Genesis 37 - Your Love For Others Matters
Main Idea: Embrace God’s plan by choosing to love, even when it’s difficult.
HATRED DAMAGES YOU
- It destroys your daily walk with God.
- It robs you of your ability to hear where God wants to improve you.
- It turns you into the worst version of yourself.
HATRED DAMAGES OTHERS
- It always invites others to hate too.
- It robs others of what God has given them.
- It always invites more sin.
LOVE IS GOD’S PLAN
- It is what you can experience every day in your walk with God.
- It allows you to hear where God wants to improve you.
- It conforms you to what Jesus is like in His character & actions.
- It invites others into the life of God’s love through His people.
- It gives others God’s kindness and blessings.
- It always invites more love from us and others.
Sermon Transcript (Auto-Transcribed by Apple Podcasts)
For the next couple of weeks, I think it's about five or so, we are going to be in a series in Genesis 37 through 41, entitled Character Matters. Character Matters.
As we pick back up in the story of Genesis, that we went through chapters one through 11 in May and June, back in 2024, and then last year, both in the beginning part of the year with winter, spring, we went through the life of Abraham, and then last
fall, I believe it was, we went through the accounts of Isaac and Jacob. And so now we're in this next portion of scripture, and we'll be in Genesis from here until the very beginning of October, and we'll be completed with the book of Genesis.
But what we're going to see over these next several weeks is that your character, your integrity, the choices that you make really do matter.
And they have an effect not just on you, but on those around you, those within perhaps your family, your neighborhood, your church, and your community. The choices that we make really, really do matter.
I'm thankful for the grace of God that we sing about. It is that grace that gives us forgiveness. But the grace of God does not deny that we ought to obey and follow God.
And so, what I want to challenge us with, even over the next several weeks, is we are going to come face to face with regular human failings. I say regular.
Even knowing what is coming, many of us will never have to make the same types of choices that Joseph makes or that his brothers make over the next several, over the next month, month and a half or so.
But I want you to know that what God has placed into your life, the choices between good and evil, to choose between God's way and your own way, your own definition of right and wrong, it can lead to catastrophe or to incredible blessing within your
life. So I want to encourage us this next month, month and a half, is going to be something that the Lord wants to speak to you if you will hear him.
2:23
Jacobʼs Family History
As kind of a brief recap of where we've been in Genesis so far, we start off with Genesis 1 and 2, and God has a perfect design with mankind bringing God's order and blessing to all of the world. God makes the world. He calls it very good.
He creates man and woman as the pinnacle of his creation, and then he gives them the responsibility to go and to fill the world, that they would subdue the animals and the plants, and that what God did for them in Eden, that they would spread out
that blessing even throughout the rest of the world. However, they chose to reject God, not only his commands, but his character, like who he was in his descriptions of right and wrong.
They chose to define good and evil on their own terms, to call good what God had called bad, to say that something that God said would bring death would in fact bring life and wisdom for them.
And unfortunately, as you go from Genesis 3 on, you can see that story play out time and time again, that each one of us as humans, we want to define what God has said is bad as really it's for our flourishing.
And what God has said is good for us, we think is oppressive or restrictive, and it's limiting the goodness of life that we can enjoy.
And so, God in his perfect design does not give up on mankind, and instead, he has a plan to bless everyone on earth through his chosen vessel.
We read that in Genesis 3 and verse number 15, that the seed of the woman, the descendant of Eve, would crush the head of the serpent, that evil itself would be destroyed through someone from human lineage.
And certainly, we can think of the Lord Jesus Christ, eternal Son of God, and the Son of Man, born of Mary. So, how would God bring this about? Well, he went through a specific line.
He chose Noah, of everyone that was in kind of his generations, in his timeline, and he chose Noah to be this one that the nations of the world would be blessed through.
Noah's son, Shem, Shem's descendant, Abraham, and we spent a lot of time with Abraham, as God brought him into the land of promise, where one day Jesus himself would be born, live his ministry, and ultimately die for us.
So, Abraham was brought into the land of promise. Then God chose Isaac, instead of Ishmael, to be the one that the line would come through. And then God chose Jacob, instead of Esau.
And in Jacob, as we spent a lot of time last fall looking at, he was a messed up guy. Can you guys tell me, do you remember, how many wives did Jacob end up having?
