out of our love.
And the easiest place to attack that is by
in belief and in hope, which you can't quantify.
You can't say here's my faith, this is how much I have.
I have this much or I have a pouch or a pocket of faith.
I have a pocket of hope.
I still have hope for you.
And how much hope do you have?
Well, a lot of breadbox.
You can't do that.
So you can't qualify that.
But the other actions are all things
that you can for sure do.
And if you say you believe in God working in me,
you say you hope that I will turn out okay,
you hope that things will go right,
I have to take that faith's value,
I have to believe that you're telling me the truth.
But I'm telling you today that if you accept my excuses,
I know you're a liar.
Because that's what the word says.
When we accept the excuses of the person
and they have a good excuse for wickedness,
a good excuse for transgression even,
might be a relatively mild thing in our eyes.
When we accept their excuses,
then that is a challenge to hope and the promises of God.
And then in accepting them, we are not practicing love.
Sin is sin, even if we have a very good reason.
Sin is sin, even if we don't even know that we're sinning.
You get that?
So you can be doing something thinking it's good.
And then God says, just a minute,
or sends somebody to say, hey, hold up a second.
Or you read in the Bible and go,
has anybody here ever been reading in the Bible
and the word says don't do that,
and you're like, oh, I do that.
It's sin, me, yeah, I think it's,
we can all be raising our hands, probably,
you should be if you're not reading your Bible enough,
if you're not.
The Bible corrects, that's one of the things it does.
Paul wrote to Timothy, the Bible corrects.
And so there it is.
And if you would then say,
well, I'm not gonna be corrected, well, that's not love.
And if you would make up a good excuse,
that doesn't make it not sin.
And if somebody accepts your excuses for your sin,
then they are not loving you.
Now that doesn't mean they're gonna yell at you
or punch you in the face
because you said you don't wanna do something.
Or it doesn't mean they're gonna treat you
with terrible disrespect or throw you out of their lives.
It may mean that eventually they will treat you
like a tax collector or a sinner.
And what does that mean?
That means they love you,
hoping you will come to Christ.
Calls to repentance are the glowing examples of love.
Now repentance does not mean turn from your sin.
We've covered that before.
Unless you mean turn from all sin,
and the only way you can do that
is to turn to God.
That's what repentance means.
So when you go into a situation
and you see that a person has a transgression,
you call them to turn to God.
You don't call them to turn away
from the specific thing that they're doing.
They should stop doing it, that's true,
but they should turn to God.
And calls to repentance
are the perfect glowing examples of love.
Love can say, I will continue to love you
without supporting this choice.
I can and will know it for what it is
while still wanting the very best for you.
Love is cautious to go beyond this step
and so involves other believers.
Remember Matthew 18?
First I come to you and I say,
hey look, I have an issue.
Natalie, I think this is sin.
I don't think that's right.
I think you should change it.
And you say to me, no, well,
I don't think you're right, Pastor Dan.
I think I'm fine.
My motivations are good.
My heart is pure.
I think I'm okay.
So I come back to you with one or two other people.
They listen to my concerns.
You listen to my concerns.
And then they tell me, Pastor Dan,
you're overstepping here.
I don't really think Natalie isn't sin.
At which point then I am informed in my choice
and I can love you while you work through
whatever you're working through,
even though they're telling me that that's not sin
and I feel like it is.
My understanding of sin isn't better than yours.
It's not how this works.
There are no, and I'm gonna be mean here,
but there are no real popes in the world.
There's only one guy that's elected and he ain't it.
Jesus is the high priest of all the priests
and we are the priests.
That's the order of things.
So when you know you have sin, you repent and turn to God.
And when somebody else has sin and you know it,
you go and talk to them about it in a loving way
and ask them to turn to God.
And if they refuse, you take another one or two.
And if it's still there, still looks like sin
and those one or two other people agree with you
and they think it's sin too,
and it's still not turned from,
then you take it to the church.
That's our protection.
That's our caution.
So that we're not ripping that cover off prematurely.
