©2003 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship

03/16/03

Learning To Love

3/16/03 Learning To Love

We finished up the first chapter of Ephesians last week,

and even made it a tiny way into chapter 2.

But before we return to that study,

I realized this past week

that I made some statements last week

that we need to look at a little more closely.

We spent a few minutes last week

looking at that remarkable statement of purpose

given to us by our Lord in His final hours prior to his crucifixion.

We saw the way in which He gave us

a powerful unified statement of His purpose in just two sentences,

one that contained the New Covenant,

and the second that contained the New Commandment.

We saw the New Covenant in Luke 22:20 where it says,

“... He took the cup after they had eaten, saying, "This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in My blood.”

He came to offer us a new covenant,

a new agreement between God and the human race,

an agreement that rests on just one thing alone -

His blood poured out for our sins

so that we can now live forever in a personal love union with Him.

It is a covenant that excludes no one,

a covenant that is offered to the enter human race,

a covenant that becomes ours

not as the result of our earning it in some way,

but simply as a result of our choosing to believe what God has said to us

about what Christ accomplished for us on the cross.

And then we saw the New Commandment in John 13:34:

"A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.”

And on the basis of that New Commandment

I made you a promise.

I promised that,

if you choose to focus your life

on loving those people that God has placed closest to you

I guarantee that you will never look back with regret.

And then from there we moved back into our Ephesians study.

But I realized this past week

that there were a few more things I should have said about that promise.

I can remember well the kind of turmoil I experienced in my early 20's

when I first began to listen honestly to what our Lord was saying with this New Commandment of His.

I can remember thinking how unreasonable it was,

how impossible it was to fulfill.

I thought I knew what love was.

It was a warm, gushy feeling that you felt for another person.

And here was our God commanding us to feel a certain way toward another person,

in fact towards lots of other people.

It was ridiculous.

It was nonsense.

It simply could not be done.

Either this was some sort of religious platitude

with no practical link to reality whatsoever,

or else there was something going on here

about which I didn’t even have a clue.

And I think it’s possible

that some of you may have responded the same way to that promise I made to you last week.

I think you may have heard me promise you

a life that could be lived without regret

if you would choose to focus your life

on learning to love those that God has placed around you,

and you may have found yourself thinking

it was a promise that in truth offered no hope

because you know all too well

that you simply cannot choose to feel anything toward another person.

We do not choose feelings.

We simply deal with them when they come.

If they are good feelings we enjoy them.

If they are bad feelings

we try to cope with them the best we can and work through them somehow.

But the very nature of feelings

is that they are automatic internal responses

that cannot be chosen or rejected

as we choose or reject the solution to a multiplication problem.

Does 3x7=21?

Or does it =22?

We can choose 21,

and reject 22,

and that’s an end to it.

But when we start talking about loving,

and then hear our God commanding us to love one another,

if we understand love to be feeling-based,

all reasonable communication between us and our God ceases

because we know that what we are being asked to do

is quite simply beyond our control.

If I were to stand up here this morning

and tell you that God has commanded you to feel love

for the person sitting three seats to your right,

the very suggestion of such a thing

would cause you to quietly assume that I have finally lost one brick too many

and it just might be time for you to check out some of the other church groups in the area.

And before we move ahead and clear this whole thing up,

I just want to make an observation that has helped me tremendously throughout my Christian life.

One of Satan’s most effective attacks against the people of God

is through his making our God appear unreasonable

or irrational in what He requires of us.

And nowhere is he more effective with this

than at those points where he succeeds in convincing us

that our success or failure in our Christian lives

depends upon our feelings.

There is no more unstable

or unreliable foundation for Christian living than our feelings,

and yet it is not at all uncommon

for Christians to live their whole lives

believing that the two most important aspects of our walk with God -

our faith in Him,

and our ability to love one another -

that both of these are primarily rooted in our emotions.

Take this faith thing, for example.

Weird things have happened with the concept of faith in the religious world during the past 2000 years.

Faith as it is presented to us in Scripture is neither complicated nor confusing.

True faith is simply our choosing to trust what our God has clearly revealed to us.

If He has revealed nothing to us in some area,

then there is no basis for faith.

