ATTN:       Aleida , 78, of Rotterdam, Netherlands, has been smoking for 50 years. And for 50 years she has been trying to give up her harmful habit. But she has not been successful—that is, until recently. She has now given up cigarettes, cigars, and pipes. The secret? Leo, 79, proposed marriage last year, but refused to go through with the wedding until Aleida gave up smoking. Says Aleida now: “Will power never was enough to get me off the tobacco habit. Love did it.”

That’s the power of love. Love enables us to do something that we normally can’t do. You’ve heard of people risking their own lives and doing supernatural things to save their loved ones from harm’s way. But usually love’s power is more subtle than that. It has the power of rearranging our priorities. It has the power of changing our desires. But probably the greatest thing that love does is to help us get over our nature of being selfish. You see, all our lives we have made ourselves the center of this universe. Everything exists to meet our needs. This starts the time we are born. Look at little babies. As cute and cuddly as they are, aren’t they all about themselves? They cry all hours of the day whenever they have a need. They are not considerate of the parents’ conditions or circumstances. “Hey, I have a need. Meet my need, however small it may be, right now right here! I don’t care it’s 2 o’clock in the morning and you have to get up in 3 hours to go to hour. Scratch my back right now! Wahhhh!”, they demand! How selfish! But then they grow up. And we train those selfish bundles of nerves to think of others and to be less selfish. But until they learn to love truly, they will always think of themselves first. Oh, they may mask off their selfishness on the outside, but only because they learned that it’s good for them to appear to be unselfish. So, they are being selfish by appearing to be unselfish. But are they being truly loving?

TRANS: I know I’m a week late, but in light of the Valentine’s Day we had last week, I wanted to pick up this topic of love and speak about it. This is a standalone message…. I will proceed this way.

1. What is love? We will define love. II. How do we check if our love is genuine? III. What do we do if we have no love?
2. What is love?

1 Corinthians 13:1-3 [1] If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. [2] And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. [3] If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Now, for years, I believed and taught that love is an action. It is what we do. It is taking actions for the sake of the one that we should love. It is not a feeling. As John Meyer sang several years ago, “Love is a verb.” It is the loving thing you do! It is action! You can say, “I love you” all you want, but “what are you doing for me?” is where love is at! Now, the reason why I believed it and preached is because that’s what many great pastors in my circle taught about love. And they were of course reacting against the world’s definition of love – that love is a “feeling” probably from the 60’s and 70’s. And they have pointed to 1 Corinthians 13 to prove their point: For example, “Love is patient, love is kind, it does not envy, it does not boast.” See? All these elements of love are actions. Being patient is an action. Being kind is an action, etc. So, love is what we do. However, when you read the text more carefully, you realize that that may have been an over-simplification of love. One day as I was reading this chapter, v. 3 caught my eye. It says, “[3] If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.”          

If the definition of love is “doing the loving thing toward someone regardless of our feeling” shouldn’t giving all my possession to the poor be a perfect example of love? But the verse says, “even so, If I have no love…” Even if I have done the loving deeds, if I have no love… which means that love is more than just doing the loving deeds. It is also feeling love for the person that we are acting benevolently towards. As a matter of fact when God tells us to love Him, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and all your strength.” God didn’t mean love me with all your being except your emotions. He DOES mean to love Him with our emotions and not just with our actions. That’s what “all” means! So, for us to compartmentalize love and take the emotional part of it out, we are making it out to be less than love. In fact, it might be pharisaical!

So, yes, love involves actions, no doubt. But it’s more than that. It is also emotions. I love John Piper’s definition of love: “Love is the overflow of joy in God that gladly meets the needs of others” So, our emotions as well as our actions are included in it!

ILL: a little girl wanted to play house with her mom. But mom was tired from working all day and making food, however, she knew that her daughter wouldn’t stop bugging her unless she said yes.” So, tiredly and reluctantly, she said, “ok, let’s play house.” But the little said “I don’t want to play anymore…” “What? You’ve been begging me all afternoon to play house with you and now you don’t want to play?” and the little girl said, “Mom, I only want to play if you want to play. I want you to want to play with me….”

Love involves not only the will, but also the desire. Love is not just doing the loving thing, but also feeling the loving feeling.

Love without feelings is legalism and drudgery

Love without commitment is infatuation. A daydream that won’t last.

1. How do we check if our love is genuine?

What does love look like in reality? Feelings are hard to quantify. But the Bible tells us what love looks like – see if we have the fruit of love. So, husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends, if you want to know whether your counterpart truly loves you, then look to these evidences!

1 Corinthians 13:4-7  [4] Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant [5] or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; [6] it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. [7] Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

How do I know if I genuinely love Janet? I look to see if there are fruits of love. Am I patient with her? Am I kind to her? Do I envy her? Am I rude towards her?… Flip it around. If I am not being patient, I’m not being kind, I’m rude… what does that show? That I don’t love her.