If you persist in this course, then we will treat you
as a sinner and a tax collector,
which is to love you every day,
but to always want you to come in a true relationship
with the living God through his son, Jesus Christ.
I will patiently and kindly endure hardships as necessary,
believing in God and his promises and hoping eternally
for his saving power to conduct its work in you.
But not hoping for a lost person to be saved
or for a backslidden person to be renewed
because they say they already are
or because they have excuses for their bad behavior
or their lack of behavior.
Those things may be reasonable, but they're not love.
It might be perfectly fine for you to say,
okay, just go away from me, go work out your own stuff.
You will be you, I'm gonna be me, I'm gonna follow God.
I don't have anything to do with you.
And then just to never think about them again.
In the world, that might be reasonable.
Might even be the best course of action
when somebody's really bad, right?
But in the kingdom, it's not.
You pray for your enemies.
You desire them to see God.
You desire them to come to Christ.
You desire them to be saved.
You desire them to overcome their greatest weaknesses.
That's what we hope for.
The third weakness of love that love is very aware of
and we are cautioned about is love knows
that someone else's love is covering for it.
Love realizes that persistent, I can't say it,
persistent failure in itself is not love.
If you know that your friend, your brother, sister of Christ,
your mother, your father, your son, your daughter,
your spouse, your grandparent,
if you know they're covering for your bad behavior
and if they love you, they are, right?
The only alternative would be you have no bad behavior, right?
So I have bad behavior, I know I do.
So I know my wife is covering for me.
So if I let my wife continue to cover for my bad behavior
and I don't address it at all, that's not love for my wife.
I don't love my wife.
If I let my brother or sister cover my bad behavior
and I don't address it at all, I don't love them
because love recognizes that they are covering for me.
This is the very way that sin spreads.
In the book of Leviticus,
there's a really cool, long, drawn out over chapters
and chapters about how sin and the effects of sin
spread to everybody around you, right?
If you're in sin and you touch somebody there
during physically speaking, that's what Leviticus says.
All right, and so you want, does everybody have sin?
Yes, everybody has sin.
So then we're spreading it all the time all around us, right?
What's the alternative?
Grace, walking in grace, becoming salt and light, right?
So I am in sin, yes, I have sinned, but I am repentant.
I have turned toward God and Jesus is covering my sin.
So now I'm not dirty.
Even when I sin, I'm not dirty
because I'm giving it to Jesus, right?
Now when I touch somebody, did I make them dirty?
No, there's a chance I may spread love.
There's a chance I may spread grace.
There's a chance that they may be saved.
And if they are, then they also become a light bearer.
They also become somebody who can spread
that love and grace.
But in Leviticus, it talks about how sin spreads,
but goodness doesn't,
because you can't save somebody by touching them.
You can't save somebody by loving them.
You can't save somebody by doing good to them.
You save people by introducing them to the one who saves.
That's Jesus.
And so be very aware as you set out to love your spouse,
your kid, your husband, your wife, your mother,
your father, your grandfather, your brother,
the brother in the church, the sister in the church,
your friend that you met,
and you're trying to love them to Christ, whatever.
Be very aware that they will be covering your bad behavior
and so as they cover your bad behavior,
if you don't do anything about your bad behavior,
you're not loving them.
Persistent failure in and of itself is not love.
That brings us to our conclusion then.
Let me go back over the three points real quick,
because I even confused myself a little bit.
The first one was, once love covers,
what love covers is covered.
And if the person is not walking in Christ,
what has covered may never heal.
The second one was, love can take the shortcut
of making excuses or being ready to take the excuses
of the person loved.
And the third one is, love knows that someone else's love
is covering for it, hoping, believing, and enduring for it.
And that brings us to our conclusions.
By all standards, everything that we have read so far
since we started in 1231,
love is unreasonable.
This is not a thing that happens as a logical conclusion
or a thing that happens because we like what we see
in or know about another person.
A mom or a dad does not love their child
because they gave them birth.
It doesn't work that way.
I wish it did.
Boy, do I wish it did, but it doesn't.
A mom or a dad does not love that way
because it makes sense.
