All right, my name is Greg.
If you've never met me before, hi.
Would love to have coffee with you, maybe, lunch, something like that.
Anything that you would like.
I would love to get to know you and talk about Jesus.
I did want to make a really quick announcement here.
Next week, Thanksgiving weekend, I know that it's like, oh, it's Thanksgiving weekend,
maybe you've ate a little too much, maybe you're thinking you're going to sleep in.
But next week, the Reverend Mason Parks is going to be with us bringing the message from
New Journey AME.
He was one of the pastors that we did the service together with in Schwieber Park this
summer.
And so please come join me.
I'll be leading worship and he'll be bringing the word and I'm really excited to have him
with us.
But today is the last week of our series that's called A Church Called Tov.
Tov is a Hebrew word.
We've gone over this a bunch of times.
It's a Hebrew word that means good.
It's found all throughout the First Testament or what's called the Old Testament because
that is written in Hebrew.
And it's the first word that God uses to describe us as human beings.
Matter of fact, very tov, he says.
You are very good.
Now last week was the last chapter of the book that this series is based off of.
And so I know that some people would be like, okay, well if that was the last chapter, why
isn't the series over?
Can we please move on?
This is week 10, I think.
Come on, Greg.
And I'll tell you why.
Because I imagine that some of you have a book that you've read and you got done with
it and you were like, there's just like, there was a chapter that I would have written.
There's a chapter that I would have added.
There was a little something that I felt like needed a little bit more emphasis or you read
it as a whole and it gave you an idea that were like, okay, well it makes sense that
really all of that is this.
And that's the way I feel about a church called tov is that this theme is in the book.
It is throughout the book, but there isn't a chapter that is just about this.
And to me, a church that is tov, a church that has a goodness culture will have this.
And so that's why we are doing another week, because I said so.
I'm going to read a bunch of scriptures, of passages, and I'm going to, a bunch.
I'm not going to ask you to stand with me because I'm going to read a bunch.
Probably more passages than I've ever read in a single sermon.
But the point, you're going to get the point.
And after I read all of them, I'm going to ask you to tell me what the theme is that
I would like to have as part of a tov culture.
Ready?
We're starting pretty close to the beginning.
Deuteronomy 7 verse 9 says this.
Know therefore that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast
love with those who love him and keep his commandments to a thousand generations.
That's 40,000 years, by the way.
Psalm 100, for the Lord is good, his steadfast love endures forever and his faithfulness
to all generations.
Proverbs 3, let love and faithfulness never leave you.
Bind them around your neck.
Write them on the tablets of your heart.
Then you will win favor and good name in the sight of God and man.
Mark 12, the most important one is this.
Hero Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one.
Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind
and with all your strength.
The second is this.
Love your neighbor as yourself.
There is no commandment greater than these.
Luke 6, but to you who are listening, I say love your enemies.
Do good to those who hate you.
Bless those who curse you.
Pray for those who mistreat you.
John 15, my command is this.
Love each other as I have loved you.
Greater love has no one than this to lay down one's life for one's friends.
Romans 13, let no debt remain outstanding except the continuing debt to love one another.
Whoever loves others has fulfilled the law, 1 Corinthians.
If I speak in the tongues of men or angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding
gong or clanging cymbal.
If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I
have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.
If I give all I possess to the poor, give over my body to hardship that I may boast,
but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient.
Love is kind.
It does not envy.
It does not boast.
It is not proud.
It does not dishonor others.
It is not self-seeking.
It is not easily angered.
It keeps no record of wrongs.
Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth.
It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails.
So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three.
But the greatest of these is love.
2 Corinthians, for the love of Christ controls us.
Ephesians 2, God being rich in mercy because of the great love with which he loved us even
when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.
By grace you have been saved.
Colossians 3, put up with one another.
Forgive one another if you are holding something against someone.
Forgive just as the Lord forgave you in all and over all these good things.
