Sermon Tone Analysis

- Last week, we spoke about the different gifts God has given the church – grace gifts – that individuals use to serve Him & His church

Date: 25-11-18 814 Echuca

- Last week, we spoke about the different gifts God has given the church – grace gifts – that individuals use to serve Him & His church

- Today, we transition from gifting to ethics & attitudes

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- We did have one gift Paul spoke about in the last passage – mercy

- All of us are to be like God & show mercy, but there is a gift a person has which excels in this task

- It might include such things as visiting the sick, caring for the elderly or disabled, providing for the poor

- Interestingly, the apostle appends this instruction of “showing mercy, with cheerfulness”

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- God has given us grace gifts that need to be used a certain way

Q.

To be exercising the gift grudgingly is really defeating the purpose don't you think?

- Let's say a person exercises forgiveness towards another & thinks...

- “I'll let you off, but I'm still fuming inside”

- You say to someone else, “I can forgive, but I cannot forget”

- Yes, sometimes the damage done to a relationship can be hard to move forward from

- There may be forgiveness given, but there are emotions to deal with

- But when we consider the grace given to us, then that puts a whole different spin on it

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- You want God to be still fuming at you, even though He has forgiven you?

Q. Do you still want Him to secretly hold bitterness & resentment in His heart towards you?

- You say that you don't believe God would do that – that when He forgives, all is gone & you are completely restored to Him

- That your sins are buried in the deepest ocean never to surface again & yet, sadly, this is not the way many Christians act after they have had difficulties with one another

- Either forgiveness means emulating God's forgiveness or not

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- Gifting is different from ethics & attitudes

- Some people have gifts that others do not have & the reverse applies to them – they don't have what other people have

- All these gifts, to be clear, are by the grace of God

- One person has a grace gift from God that is beneficial to the body while another person has a different kind of gift that is also beneficial to the body

- But every Christian has a grace gift from God

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- While gifting is unique to individuals, ethics & attitudes are the same for us all

- You may say that you are of a certain personality & that personality works against, say, “rejoicing in hope”

- It may be true that, because of your personality, you have to work harder to get your attitudes & emotions in order, but you still need to do that – you need to work on that

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- Today's instructions are about attitudes & ethics

- This all stems from a mentality that is FUTURE oriented

- You would be right to think that this list is difficult to fulfil

- It is difficult because people assume this stems from a mentality that is only located in the present

- Whereas, in fact, it stems from a mind, set on the future, as it operates in the present

- We are told that time & time again – to have our minds set on where Christ is seated in the heavenly places & that we are seated with Him there now

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- As we come to this passage today, the underlying design of this section is love

- He is not always specifically speaking of love, but he keeps coming back to love as the single most important facet of Christian behaviour

- Love is the mark of a new creation in Christ

1. Love's Quadrant vs.9-10

1. Love's Quadrant vs.9-10

- The first set of values we come to is what I'm calling “Love's Quadrant”

- Love's quadrant is here expressed in it's behaviour

1. Love is sincere

2. Love hates evil & clings to the good

3. Love is loyal

4. Love puts others first

- “God is love” says the apostle John

- Unfortunately, we have been so accustomed to think of love as located in the emotions that we lose sight of what it truly means to love

—7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. 8 The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.

- Unfortunately, we have been so accustomed to think of love as located in the emotions that we lose sight of what it truly means to love

- To be sure, love must involve the emotions because we are driven by both the mind & the emotions, but love should not be seen as originating with how I feel

- We will see this clarified soon through what the apostle Paul writes about love hating evil & clinging to the good

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- The biblical kind of love is expressed, however, in action

9 By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him. 10 In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

- Tangible action that showed or demonstrated God's love for us

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- But this is also to be the case with our relationships, one to the other

—11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.

12 No one has seen God at any time; if we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us.

- So basic is Christian love to the people of God, that Paul doesn't write about the need to love, but of what such love entails

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- It is relatively easy to fain love

- In other words, it is possible to fool people about our love

- In the first sector of the Quadrant, I mentioned that “love is sincere”

- It is literally, “love is not hypocritical” or “Love is not play acting”

- Playing a role even though it's not true in reality

- So here is an attempted expression of love, but he was play acting

But the goal of our instruction is love from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.

-- Since you have in obedience to the truth purified your souls for a sincere love of the brethren, fervently love one another from the heart,

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- Unfortunately, love is has been turned on it's head to mean something radically different from what God's love is about

- Sexual perversity – relationships that are not sanctioned by God are given the tick of approval by most members of our society

- “Love is love” they say – “no, it is not”, God says

- Love is defined by God & He says that love, in fact, hates evil

- It doesn't hate the people, but it hates the sin & the evil

—6 love does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth;

- In contrast to this, love clings to the good

- The word used here is used by Jesus when He quotes Genesis of the man leaving his father & mother & clinging to his wife

- You “tie yourself (tie the knot) to what is good.”

- It's like standing on a steep hill - a slippery incline – you have to bind yourself to the stake or poll on the hill or else you'll eventually slip & slide down into the “evil”

“Genuine” Christian love, Paul is suggesting, is not a directionless emotion or something that can be only felt and not expressed.

Love is not genuine when it leads a person to do something evil or to avoid doing what is right—as defined by God in his Word.

Genuine love, “the real thing,” will lead the Christian to that “good” which is the result of the transformed heart and mind.

— Douglas J. Moo

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- The ESV's “Love one another with brotherly affection” speaks of the Christian church as an extension of your own family

- There's one trait in a family that I find lacking in the church family - & that is loyalty

- “Blood is thicker than water” goes the saying – family gets our loyalty

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- I'm finding that loyalty is such a lost word in today's western world

- Loyalty, to the world, tends to sound like a restriction of choice & that is anathema to the modern mind

- If I have to be loyal, I'm locked in – wow, what a problem to have

- In fact, these very same people bemoan the fact that no one is loyal to them

- If we want or desire loyalty, guess what, we should be loyal too!

- Paul wants us to regard our church family as an extension of the affection & loyalty we have for our own family

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- The fourth quadrant here is to “put others first” or as our reading has it, “outdo one another in showing honour”

- Probably, this has to do with honouring the ministry of others

- This would be a way of ensuring a respect for the value of other ministries in the church, other than our own

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- Obviously, the apostle would not say, for e.g. that if someone wants to insist on speaking in a tongue, that the world has to come to a stand still

- In 1 Cor. he himself puts limitations on gifts & says that the spirits of the prophets are subject to the control of the prophets

- So this is not a blatant license for anyone to do their thing regardless of it's benefit to the church

- But he is saying to show love, by respecting & even preferencing the gifting of others over yourself

2. Love's Diligence v.11