I just figured this out.
I should love my kids.
In fact, many moms or dads do not love their kids at all.
You think, well, they should.
They're their kids.
That just makes sense to me that they should.
And even the world teaches that they should,
but then the world teaches the kind of love
that they should have is not a biblical love.
So it isn't love at all because the only real love
is the love that God shows us is real.
Rather, love is a thing we were created for and reborn for.
Even love knows that love is unreasonable.
It doesn't make sense in logic because if you loved
because of logic, that would not be love.
In other words, if you said, oh, I take this.
This makes sense.
This connects to this.
This goes like that.
Here's a proof I should love.
And then if you did it, that wouldn't be love.
It doesn't make sense in desires because if you love
because it's what you want, you want somebody to love you
back or you love because it makes you feel good
about yourself, then that wouldn't be love
because love doesn't seek its own.
Love doesn't love because it's good for that person.
Love loves because this is what we were created for.
Jesus said, love is a thing we were created for.
Love loves because this is what we were created for.
Jesus said, those who love me follow my commands.
John 14, 15.
And he said, a new command I give you, love one another
in John 13, 34 to 35 right before that.
On the surface, it seems then that we can love
another person as obedience.
In other words, God tells us to love so we can love.
So we choose to love because God says so.
God gives us a command, the command can be followed.
So we're being obedient.
But I submit to you that actually what Jesus is showing us
here is the real problem, the crux of the matter.
This is where it all comes together
and it all either breaks or works.
Because also in John 13, 34 to 35, it says,
they will know you are my disciples
but if you love one another.
If we do not know God, we will fail in this command.
You follow me?
So the church will fail to love one another.
Families will fail to love one another.
Real love as God talks about will fail
if we do not know God.
We will find weaknesses in one another
because does anyone have a weakness?
Yeah, we all do, right?
So you're gonna look at the other person,
you're gonna find their weaknesses
and that will make your lack of love justified.
You'll say, well, I'll either put up with that crap.
We will find excuses that make our lack of love reasonable.
You'll go, well, it makes sense that I don't have to go
out of my way for that person, be overly kind,
patient, endure the hits, whatever.
I don't have to cover their bad behavior.
I don't have to do any of those things
because man, look at who they are or what they are.
Look at what they did.
We will embrace the excuses of others
which makes our love empty of belief and hope
and therefore not love at all.
So I love them, I'm going the extra mile for them.
I don't wanna hurt their feelings.
I don't wanna confront them.
They say they can't do what God's calling them to do
because of X and I'll take it.
X is good enough for me.
That way I feel like I did what I was supposed to do here.
I at least went so far enough to get the excuse
but that's not love.
Love would be then to cover it and at the same time
to say, look, this is sin.
I hear your excuse.
I'm gonna raise you one more.
I love you so much, I'm not gonna accept your excuse.
What you're doing is sin against God.
God's not gonna accept the sin.
Therefore, what can we do together
to get past this excuse that you just made?
How do we go beyond that?
But in failing to love one another,
we will not only be failing one another
but we will be demonstrating the lack
of God's presence in us.
Let's be very, very, very, very blunt for a moment.
If you participate in any of these weaknesses
that I have just described,
you are not loving the person that you say you loved
in that moment of time, that's not biblical love.
When you accept their excuse for their transgression
or their wickedness or bad behavior or whatever,
that's not love.
If you had a child and you say to your child,
look, you need to brush your teeth every morning
and every night, twice a day.
If you do that, you'll not get cavities.
And they go on persisting, sneaking.
One night you're standing in the hallway,
peeking around the corner of the bathroom
and they've got the water running
and they're rubbing their toothbrush in the sink
because they really don't want to brush their teeth.
And you see them doing that and you're like,
ah, well, you know, I did my part.
Or maybe you go this far, you say, listen son,
I talked to you about this, you gotta brush your teeth.
And I see now you're sneaking and you're not doing it.
And so you gotta brush your teeth.
You say, yeah, I know you did say that
but my teeth are fine, I don't have any cavities.