I'll say four, with the caveat, two were more wives, two were more concubines, or those that were somewhat slaves, marital slaves, if you will.
And so, he had these women, and they were constantly fighting one another, because they wanted to be Jacob's favorite. So, they were always duking it out. Jacob was the younger son.
He was not the first born son, who would normally get the inheritance from his father. But he tricked his brother Esau into selling Jacob his birthright.
And then, he tricked his father Jacob into giving him the blessing, instead of giving it to Esau. Do you guys remember the specific thing that Jacob did to get Isaac to bless him? Do you remember what he put on his arms?
He put the goat skins on him. How hairy do you have to be that a goat skin is a good substitute for your arm? So Jacob has an incredibly broken family, and we saw that over and over again.
Now we're going to see what Jacob's sons do with their lives.
And even as we look at the timeline of who Jacob's children are, his four oldest sons, the firstborn is Reuben, who, if you recall the story correctly, he had an inappropriate relationship with one of Jacob's concubines in a way to try and get
himself further up the scale of his status within the family. So Reuben, we already know from our previous series, is a wicked person, and we saw at the end of the last series, Simeon and Levi, that is the second and thirdborn, that they went
through, and through deceit, through lies, they went through and massacred an entire town of people. So now we're left with Judah is the next one that in the birthright order, you would think this might be the son of Jacob that would bring about
God's blessing on the earth. But we don't really have good feelings about the family as we've been going through. So that catches you up to speed with where we're at right now. And today, I want us to see that your love for others matters.
Your love for others matters. We as humans tend to love the people that love us, that look and think and act and have fun just like we do. And the more unlike us someone is, the more we tend to hate them.
Or the more someone has what we wish that we had, we hate them. And what we're going to see today is that your inner feelings towards another person actually matter. It matters before God, and it matters in the way that you interact with others.
So, we're going to dive into the story in just a moment. But I want to invite us, even before we begin, let's pray.
Ask the Lord to speak to your heart today, that He would show you who He's calling you to love, and maybe where there's been hatred, where God is calling you to release hatred, and accept even the love of Christ within your life. Let's pray together.
Dear Jesus, we ask that today you would be honored and glorified in us.
God, we come to you today, not because we are perfect people in need of nothing, but we are here today because we recognize that we need you, Lord, that we keep redefining good and evil on our own terms. And so Lord, we need to hear from you today.
Speak to our hearts. Show us those dark places where we have not been walking with you and guide us into your good way. We love you, God, and we ask all of this in your precious name.
Amen. Alright. This is a lot of fun walking through some of these accounts.
I cannot get bogged down in the story. And so I'm making a pledge to you guys. I'm going to talk fast.
You guys listen fast. And we will travel through this very rich account of scripture together. Beginning in verse number one, Jacob lived in the land where his father had stayed, the land of Canaan.
So this is the land of promise. Verse number two, these are the family records of Jacob. At 17 years of age, Joseph tended sheep with his brothers.
Pause right there. Joseph is the firstborn son of Jacob's favorite spouse, Rachel. Rachel was the one that he had worked an initial seven years for.
His father-in-law had tricked him and had given him the firstborn daughter, Leah. And then Jacob had to work another seven years in order to get Rachel. So this was the firstborn son of the wife that he loved.
And we saw at the end of the last series that Rachel died in childbirth with her youngest son, Benjamin. So she had two kids, Joseph and Benjamin. So here it's Joseph.
He tended sheep with his brothers. The young man was working with the sons of Bilha and Zilpah, his father's wives. So these would be the concubines.
And he brought a bad report about them to their father. Now, some of you in the room, you identify more with Joseph in this account. Maybe you are the one that you have a very strict sense about right and wrong.
And so you go, yeah, obviously, if they're goofing around, if they're doing bad things that they shouldn't be doing as they're watching the sheep, yeah, I should definitely tell dad about this.
There are others of you in the room today that you say, tattletale, how could you do that? Why did you have to go and complain to dad about what we were doing? There are those types of people in the room today.
But here Joseph brings an ill report about the behavior of these men as they are tending the sheep. It says, now Israel, this is another name for Jacob. Prince with God is what God named him after he wrestled with Jacob.