So, that wife beater who beats his wife and treats her cruelly but afterwards keeps telling her, “I love you! I won’t ever do it again!”, and is even shedding tears… well, he doesn’t really love you. He is not patient with you. He is not kind to you. He’s certain rude to you putting his hand on you! You have to go with not what he says and not what he feels at the moment, but with the outcome of love which are visible according to the Scpriture – again, patience, kindness, without arrogance, or rudeness.

So, here are some true tests of our love according to this passage:

– You say you love your best friend. You are BFF. But how do you feel when your friend makes the Homecoming court and you don’t? or the football team and you don’t? Jealousy. That shows that you don’t really love your friend. b/c if you did, then you would be glad and happy – love is not jealous.

– What about when your co-worker gets the promotion you really wanted? Or your neighbor finally own their house outright and you still have a long way to go? Or your friends take your dream vacation in the Bahamas and post pictures all over social media? As you are commenting on it and saying how happy you are for them, are you really? Or do you rather wish it was you there and not them?

– Or everyone else’s getting pregnant but you? Do you genuinely rejoice with them from the inside without a tinge of jealousy? “Love does not envy or boast!” Oh, how subtly we boast! We may not say it with words, but we boast with our action! It’s called one-upmanship. Your friend posts a picture of her child getting a Terrific Kid award from school and so you post a picture of your child getting two Terrific Kids awards from school! That’s a silent form of boasting.

ILL: (I found this illustration while looking through an old sermon I preached 10 years ago!) When Janet and I first married, I overheard her relatives whisper to one another, “I think Janet is too good for him. I don’t think he matches up to Janet…” you know how I felt? Good! I loved it. I didn’t grow jealous. I liked it b/c I prefer her over me so if people compliment her over against me, then I’m perfectly fine with it. Now, 11 years later, if I heard that…. that might be a different story! Just kidding! But that’s what love does. It prefers others to the self from the inside.

III. How do we love like this? (What do we do if we have no love?)

Is this kind of love even possible? How do you not get jealous really when your friend gets the job you want? How do we not think about what we are NOT getting when our friend gets what we want?

Can this be done by the sheer willpower? Do we repeat to ourselves, “I’m not going to get jealous that she got a Lexus. I’m not going to get jealous she got a Lexus. I’m going to be happy for her!”? So then, what do we do when we find out that we don’t really love our brothers and sisters? What will it take for us genuinely love one another from the heart? What would it take for us to genuinely be interested in other people? What would it take for us to be genuinely be happy at the good fortunes of our friends? Our hearts must change. We must take off the old cloak we’ve had on since birth called “self-centeredness” and put on “love.”

It starts by receiving love. Only those who are loved can love. Only those who experienced love can love. And be broken by that love. Where do we get that kind of love?

             1 John 4:10, “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.”

This Son was preexisting and had everything with His Father in glory. And there was mutual love and admiration between the Father and the Son. The Father was enthralled by the beauty and glory of the Son and the Son was enamored with the majesty of the Father. Out of this beautiful union, they created the world. Even though fallen by our sin, we can see glimpses of God’s brilliance in His work in the billions of galaxies only our telescopes can see, magnificent mammoth whales playing in the depth of the sea, the blazing sun rising above the horizon over the snowcapped mountain or even in the chortles of a child’s laugh, we feel God’s fingerprints of beauty and joy. But these human beings who have been made in the image of God have rebelled against God and cursed the universe along with them. What will God do? He does the unthinkable! He doesn’t annihilate human beings to start over. He doesn’t send an angel to take care of the sin problem. But He sends His most precious possession and love in His Son, fully knowing what these human beings will do to Him! The human beings don’t understand this kind of love and sacrifice. They couldn’t believe that this mere human being in Jesus would be the Son of the very God of very god. So, they captured Him, tortured Him, and killed Him. And what does this Son of God who co-created the very muscle fibers driving the nails through His hands say? “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing…”

Oh, what love! What sacrifice! How amazing! How divine!

Seeing and experiencing this love, John Newton, that hardened slave trader in England who knew no love from his earthly father, and treated African slaves like animals with no pity in his eyes, broke down and utterly and completely changed and wrote that beautiful hymn that we love to sing 250 years later: Amazing Grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me!

This kind of love described in the 1 Corinthians is only possible for those who have been loved. But you have been loved! So utterly and completely. You are worth more than all the earthly empires put together. You are worth more than all the 7 wonders of the world put together. You are worth more than all the oceans crashing 7 continents together. You are fearfully and wonderfully made. All the supercomputers put together in the world cannot emulate the brain that is in between your ears!

CONC: If you do not know this kind of love. If you have not felt this kind of love, ask God to open your eyes. Ask Him to open your hearts. And once you are fully enveloped in His love which you didn’t deserve, you can go and distribute this love to others. You can be genuinely happy for your friend’s promotion and wellbeing. You can love your husband or wife even with all his/her flaws and quirkiness. After all, s/he is not the source of love. God is. You can do this because God, your God who rescued you, filled your heart with supernatural love and so now you are about giving glory back to that Father who honored you so lavishly. You can now make it about others. You can genuinely rejoice in other people’s fortunes because it is your heavenly Father who did this and you are grateful at His generosity.