I'm not eating hardly any sugar.
And it tickles when I brush my teeth.
And every time it tickles,
I feel like I'm gonna pee my pants.
And so I just can't brush my teeth, dad.
I know I should brush my teeth but I just can't do it.
And so then as the good dad that I am,
I say, yeah, that's fine son,
don't bother brushing your teeth.
We wouldn't want you to tinkle in your pants.
That would be terrible.
Right?
Is that how love works?
That's not how love works.
Love doesn't take any excuses for doing what's right.
Love says, okay, I hear what you're saying
but I also know you have to brush your teeth
or you have to not drink
or you have to not take drugs
or you have to not lie
or you have to not betray
or you have to not slack off.
You have to not make excuses
for why you're not doing what you're supposed to be doing.
All of those things are not right.
And so if we live that way
and what we're really doing is demonstrating
the lack of God's presence in us.
Because I'm gonna be honest with you.
Does God judge your outside or your inside?
God judges your inside.
Right?
So God knows when you make an excuse
to not do what God has called you to do, God knows.
But what does God know?
Does God know that your excuse is an excuse?
Well, absolutely he does.
Does God know that your mind is twisted
and you have seven choices?
You could have chosen A out of the seven
and you chose number four.
Does God know that?
Yeah, sure.
But he knows so much more than that.
He knows the condition of your heart.
He knows where he lives and where he doesn't.
You can't fool God into thinking that you do love him.
In fact, the Bible says in Galatians 5 22
that there are a certain number of fruits
of the Holy Spirit.
Does anybody know what the first one is?
It's love.
The presence of God will bring up love in you
and not love like the world loves,
not love like somebody else's understanding,
not love that's convenient, but love that's unreasonable.
Love that you cannot logically come to.
Nobody in the world is gonna love the way God
is teaching us to love unless they have met God
through his son, Jesus.
Unless they have seen the example of a God
who created everything, dying on the cross,
which we could not do for ourselves,
no one is going to love this unreasonable love
unless they have met this unreasonable God.
We must repent and turn to God through Jesus
and be remade to love like this.
You have to.
And then yes, you will find yourself doing
what even you think is unreasonable,
covering, enduring in faith and hope.
And when covering, not just accepting excuses
when no healing may be taking place,
but coming looking for healing,
coming looking for God at work in that person.
If you live your whole life alongside somebody,
you knew them for 50 years
and they always professed to believe in Jesus.
They always said, yes, I'm a follower of Jesus.
And they were the nicest person,
taking all your excuses, accepting all your ways of living,
even showing up in church and sitting in the chairs
and maybe reading their Bibles or whatever.
All the things that they did,
if they did all of that in their life,
you knew them for 50 years and you thought,
man, for sure, if anybody's saved, that guy's saved.
And you got to heaven and stood before God
and that person is not allowed into heaven.
They're not allowed into heaven
because they didn't know Jesus.
And you are, even though you weren't
half as good as them in life,
but you know Jesus and he's covering you.
He's got you covered in that most important of all moments
and he lets you come in.
He says, this one belongs to me.
Yeah, he's a screw up.
Yeah, she really didn't do it very good,
but she stuck with me.
And she followed me to the best of her ability.
He followed me to the best of his ability.
And you get to go in.
And that person that you lived alongside of
and you always accepted their excuses
because they're a really good person
and they really did a lot of things.
But you always could see there were some things
that didn't quite make sense,
but you just kind of let that go
because everything else was quite good enough.
And when they go to hell, I submit to you,
they're going to be wondering why for 50 years
they lived like that alongside of somebody
who was going to heaven.
And that somebody who was going to heaven
never said a word.
Am I calling you to cover, endure in faith and hope
and when covering, not to accept excuses,
to look for healing?
That person that says, well, I can't because,
and 20 years later, they're still using the same excuse
because nobody cares enough to pierce that veil.
Nobody cares enough to come after them.
We need to repent and turn to God
and love like this unreasonable love,
which I know we can do because we were made for it
and then we were bought for it and we were reborn for it.