It says, now Israel loved Joseph more than his other sons, because Joseph was a son born to him in his old age, and he made a long-sleeved robe for him or a coat of many colors. This would be princely attire.
The other time that it shows up in the Old Testament is when David's daughters wear this particular type of clothing. This isn't saying he has a beautiful dress. It's saying princely, kingly attire is what Joseph is clothed in.
Also, should you guys have favorite kids or favorite grandkids? Everyone yes or no? No.
Now, in our fallenness, do we sometimes like or prefer one more than another? Yeah, but don't do that.
If anything, all of these stories in Genesis over and over again about a parent favoring one child over another only ever leads to heartbreak even as we'll see today.
It says, when his brothers saw that the father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him and could not bring themselves to speak peaceably to him. I want you to think, in your life, who does this describe your relationship with?
That you cannot have a peaceful conversation with this other person because of how much you hate them. I want you to think about that.
It can be easy, especially when we come to the Word of God, to think of all the ways that someone else needs this message.
But each one of us, imperfect as we are, will have people in our lives that we've not been walking in love of the Lord and love of other people with. Who does this describe for your life?
Who can you never have a peaceful conversation with because of your anger and hatred towards them? Then Joseph had a dream. When he told it to his brothers, they hated him even more.
Now, this dream is not an ordinary dream. This is a very special dream. Verse number 6, he said to them, Listen to this dream I had.
There we were, binding sheaves of grain in the field. Suddenly, my sheaf stood up, and your sheaves gathered around it, and bowed down to my sheaf.
Okay, do you think they're going to be happy about him having a dream where all of them are bowing down to him? No. Verse number 8, are you really going to reign over us?
His brothers asked him. Are you really going to rule us? So they hated him even more because of his dream and what he had said.
Now, I'm putting the cart before the horse a little bit. Who was the one that gave Joseph his dreams? God did.
Now, that's a detail that we're going to come to later in the story. So if you don't know that right now, that's totally okay.
I have some teacher's pets in the room right now that they've been in Sunday school a little bit, and so they have heard this account before.
But God is the one that said, Joseph, this is what is going to happen in your life, and other people in a hatred of what God had for Joseph, that God said, this is the good that will come about through Joseph's life.
And the people were angry because they viewed his evil, what God intended for good. Verse number nine says, Then he had another dream and told it to his brothers.
Now, if after the first dream in the reception he got, I don't know if I'm Joseph, if I am sharing this other dream. But here's what he did. Look, he said, I had another dream.
And this time, the sun, moon, and eleven stars were bowing down to me. I'm going to keep on reading because Jacob gives us a little bit of a picture on what this means. He told his father and brothers, and his father rebuked him.
Okay, well, that was not just the brothers that are getting mad about what God is telling him. Now it's also his dad is getting mad about it. He says, What kind of dream is this that you had?
He said, Am I and your mother and your brothers really going to come and bow down to the ground before you? Here the picture that is given is the sun and moon.
It's Jacob, and I don't know which of his wives he's thinking counts as the moon, if it's Leah as the one that is more his official wife and not the concubines. But he says, Okay, are we all going to bow down to you?
His brothers were jealous of him, but his father kept the matter in mind. All right, first 11 verses. This is the first like portion of the story.
Are we feeling good about everyone's behavior right now? Are we feeling bad? Yeah.
We are headed for trouble. If you remember the first pair of siblings in scripture in Genesis 4, can anyone tell me their names? Cain and Abel.
We are headed towards a really not good set of circumstances right now.
16:17
Josephʼs Betrayal
Verse number 12. His brothers had gone to pasture their father's flocks at Shechem. Israel said to Joseph, Your brothers, you know, are pasturing the flocks at Shechem.
Get ready. I'm sending you to them. I'm ready, Joseph replied.
Then Israel said to him, Go and see how your brothers and the flocks are doing and bring word back to me. So he sent him from the Hebron Valley, and he went to Shechem.
A man found him there, wandering in the field, and asked him, What are you looking for? A couple of things here.
Number one, if you know anything about the rest of the story of Joseph, you know that him actually finding his brothers doesn't end up being an immediately happy or good thing for him. We know that we are headed towards trouble.
But what a thought here that God had a purpose for Joseph to go through everything that he did. And so there was a man as Joseph. Notice, what is that word there that you see on the screen?