Put on love.
Love holds them all together perfectly as if they were one.
1 Peter, above all, keep loving one another earnestly since love covers a multitude of
sins.
1 John 4, dear friends, let us love one another because love comes from God.
Everyone who loves has become a child of God and knows God.
Anyone who does not love does not know God because God is love.
Let us pray.
God, we thank you for the scriptures that have existed and persisted throughout the
millennia and we thank you that you've given them to us that we can still read, that we
can still learn, can still consider and I pray that whatever you have for us to learn
today, whatever this mystery theme may be, I pray that it would stick, that it would
become a part of the framework of our faith, that our faith would become stronger as we
become more like your son Jesus.
Amen?
Amen.
I just read you 13 passages.
I started with 30 and I pared it down.
It was eight minutes to read, all eight without any inflection, without being dramatic in
any way.
13 passages from at least eight different authors across a thousand years and they all
have a simple theme.
What is it?
Love.
Exactly.
Love.
A tov church, a good church, knows that love is what holds us together.
C.S. Lewis has a book called The Four Loves.
It talks about the four main Greek words for love throughout the New Testament.
They are storge, philo, eros and agape.
Storge is the kind of love that you have for family because you're family.
You didn't choose these people, but because you grew up with them, because they are your
family, you just innately have a love for them.
Philo is friendship love.
Lewis actually emphasizes this as one of the greatest loves that you can have because these
are the people that you actively choose to love.
These are your people.
That's my family that I was born into, but these are the ones that I chose.
I think back to 20 plus years ago, moving back to the Quad Cities, getting involved at
Heritage Wesleyan Church and meeting Robin.
Robin, who is our treehouse director right now, meeting Jen, who is our associate pastor
right now, meeting my wife, Cindy, who is my wife right now.
These are philo.
These are the friendships that I've chosen, that we have chosen.
I feel bad for them sometimes.
They're stuck with me, but I am so grateful that I get to choose them.
It's different than the love that we have for family, that love that you have for friendship.
Then eros.
He talks about this as a romantic love, but it's not just lustful.
It goes deeper than that.
It's not the desire for anything erotic.
It is a desire for a relationship with someone specific and then agape.
This he puts at the pinnacle.
It is selfless.
I'm no C.S. Lewis, but I want to spend a little time narrowing in, narrowing love down to
a single descriptive word.
One of the verses that I read was 2 Corinthians 5 14.
It says, the agape of Jesus, Senechai's us.
The agape of Jesus, Senechai's us.
The love of Jesus, the selfless love of Jesus is Senechai.
That word, Senechai, only gets used one single time in all of the New Testament.
By virtue of the New Testament being in Greek and the Old Testament, not only one time in
the whole Bible.
Anytime that a word only gets used once, that can become problematic for Bible translators
because maybe they don't have all the context for how to translate that specific word.
What you find is that in different versions or translations of the Bible that you read
when a word is only used a single time or only a couple of times, you're going to actually
see in different versions what seem to be pretty different words get used because of
the translator's understanding of how they should use it.
This word, Senechai, gets translated as rules.
Now fill in the blank.
The agape love of Jesus blanks us.
Rules, presses, impels, constrains, over masters, but the two most common translations are these
words, compels or controls.
I don't know about you, but those two words sound very different to me.
Am I wrong?
Well, control, depending on your background, maybe those sound exactly the same to you.
The agape, selfless love of Jesus compels us.
The selfless agape love of Jesus controls us.
You might be surprised which one of those is more meaningful to me.
I grew up reading the KJV, King James Version.
King James Version says, constraineth, for the love of Christ constraineth us.
Then getting into junior high, high school, you got to remember when I was a kid, I'm
old, right?
The NIV came out in 1978.
So when I'm in the 80s, no one was reading the NIV.
That was a brand new, that's not even a real Bible.
It's only been around for five years.
No one was reading the NIV in the 80s.