And yeah, maybe we learned to walk a little bit without it,
but we've got to stop walking without it.
And if you can't love, then just don't do anything at all
until you can love and whatever you're doing
is done in love.
Two illustrations and then we'll be through.
The first one comes from a story from my wife
and she doesn't know I'm going to tell this story,
so it's not bad, it's actually quite good in fact.
It goes back to Sherry's brother, Michael.
Sherry's brother, Michael is not a professing Christian
and I'm not throwing him under the bus.
He would say the same if he were here.
He's not a professing Christian
and he developed a pretty bad spinal disease
and he was laid up in bed and they couldn't find out,
couldn't figure out what to do with him
and really the truth was they thought he was gonna die,
but they knew for sure even if he managed by some small odds
to recover, he would never walk again, work again,
do anything again.
He was gonna be paralyzed probably from the neck down.
Is that right, neck down?
Yeah.
So the Lord pressed upon Sherry's heart.
He lives in the Columbus area, which is pretty far away
and they don't see each other often at all
and they don't agree on some very key things
like one of them being Jesus.
And she went to go visit him and he was laying in bed
and he was virtually paralyzed from the neck down
at that time and he was not in good health at all.
And she said, I want to pray for you.
She felt impressed of the Lord, I want to pray for you
and he said, well, you know, I don't believe.
I don't believe in God.
I don't remember, I wasn't there,
so I don't know exactly what he said,
but she told me this story and she said, it's okay.
I have faith enough for both of us.
And she prayed for him and he's still living now
and he's still doing an awful lot now.
In fact, he's overcome and they found a sort of a cure,
but not a cure and he can do a lot
and I don't know what his actual physical condition is,
but this much I know in that moment
when he thought, I don't really believe in God
and so I can't really expect God to do anything for me at all.
She was willing to love him.
How do I know she loved him?
Because she believed, she believed in God
and she hoped that God would do in him
what even he could not hope for.
That's what it means to love somebody.
Paul gives us a biblical example in Philippians 1,
verses three through 11, I'm gonna read them briefly
and it basically says this.
So Paul is writing to the Philippians,
the church in Philippi,
and he says, beginning in verse three,
I thank my God in all my remembrance of you,
always offering prayer with my joy
and my every prayer for you all.
In view of your participation in the gospel
from the first day until now, listen to this,
for I am confident of this very thing
that he who began a good work in you
will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus.
Hear the love?
He loved them.
He knew that God was going to do in them
what God was going to do.
He could just believe it.
In verse seven, he makes it very clear, he says,
for it is only right for me to feel this way about you all
because I have you in my heart,
since both in my imprisonment and in the defense
and confirmation of the gospel,
you all are partakers of grace with me.
Do you know somebody who's a follower
of the Lord Jesus Christ?
Love them.
Love them and believe and hope
that God will work in them that thing
that you can just only hope and believe for
and ask God to do it.
Do you know somebody who's not a follower
of the Lord Jesus Christ?
Then love them.
Love them and believe and hope
that they will come to Christ
and then God will bring to completion in them
all that he had begun.
When I was a young church planter,
I got to go to an evangelism conference down at Cedarville
and Elvis Presley's stepbrother,
I think probably most people know who Elvis Presley was.
Some people might be outgrowing that now,
and there was all these rumors that he didn't die
when they said he died and all that kind of things.
Elvis left the building and there's a lot of stuff
about Elvis.
Elvis Presley's stepbrother got up on the stage
and he gave his testimony.
He said, I started dating a girl when I was in high school,
well, I wanted to anyway.
He said, I asked her, I said, can I take you on a date?
And she said, no, but we can meet at church.
And he was like, I don't wanna go to church.
And she said, well, when you're ready,
we can meet at church.
We can go to church every Sunday,
and I'll be there, you'll be there,
and we'll see each other at church.
And she inferred that maybe they could hold hands
or they would sit next to each other,
they would encourage each other like that.
Well, he didn't believe in God,
he didn't want nothing to do with God.