A man found him there, wandering. Even in the Hebrew, it's this idea of Joseph didn't know where his brothers went. He knew where they were supposed to be, but they weren't there.
And God, in his sovereignty, leads Joseph to where he needs to be. It is not going to be the most comfortable path. It is not going to be a path that brings no pain or difficulty into his life.
But God guides him there, so that what we read at the end of the story, that Joseph tells his brothers, you intended it for evil, but God intended it for good. So God here leads him into this moment. I'm looking for my brothers, Joseph said.
Can you tell me where they're pasturing their flocks? They've moved on from here, the man said. I heard them say, let's go to Dothan.
So Joseph set out after his brothers and found them at Dothan. They saw him in the distance, and before he had reached them, they plotted to kill him.
Hopefully, you have never thought in your life, man, I really wish that I could kill my sibling right now, or my half-sibling right now. But that's where Joseph's brothers were at this particular moment.
They said to one another, oh, look, here comes that dream expert. So now, come on, let's kill him and throw him into one of the pits. We can say that a vicious animal ate him.
Then we'll see what becomes of his dreams. Okay, notice this, that the hatred that they had held, it escalated. It didn't stay hatred or despising because of their father's favoritism.
It didn't stay hatred in their hearts or coming out of their mouths because of Jacob's dreams. It escalated into now murderous intent. As a result of everything together.
When Reuben heard this, again, remember, firstborn son, he's supposed to be the, if you will, brother in charge. This is the guy that would oversee all of dad's stuff after dad passes off the scene.
When Reuben heard this, he tried to save him from them. He said, oh, let's not take his life. Reuben also said to them, don't shed blood.
Okay, if he stops there, good job, Reuben, we're really grateful for you. Next words, throw him into this pit in the wilderness, but don't lay a hand on him, intending to rescue him from them and return him to his father.
Okay, on the scale of wanting to kill him, wanting to rescue him, Reuben's tending more towards the good side. He says, oh yeah, let's throw him in the pits. You guys are right there, but let's not kill him.
And he's planning to rescue him after. When Joseph came to his brothers, they stripped off Joseph's robe, the robe of many colors that he had on. Then they took him and threw him into the pit.
The pit was empty without water. Then look at those first words in verse 25. After you have thrown your little brother into a pit without water, intending for him to just be there until the good Lord takes him home, they sat down for a meal.
Hatred will cause you to be so calloused that you do not feel the impact of your decisions. You will not notice the impact of your words as you carry hatred and the despising of another person or another group of people within your heart.
Since they sat down to eat a meal and when they looked up, there was a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead. So these are distant family members, also descendants of Abraham through Abraham's other son, Ishmael.
It says their camels were carrying aromatic gum, balsam, and resin going down to Egypt. So these would be nomadic traitors on their way through. Judah said to his brothers, this is the fourth born son.
What do we gain if we kill our brother and cover up his blood? Well, you don't gain anything, but also your attitude in life should not be, what do I gain from me mistreating someone else? That should never ever be the thought.
And instead, what Judah says is, come on, let's sell him to the Ishmaelites and not lay a hand on him, for he is our brother, our own flesh, and the brothers agreed. Class, all together, should you sell your half-siblings into slavery? Yes or no?
Okay. This is very, this is very bad. And I like how pompous he makes himself like, this is some great accomplishment.
He goes, oh, let's not lay a hand on him. He's our brother and our flesh. That should make you not sell him into slavery.
But that is what Judah has suggested.
When Midianite traders, so this would be another group of descendants of Abraham through his third wife, Keturah, and she had Midian, so you have the Ishmaelites, which are descendants of Abraham, and the Midianites, also descendants of Abraham.
They kind of intermingle. They were both nomadic. And so you would have groups of both Ishmaelites and Midianites traveling together.
So when Midianite traders passed by, his brothers pulled Joseph out of the pit and sold him for 20 pieces of silver to the Ishmaelites, who took Joseph to Egypt.
And then just as a small aside, do you guys remember someone else, even in the past couple months, that got sold for 20, 30 pieces of silver? You remember that story? Yeah, it's Jesus.
And here even Joseph, as a picture of some of what Jesus would go through, even in his life, that is Jesus was sold out to the Pharisees for 30 pieces of silver. Joseph here is sold out to the Ishmaelites for 20 pieces of silver.