The difficulty, of course,

comes at those points where our feelings

or our circumstances seem to counter what our God has said.

But the heart of all true faith,

the foundation for it

is always based upon clearly revealed truth given to us by our God.

In correct Biblical thinking,

there simply is no such thing as a “blind leap of faith”.

And yet

Satan has taken faith within the religious world

and twisted it into some kind of mystical gasoline for supercharged spiritual living.

We say things like,

“I need more faith!”

or “If I just had enough faith!”

or “I just don’t have the faith for that!”,

as if faith were some kind of cosmic currency measured out in $5's, $10's, $50's, and $100's.

“I’m a little short on faith right now,

but if you get back to me after the 1^st of the month

I should be in better shape.”

True faith is not something we feel,

it is not something that is somehow mystically infused into our lives.

Faith is a choice we make

based on correct knowledge about what our God has said or done.

Maybe a couple of examples will help.

Paul tells us in Ephesians chapter two that we are saved through faith.

With that statement he is telling us

that true biblical faith has the ability

to dramatically alter our personal eternal destiny.

What does he mean by that?

He is talking about a choice we make.

He is talking about how we choose to respond

to the greatest single historical event that has ever taken place,

a choice rooted in clearly revealed truth given to us by our God.

Here are the facts our God has given us to work with.

He begins by telling us the truth about our condition apart from Him.

He tells us that we have all sinned against Him,

and as a result of that sin we stand separated from Him and His love forever.

Then He tells us about Jesus Christ.

He tells us that Jesus Christ was our God in a human body,

and that, when He allowed Himself to be nailed to that cross,

He was doing so in order to offer Himself

as the perfect and acceptable sacrifice for our sins against God.

Those are all truths

that are rooted in historical fact.

And then He tells us

that all He requires from us

in order to share in this sacrifice,

in order to have our sins transferred from our account

and placed onto the account of Christ Himself

is that we choose to believe

what God has said to us about our sin

and what He has said about Christ’s payment for that sin through His own death.

That’s it.

That’s all there is to it.

It is our choosing to turn to our God as our Savior

based on the knowledge of what He has said to us about what’s really going on.

And every true act of faith operates exactly the same way.

If is through this same kind of faith

that all true practical righteousness comes into our lives.

It begins with what our God has said to us.

For example,

He tells us that deception and lying are absolutely inconsistent

both with who we are at the heart level

and with the life He has called us to live as His children.

He then makes a clear, understandable commitment to us

that He will meet our needs

as we choose to keep ourselves within His moral framework.

PSA 84:11 ...No good thing does He withhold from those who walk uprightly.

Then I sit down to fill out my tax return,

and I have income the IRS knows about

and income they do not.

And once again I face a choice of faith -

do I believe what my God has said to me,

or do I accept the value system of the world in which I live,

a value system that assures me that “honesty” is only required if there is a chance of my getting caught,

and any sensible person will use dishonesty and deception whenever and where ever he can get away with it,

especially if it involves the federal government.

Do I choose faith,

or do I not?

Faith is not and never has been a feeling,

nor can it be based upon our feelings.

It is a choice we make

based upon truth that is clearly revealed to us by our God.

And obviously I have gotten way off track here

from what I really wanted to talk about this morning,

so let me bring it on back.

The other huge slight-of-hand used by Satan

to rob us of the truth

is in his convincing us that love, too, is a feeling, not a choice.

This deception is so deeply ingrained in our thinking as a culture

that even the suggestion that love is a choice

sounds strange to our ears.

Of course I am certainly not suggesting

that love does not affect our emotions.

Some of the best of all human feelings

are the direct result of the healthy love relationships we have built in our lives.

And, the truth is,

some of the most painful feelings we will ever know

also come from those relationships as well.

It is the nature of love.

But the truly great and freeing truth

given to us by our God

is that, though true love relationships often result in feelings,

they are, in fact, based upon and built upon the choices we make.

When God calls a husband to love his wife as Christ loved the church,

He is not asking the man to “feel” an intense emotional love for his wife

every minute of every day for the rest of his life.

He is asking him to make certain choices in his life,

choices that place his relationship with his wife

as his highest priority.