And so after he tried to entreat her for a while
to ignore her convictions
that he needed to come to church with her,
and that was the only dating that they could do,
she eventually refused to go to church
and refused, she said, no, I'm just not gonna do it.
You don't believe in God?
I mean, the Bible says don't be unequally yoked.
I'm not gonna date you because God does nothing to you.
And he said, well, that's true.
And he went on to live his life.
He said, 25 years later,
25 years later, they never dated, they never married,
they never became a thing.
He was married at one point,
and then I think he was married once and divorced once,
and he was married once, and she died, I think,
something like that.
And he had lived his life.
So now he's 25 years later, he's in his late 40s,
and he's back in his hometown, and he's broken.
He's falling apart, his life's dying,
his addiction's overcoming him,
he didn't know what to do.
And he was in a hotel, and he got a Bible out of the drawer,
and he started reading it,
and he felt like God was working in him.
It's like God was telling him that he would save him,
even at that late date that he would save him.
And so he got up the next morning, it was a Sunday morning,
and he went to church, not even realizing,
not even realizing that the church he was going to
was the church of the girl
that he had tried to date 25 years before.
Not even realizing that that was the church.
And here it is, he came in the room,
and he said, they recognized him.
And five or six people came and surrounded him,
and said, we've been praying for you for 25 years,
and now here you are.
Does the church love?
Yeah, and when they do, no matter how long it takes,
God always wins.
Does the church sometimes not love?
Yeah, and when the church sometimes not loves,
sometimes does not love,
God doesn't win like he wants to.
So let us love like we've been talking about.
Let us love like we've been created to love.
Let us love like we've been recreated in Christ to love.
That means we're not gonna take each other's excuses.
We're gonna step up for each other.
We're gonna call each other out in a loving way
when the time comes right.
In the meantime, you're gonna cover.
I'll take the hit so that you don't have to do
what you don't wanna do
that you're making a very good excuse for.
But as soon as the Lord leads me to,
I'm gonna go to the church,
but as soon as the Lord leads me to, I'm gonna come to you,
I'm gonna say, look, I just think this is an excuse.
You say, no, I really have a health condition.
I really have this problem.
I really can't do that because of this or that
or the other thing, okay?
But that reason, that excuse,
that problem does not remove the requirement.
It doesn't.
We find reasons not to do what God wants us to do,
but there really is no reason.
And so we can work together and overcome.
You say, I don't have transportation.
I say, I'll provide it.
You say, well, I have a health concern.
Well, I'll pray.
And the very first moment your health concern
does not interfere with you doing what you must do,
then you have to say, okay, I won't let it.
I'll do what I'm supposed to do.
The very first moment.
You say, well, I have other commitments,
but God still requires this of you.
You know what God wants you to do,
so I have other commitments.
Okay, so I'll pray and we'll work through
how to get past those other commitments.
Maybe somebody else can take care of it
or we can put it away.
But the very first moment, it's not stopping you
from stopping you, it's not stopping you
from doing what you're supposed to do,
then you begin to do it and you never look back.
That's the kind of people we are.
That's the kind of people the church is.
That's the kind of people the church has been
since Jesus died on the cross.
Oh, and my goodness, I'm sure glad
he didn't make any mistakes.
I'm sure glad he didn't make any excuses.
Think he had any?
You think Jesus could come up, Jesus,
in his infinite wisdom, could come up with any excuses
of why not to go to the cross?
I'll bet you he had a bunch.
And he didn't make any.
And he loved.
And he covered.
And he endured.
And he rose again on the third day.
And we can do the same.
I ask the praise team to come forward
and lead us in our closing song at this time.
If you're here today, if you realize
you have not been loving this way,
you are not your spouse, your kids, your family,
and you repent.
Not repent from what you've been doing wrong,
but repent and turn to God.
Only God can make it possible.
Only God can give you the words when the time comes.
Only God can make you strong on the inside
to support your efforts on the outside.
God can do that.
And you've got to trust him to do that.
He loves you.
And he wants you to be his love
to the people that you run into in your life.
And you can.
And we'll be here.