Verse 29, When Reuben returned to the pit and saw that Joseph wasn't there, he tore his clothes.
23:27
Jacob Deceived
He went back to his brothers and said, The boy is gone. What am I going to do? So they took Joseph's robe, slaughtered a male goat, and dipped the robe in its blood.
They sent the long-sleeved robe to their father and said, We found this. Examine it. Is it your son's robe or not?
His father recognized, It is my son's robe, he said. A vicious animal has devoured him. Joseph has been torn to pieces.
Does anyone remember, What does Jacob's name mean? It's trickster, deceiver. And now the guy who spends all of the scriptural accounts up to this point deceiving others, he is now deceived by his own kids.
And if you remember, one of his first deceptions is deceiving his dad with the goat arms. Or the goat doesn't have arms, but he put the goat skin on his arms. And now you have his sons deceiving him with the blood of a goat.
Remember that what you put out will come back. Whatever you sow is what you will reap. Then Jacob tore his clothes, put sackcloth around his waist, and mourned for his son many days.
All his sons and daughters tried to comfort him, but he refused to be comforted. No, he said, I will go down to Sheol, that is the grave. I will go down to the grave to my son mourning.
And his father wept for him. Meanwhile, the Midianites sold Joseph in Egypt to Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh, and the captain of the guards. That's something we'll look at in two weeks.
25:06
Hatredʼs Personal Cost
What I want us to see today is that your love for others matters. First, from this passage, hatred damages you. Hatred damages you.
First, hatred destroys your daily walk with God. First John, chapter 3, in verses 15 and 16 say, Everyone who hates his brother or sister is a murderer. And you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in him.
This is how we have come to know love. He laid down his life for us. We should also lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.
Because God is love, as we are told in First John 4 and verse 8, a rejection of love, a rejection to lovingly deal in our minds and words and actions with another image bearer of God, is a rejection of God himself.
He will tell you to love people that you don't want to. And when you tell him, no, you are not walking with him. So hatred destroys your daily walk with God.
As God leads you, you guys all know this. We are called as Christians to love God and love people. Jesus said, the greatest commandment is this, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.
We have no right to claim for ourselves. We are children of God. We are heaven bound.
While we insist on hatred and rejection, cruelty and malice in our hearts and words and actions towards others. Not only does hatred destroy our daily walk with God, but it robs us of our ability to hear where God wants to improve us.
You can see this even in the beginning of the passage with Joseph's brothers, where they could not be told, you have been doing bad things, there's a bad report about the work that you've been doing.
They could not have that enter into their life without it resulting in hatred. For you and I, when we walk in love, we can receive rebuke.
We can hear from someone else if there's an area that we fall in, and because we know that it comes from a place of love. But hatred will say, oh, you have something against me. I have some imperfection.
Well, I have a thousand different things that I have that I dislike about you, or about what you do, or how you act. Hatred robs us of our ability to hear where God wants to improve us.
Hatred is a proclamation of our superior worth and our superior morality over this other person, the object of our hatred. And maintaining that hatred means that we can't be told that we are not superior to the person that we despise.
This steals us against any improvements in our life. You have to have a heart open to be able to hear rebuke. This isn't what Joseph's brothers had.
Jesus would give us the example, yeah, there might be a splinter in someone else's eye, but you've got a beam, you've got a log in your eye as you're trying to tell them what their splintery problem is.
Not only that, but hatred turns us into the worst version of ourselves. God is love. It's not just that God has love.
And so an insistence on hatred of another means that we are fundamentally acting against who God is and who He made us to be, made in His image. Do you want to be a suspicious, angry, slanderous, cruel, gossipy, lying person? Then choose hatred.
Now, all of us in our minds have all the reasons why we should hate this person and why we are justified in our hatred of this one. But my friend, God has infinite reasons to be mad with, to be, have a holy hatred against you and I.
But the cross is where Jesus said, forgive them. They do not know what they are doing. And we would think the crucified son of God on the cross, I mean, they, I'm pretty sure that they knew that they were crucifying an innocent person.
But as they were doing it, Jesus extended forgiveness. Who in your life have you been holding on to hatred against that you need to release into forgiveness?