Getting in the 90s, all right, now I'm a junior high school, high school student, now I'm
reading the NIV.
NIV says, for the love of Christ compels us.
I grew up in a strict home.
My dad can attest to it.
In a lot of ways, my mom had to be strict.
My dad worked a lot, and I was a little unruly.
I went to a church with a really strict theology.
I went to a Christian school through sixth grade with strict rules.
I got spanked by my principal with a paddle that had holes in it for aerodynamic flow.
I went to a Bible college that had a lot of rules.
Most of my life, I was constantly surrounded by rules and controlling systems.
By the time I got to my senior year in college without really understanding why, I had resisted
and rejected just about every boundary that they were trying to put on me.
I didn't like feeling controlled.
If you know me beyond just seeing me in front of this table, if we are friends, you know
I still don't like feeling controlled.
My senior year, I was dating a young lady.
She lived off campus.
She went to a different school.
She wasn't supposed to get phone calls after 10 o'clock because she lived with her parents.
I'd been at her house after 10 tons of times just hanging out with her, hanging out with
her family.
It was after 10, so I knew I couldn't call.
I drove out and I just let myself in and we were hanging out.
Her dad had a problem with that because he didn't know I was there.
I was like, all right, see you.
The next day, he gives me a call and he says, Greg, listen, if my daughter hadn't told me
that you had let yourself in, if she had let you in without my knowledge, this would be
a much more major issue than it is, but you still need to understand that you have a problem
with boundaries.
Any healthy young man, my response was, all right, hung up, called his daughter, said,
hey, I think we should break up because I wasn't going to be controlled.
I lived on campus at a Christian school.
There's some rules.
I was working at a steakhouse making friends off campus, friends that didn't go to that
school.
So I moved off campus, started living with them.
I didn't drink a lot.
I didn't sleep around, but now if I wanted to, I could because I lived out on my own.
I was living off campus.
I didn't have to follow the rules of the Christian school.
As I careened toward my college graduation, I felt myself, my feet, my faith getting more
and more slippery.
Back then I described it like I was the undertow of a tide that would never come back in.
It felt like every part of my life was receding.
I wanted to be solid.
I didn't want to feel slippery.
I'd always heard that if you were wanting to jumpstart your spirituality, just go buy
a new Bible.
The theory goes that if you buy a new Bible, especially if you spend a lot of money on
it, you're going to feel invested and you're going to read it.
And so I did.
I actually, hold on.
I think I have it here somewhere.
Hold on.
Hold that thought.
Hold on, guys.
No, not that one.
This one, right here.
All right, you still there?
Yeah.
All right.
This Bible.
Someone want this piece of it?
And if you pick up this Bible, you'll see there's stuff written all over it.
Passages are underlined multiple times.
There's no pages missing, but there's phone numbers from random people that I met.
There's my number in it in case I lost it, someone could give it back to me.
This is a new American Standard Bible with what's called Thompson Chain Reference.
Sounds cool, doesn't it?
I didn't really know what that meant, but I thought it sounded really important and
it was really fancy.
It was shiny, burgundy, leather.
It had gold, gilding.
I remember the moment that I dropped it in the Midwest snow and the gold just disappeared.
And I was like, wow, okay.
25 years ago, this Bible probably cost 65 bucks.
And I didn't know a lot about translations back then.
All I knew was that I was buying an expensive, fancy Bible that would compel me to read it.
And then I was reading 2 Corinthians 5, 14.
See if I can find it in here.
I know I can, but just take me a second.
5, 14.
Right there.
Numbers circled, underlined in two different colors of ink.
When I was reading it, something grabbed me because I had very literally read this passage
5, 7, 10 times, partially because it's the beginning of one of my favorite passages.
This passage is the one that includes, for if anyone is in Christ, they are a new creation.
The old has gone, the new has come.
And so this was a passage that I had camped out a bit in.