God does this

not to dump some huge or unreasonable burden upon the husband,

but rather because He has designed the man in such a way

that, for a man who marries,

his deepest fulfillment and satisfaction in life

will come ultimately from seeing himself successful in that one relationship.

And if he fails in that relationship

and knows he has failed because of the choices he has made,

no amount of career success can ever compensate for that failure.

And when our Lord gave us His New Commandment,

"A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another...”

He did so not as some sort of sentimental religious platitude,

but rather because He knows that all of our deepest satisfaction in life

will result from our fulfillment of that calling.

It is what we are here to do,

and it is what gives us our deepest sense of purpose,

and everything else is just trivia by contrast.

And it was on that basis, of course,

that I made that promise to you last week,

the promise that

if you choose to focus your life

on loving those people that God has placed closest to you

I guarantee that you will never look back with regret.

But that promise is only of value

if we understand that love truly is not a feeling

but rather a way in which we choose to relate to another person.

Love is something we can learn.

It is an approach to human relationships

that our God seeks to teach us.

But in order to complete this picture,

I need to take it one step farther.

You see, learning to love is in no way an easy

or an automatic thing in our lives.

When we come to our Lord

we come with a life heritage of total self-centeredness.

In fact, this is exactly where Paul takes us next

when we move into chapter two of Ephesians.

Of course we don’t like the sound of these words,

but Paul’s description of us is dead on target.

He says,

EPH 2:1 And you were dead in your trespasses and sins,

EPH 2:2 in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience.

EPH 2:3 Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.

That is the foundation upon which our Lord then begins His reconstructive work within us

in His efforts to teach us how to love.

And here’s the way it works.

1. He begins the process

by creating the hunger within us for truly healthy relationships.

Simply stated,

He gives us a longing for a quality of human relationships

that goes far beyond what we have ever known before.

He gives us a longing to learn how to love.

2.Then, from there, He gives us the courage to be honest with ourselves -

“Lord, I am by nature utterly selfish.

I fear people,

I use people,

I’m a manipulator,

I’m always looking for what I can get out of this

or how I can use this other person to make me feel better about myself,

or to meet what I believe to be my needs.

That’s all I know.

That’s what I do.

I don’t know how to love,

I don’t even know how to begin thinking in those terms.

You alone can change me.

You alone can give me eyes to see myself

and to see those around me in ways that go beyond my own self interests.

You alone can show me when and where and how to give

when by nature what I want to do is take.

I now give you my desire to be different than I am,

the desire that You have created within me.

Now please, recreate me and teach me how to love.”

4. And then we listen to what He says to us

about what really works

and what does not in human relationships.

We listen to what He says about honesty,

about faithfulness,

about moral purity,

about gentleness,

and kindness,

and forgiveness.

We listen to what He says to us

about the value of prying our eyes off of our own needs long enough

so that we can begin to see the needs in those around us,

and the tremendous value to us

that comes when we choose to give to them

rather than taking for ourselves.

In other words,

we choose to allow our God

to lead us into a learning process

in which we literally allow Him to teach us how to love,

knowing that true love is not what we feel about another person,

it is how we choose to act toward them.

5. And then we choose to make that learning process our highest priority in life.

And I do hope our Lord will give you ears

to hear the tremendous hope and freedom that comes

from understanding the true nature of love.

There is nothing in human experience

that causes greater joy

or greater turmoil than our love relationships with others.

But quality relationships are never the result of chance,

or luck,

or “finding the right person”.

They are the direct result of the choices we make in those relationships.

And, if you have a significant relationship in your life right now

that is not what you want it to be,

let me conclude by suggesting a starting place for you.

Start by admitting to yourself

and to your God that you simply do not know how to love that person as you should.

And then ask your Lord to show you how to love,

ask Him to give you eyes to see

the choices you are making now

that are destroying the relationship,

and the choices you can make

that will begin healing and restoration.

1TH 4:9 ¶ Now as to the love of the brethren, you have no need for anyone to write to you, for you yourselves are taught by God to love one another;

1TH 4:10 for indeed you do practice it toward all the brethren who are in all Macedonia. But we urge you, brethren, to excel still more...