That in your heart, you're not seeking for the ways that you can get even, the ways that you can harm them, the way that you can tear them down to everyone else that will listen. Who is God calling you to forgive even today?
To choose love, to choose a disposition toward them like that of God himself.
30:04
Hatredʼs Wider Impact
But not only today does hatred damage you, hatred damages others. We see this in the passage because hatred always invites others to hate too. It wasn't just Dan.
It wasn't just Naphtali that hated Joseph. It spread out to all of the brothers. And so, in my life and yours, a personal hatred for someone never stops with just you.
It always will pass on to a new person and a new person.
As you inwardly seek to justify your hatred more and more, you'll bring in more and more people so that a bunch of people will have the same opinion you have, and therefore, it's obvious that you're right. Just ask any of my friends.
They all say the same thing about so-and-so that I say. But my friend, hatred damages your soul, and it damages the souls of those around you. It's never enough for just us to dislike someone or some group of people.
We will always spread that hate to others in order to justify our guilty conscience before our loving God. Can I ask us today, who is our hate friend? That one that we go to, that we know, will affirm our trash-talking of others?
Can I tell you, that's not a good relationship to have. And may we have a heart that we're not going to be that person for others.
That when someone else has some hatred for someone, they can leave it with them, but we're going to choose to walk in love. We're going to choose to walk in forgiveness. Allow that person to have the Holy Spirit work on and in them.
But for each of us, may we choose, we're not going to be that one that hate spreads to. Secondly, hatred robs others of what God has given them. You think of Joseph's story.
His robe was taken from him. His freedom was taken from him. His relationship of being able to talk with his father, to give him a hug, that was taken away from him as he sold into slavery.
His relationship with his little brother Benjamin, he wouldn't see him again for another 20, 30 years. Do you think about even his freedom that he's then sold into slavery?
He loses out on his homeland and goes to the strange land of Egypt that he had never lived in. All of these things that God had given Joseph, the brothers robbed from him. When we hate someone, hopefully, it's never that serious.
I better not hear any of you guys selling anyone into slavery, by the way. Don't do that.
Whether someone else's life, as in this chapter, someone else's dignity, their possessions, their friendships, hatred is a destructive version of the emotion of anger that seeks to strip the object of your hatred of all that is good in their life.
However, God is the one who causes the blessings of every single person on planet Earth, and so you cannot take what is good in someone's life without robbing them of what God Himself gave them. Thirdly today, hatred always invites more sin.
I'm sure if you had asked the brothers after that initial sheep report meeting with their dad, hey, should you murder Joseph? I'm certain that none of the brothers at that point said, yes, we literally want to kill this boy.
But as time went on, and there became more and more grievances with Joseph, they ended up at a spot that I don't think they ever anticipated that they would end up in.
I've heard the old preachers say something along the lines of, sin will always take you further than you wanted to go. It will cost you more than you want to pay, and it will keep you longer than you wanted to stay. Hatred is never a stand-alone sin.
Hatred will lead to bitterness, to gossip, to distrust, to slander, and even as far as to stealing, adultery, or murder.
If you think that's overstating it, Christ in the Sermon on the Mount tells us the exact same thing, where he says, when we hate someone in our heart, we are guilty of murder in the eyes of God.
Your inner feelings toward another person or another group of people are actually something that you are responsible for in the eyes of Almighty God. Now, all of us can recognize, man, we fall short in that. We have hated.
There has been that person, that man, in grade school. They were always teasing me. They put gum in my hair.
They shut me in a locker. They gave me a swirly. And we could say, man, I hate that person.
Maybe as we get into adulthood, it might be, man, that person always gets the upper hand. They get the promotion before me. They are the one that everyone always loves that person, and they don't know what that person really is like.
It might be a family member that has wronged you, maybe even in some profound ways. But as we look at this story, what God wants us to realize is that hatred will never lead us into the place in our life where God wants us to be.
Instead, may we look at Jesus, the one who, though he was rejected by his own country, his own people, he was abandoned and betrayed and denied by his disciples, that the government of his time unjustly tortured and killed him.
Yet his response was, love others, as I have loved you.