So on this particular occasion, I was reading it and I came across the word that, no, that's
wrong.
That's the wrong word.
For the love of Christ controls us.
That's not right.
What happened was, I'm this wave that keeps getting pulled back out and never gets to
come up on the shore.
Everything in me feels slippery.
And something deep and spontaneous started happening inside of me because of the difference
of one word.
I knew that I needed that word.
That selfless love of Jesus, the agape love of Jesus that would control me because I was
out of control.
Maybe control still feels like a bad word to you.
I get it.
No one wants to go to a church that's controlling.
The Regs had a good church, it's a church that nurtures control.
Don't tweet that.
All right?
It's not exactly what we're talking about.
We're talking about a church that is filled with individuals, pastors, people that are
individually controlled by the agape of Jesus, by the selfless love of Jesus and what that
culture would look like.
For those of us that aren't quite sold on the word control just yet, let me go back
to the Greek word for control, synechai, because I intentionally left something out.
And I intentionally left something out because I didn't want everyone to just easily and
right away accept such a difficult word because it is a problematic word.
Agreed?
It can be.
In the Greek, synechai might only get used once, but that's really just because it's
a version of synecho, and synecho gets used in at least 12 different ways, which means
that the translators actually have a lot of examples to tell them what this word really
means.
And I wanted to make sure that I wasn't stretching, that I wasn't making something up, so I messaged
my friends that are experts in biblical languages.
They work for Wycliffe Bible translators.
They are Mike and Rachel Aubrey.
Hey guys.
And they're probably watching right now because they consider us one of their home churches.
And they are off on mission translating the Bible.
We as a church actually support them financially every month.
And they assured me that what I'm about to tell you, I am not making up.
Synechai is translated in its context as control because its root word is synecho, which means
to hold together lest it fall apart.
Almost 25 years ago, I felt so slippery.
I still have times when I feel slippery.
Truth is that I've been coming in and out a lot of it lately.
I don't know if it's because coming up on 10 years as a church, that it's been 10 years
since we moved back this last summer, sometimes I have no idea what I'm doing.
And I still need to know that the love of Jesus has some kind of a controlling influence
in me, that I'm not just doing whatever I want, that I'm not making this up.
I don't need, none of us need control like the world offers, but the kind of control
that will hold us together lest we fall to pieces.
Maybe you feel like you're falling apart.
Maybe you were in a church where everything fell apart.
Maybe you were in a church that broke you to pieces.
Maybe it's just the weight of the world and the weight of life, but hear me, a Tove church
will nurture a culture of love that holds us together lest we fall apart as individuals
and as a community so that when people walk through our doors, if they feel any kind of
control it will only be that love is holding this together.
And maybe they will feel like they have found a place where it is safe to fall apart because
love will hold all of their pieces.
I wake up most days praying some version of the prayer, God help me feel loved today.
And as I knew I wanted to preach on this, I just felt like there was a song there.
So what I want to do is I want to play you a song that I wrote this week.
Words will be up if as it goes along, if you feel like you want to sing these words, feel
free, but just let it wash over you.
Just hear it.
Your love holds all the peace.
When my heart is hard, your love is comfort and healing.
When the world is dark, your love is hope in the shadows.
When I am giving up, your love is telling me I am loved.
I am loved by the one who was and is to come, Jesus Christ the risen one.
I am loved, I am loved by the Holy Spirit, Father overflow my cup with love.
I am loved by you.
When I am far from home, your love will come out and find me.
When I feel so alone, your love will always remind me that I am not alone.
Your love still holds me with kindness.
When I doubt what I know, your love is telling me I am loved.
I am loved by the one who was and is to come, Jesus Christ the risen one.
I am loved by the Holy Spirit, Father overflow my cup with love.
I am loved by the one who was and is to come, Jesus Christ the risen one.
I am loved, I am loved by the Holy Spirit, Father overflow my cup with love.
I am loved by you.