And the only way that we can, my friends, is that we would repent of our sin, believe in Jesus Christ alone as our Savior, and as God's Holy Spirit, in that moment of repentance and belief, as the Holy Spirit of God moves into your life and mine, we
can have a supernatural ability to forgive and to love that does not come from human push through. We need not just a human ability to forgive, because people will do things that humanly we could never forgive.
We need the Holy Spirit of God to give us the same heart of forgiveness that Jesus exercised even on the cross.
36:50
Love Transforms
So what we see lastly today is that love is God's plan. Love is what you can experience every day in your walk with God. God loved the world so much that he gave us his son.
We love him because he first loved us, and we love each other because he loves us, and he is our model for love.
If you have never asked Jesus to be your Savior and your Lord, the one who calls the shots in your life, the one who can make you able to love those that humanly you could never love, then my friend, turn in faith to Jesus today.
If you ask him to come into your life, save you, to give you that new heart, to give you the Holy Spirit, he can make that happen. Do you know that God loves you? And do you know where you can find his love for you expressed each and every day?
Secondly, love allows us to hear where God wants to improve us.
When we love people from a place of security in God's love, that I don't have to have Laura or Mike or John or Jen, I don't have to have them love me because I'm perfectly loved by Jesus, but I'm happy when I have the love of others.
It means that I can hear rebuke, I can hear correction, because I'm not reliant on them for my identity.
When we love people from that place of security, we're willing to hear from them, and we have moments and habits of sin that they caringly point out to us.
Can I ask you, when was the last time that you asked a pastor, your spouse or a godly friend, where you could improve in your life? My friend, none of us are perfect.
All of us have areas where we need work in, but how in the world can we improve if we are not asking where that improvement needs to be? Love conforms us to what Jesus is like in his character and actions.
Unlike hatred that turns us into the worst version of ourselves, love will make us look more and more like Jesus each and every day of our life. Love will turn you into the best version of you, because it will make you look like the Son of God.
And how you think about others in your words, in your actions, you will love and care for others in a way that mirrors the Savior. Love invites others into the life of God's love through his people.
Instead of hatred, always trying to find more people that will hate that person or that group with you, love says, I want you to experience my love and the love of God, and I want you to experience the love of others around us.
In its best form, this is what we do as the local church, that we are personally loved by God, and because we've been loved by God, we love the people that are around us, and then we invite others that would also come so that they too can experience
the love of God. And whether that's a family member, whether it's a neighbor, a co-worker, a friend, we should all be looking for, God, I am being loved by you. Who can I extend your love out to that you have given me?
Can I ask you, who in your life inspires you to think, talk, and act kinder towards others? And can you be that person in someone else's life? Love gives others God's kindness and his blessings.
You see, love is far more than just an emotion. Love is actions and words that make other people feel valued, seen, appreciated, and worthy of our time and efforts. And everything that we have comes from God anyway.
It doesn't ultimately belong to us. So we ought to choose to give to others what God has blessed us with. For you, what's maybe one way that you can show someone else God's love, even tomorrow?
And I love as well that God's love always invites more love from us and from others. The people in your life that you love most, it's likely because you've invested the most love in them.
The relationships you nurture are the ones that grow and are often the ones that most reciprocate love back to you. So who can you invest love into even this week?
Today, we've seen kind of the bad end of this, that there is a hatred for others that matters, and it spills out, it destroys and damages you, it damages others, it spills out, it ends up in more and more evil and sin taking place.
But a love like the love of Jesus, it can transform your life, and it can transform the lives of everyone else around you. This week, you get to choose love or hatred.
Will I choose to love others even when it's difficult, or will I choose hatred because it's easy, because I want to do it, because it makes me feel good?
And today, if even as I've mentioned about Jesus and his forgiveness, if you say, I've never experienced that for myself, I feel like maybe God hates me right now, I want you to know that God loved you so much that he has made the plan of salvation
free and open to all who would call on him. There is no one that will ever call on the Lord who will not be saved. So I want to ask you today, do you know Christ as your Savior? If you don't, then take care of that today.
We're going to stand in just a moment, sing and pray together. I'll be at the back of the sanctuary, and a couple of the elders will be up here right at the front.
After we have our time of invitation, we're actually going to have a very short time of prayer for someone right now in our church that is in need, and so praying over them as well.
But however the Lord's spoken to you today, I encourage you to respond in faith and obedience to him.
