Showing His Love To Others
Main Idea: The love of Christ compels us to love others in tangible ways that mirror Him.
WE LOVE OTHERS THROUGH EVANGELISM (2 Cor. 5)
It is loving to call others from death to life. (Vs. 14-15)
It is loving to call others to new purpose and relationship with God. (Vs. 16-19)
It is loving to call others from sin to righteousness. (Vs. 20-21)
WE LOVE OTHERS THROUGH PATIENCE & KINDNESS (Col. 3)
Relational difficulties are to prompt love, not to prompt leaving. (Vs. 12-13)
Relational difficulties help you shine out Jesus, not shirk from Jesus’ family. (Vs. 14-17)
WE LOVE OTHERS THROUGH SACRIFICIAL GIVING (Matt. 25)
When we give to others, we give to Jesus. (Vs. 31-40)
When we neglect others, we neglect Jesus. (Vs. 41-46)
Sermon Transcript (Auto-Transcribed by YouTube)
We have been in our study Tabernacle DNA for the past few weeks. And today, we are continuing in that. As we've gone through the series, first, we looked at the book of 3 John, looking at what is the DNA?
What are the building blocks? What are the essentials for a local church, for a healthy church? Then we looked at knowing Christ and the importance that Jesus plays in the life of a church.
If there is no Jesus, if there is not a following of Him, a knowledge of Him as our Savior and as our Lord, there's no reason for our church to exist. But with the message of Jesus, armed with the gospel, we have ultimate purpose in our mission.
And then we looked at growing in God's Word and how we have to go back to the Bible for every practice, for every belief, for everything that we do.
If we say that we know Christ, but that knowledge is bereft of what God says in His Word about Christ, then it's pointless. To know Christ is to know Him as He is expressed in His Word.
Then today, we're going to be looking at this next step in Tabernacle DNA, which is showing God's love to others. Love is one of the most versatile words in our culture. I can love the ravens.
I can love some Pizza John's pizza. I can love the season. I currently don't with the rain, but that's just because I grew up in the desert.
It doesn't count. Or I can love Samantha or my daughter and my son. You can see signs all around our neighborhoods and businesses that emphatically state love is love.
And you can listen to songs from the past hundred years that declare what the world needs now is love, sweet love, or that people all over the world need to join hands and start a love train, or that love is all you need. All you need is love.
But what is love? And from a Christian worldview, what does love entail? Is it simply a warm, fuzzy feeling that I get when I see someone that makes me happy?
Is it the amount of hours that I spend in community service, or the amount of money that I give to charitable donations? What is love? The Apostle John would answer the question in this way in 1 John 4.
Dear friends, let us love one another, because love is from God, and everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. The one who does not love, does not know God, because God is love. God's love was revealed among us in this way.
God sent his one and only son into the world so that we might live through him. Love consists in this, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.
Dear friends, if God loved us in this way, we also must love one another. As it relates to our Tabernacle DNA, I'd phrase it this way. Love is treating others how God has treated me.
We'll look at three specific passages today that discuss ways in which God has treated us that were specifically called to pass on to others. But I want to underscore the importance of the topic that we're dealing with.
This is not an option for Tabernacle.
An individual or a body of believers that claims to cling tightly to God's word, that claims to know Christ, but fails to show God's love in the ways that we'll talk about today, is pointless and useless, not only in our world's estimation, but also
in God's. We were created to love God and to love others.
And scripture would tell us that a refusal to love others, to treat them how God has treated us, is a warning light, an indication that something is not right in our understanding of how God has treated us and our resultant love for him.
The Apostle Paul would put it this way in 1 Corinthians 13. If I speak human or angelic tongues, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging symbol.
If I have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so that I can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.
And if I give away all my possessions and I give my body in order to boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. I don't want to live my Christian life.
I don't want to lead Tabernacle in such a way that I am nothing and gain nothing in the eyes of God. The only way that our lives possess that meaning and purpose is realizing Christ's love and passing it on.
That's the main thought of today that's written on your handout, that the love of Christ compels us to love others in tangible ways that mirror him. Let's do this together.
Let's pray, and then we'll look at these three ways in which God calls us to love. Dear God, I pray that you would be glorified today. As we look at your word, God, may you convict our hearts.
May you not allow us to excuse away the corners of our affections and our heart that we excuse away a lack of love. But God, as you have so greatly loved us, may we love one another in the same way.
God, please be with all of us as we hear God's word. Be with me as I speak it, that I would only say what you would want me to. We love you, Lord, and we pray all of this in your name.
Amen. I do want to state this on the outset of the message. Everything that I'm going to talk about today is something that Bryon Self needs.
I have only been here, I think, four months ago. That first week of January was my ordination service here at Tabernacle. And so I don't know many of your stories yet in the way that I hope to over the coming months and years.
So if something sticks out to you, I promise, it's not that someone tattled on you and I'm preaching against you. I promise you, this is me preaching to Bryon. The first way in which God calls us to love others is to love others through evangelism.
And we can see this in 2 Corinthians chapter 5. And we can see in verses 14 and 15 in that chapter that it is loving to call others from death to life.
Evangelism, making disciples, calling people to faith in Christ is not the mission of the most spiritual and the most knowledgeable. It is the call to every disciple, to every follower of Christ.
2 Corinthians 5, 14 says this, For the love of Christ compels us, since we have reached this conclusion that one died for all, and therefore all died.
And he died for all, so that those who live should no longer live for themselves, but for the one who died for them and was raised. Evangelism is uniquely unpopular in our world today.
There are statements that it infringes on autonomy, that it's unwanted. If someone wanted to be a Christian, they would ask. But God commands us to go and tell, to preach the gospel, to make disciples, to do what he did for us in bringing us Jesus.
If someone is headed for eternal separation from God, for eternal death, as Scripture says that all of us without Christ are, would it be more loving to leave a person alone in that state or to let them know about what the Bible says about a
forgiving Savior who loves them and wants a relationship with them? It's loving to call others from death to life. It's also loving to call others to new purpose and relationship with God. We can see this in verses 16 through 19.
From now on then, we do not know anyone from a worldly perspective. Even if we have known Christ from a worldly perspective, yet now we no longer know him in this way. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.
The old is passed away, and see the new has come. And everything is from God, who has reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.
That is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and he has committed the message of reconciliation to us.
I mentioned this truth two weeks ago, but God did not commit the declaration of the gospel of inviting others to faith in Jesus. He didn't give it just to Jesus or to the angels or just the apostles or just the pastors.
It is the responsibility of every believer. God has not placed me or Pastor Ron in your family, in your neighborhood, unless you're Owen, or in your job. God's ambassador to those places is you.
I also want to mention that the Christian message isn't primarily, I heard it phrased one time rather humorously in a Southern accent, turn or burn, get right or get left, get sanctified or get chicken fried. That's not the main message of scripture.
Frankly, not a single sermon in the Book of Acts and not a verse in Romans through Jude speaks about hell as a motivation for accepting Christ.
Instead, how the Bible communicates the message is Jesus loves you despite the sin that you have that all humanity has.
He forgave your sin on the cross and calls you to repent and turn from sin and your own way and follow his new way, obeying him and becoming part of his family. The gospel is meant to be good news, not terrible news with one bright spot.
This is what Paul communicates in these verses, a new perspective on life. Given a ministry, a job of reconciliation, you have been commissioned as an ambassador of the heavenly kingdom.
Christ did not come into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him would be saved. It's a message of reconciliation, of inviting to new life and purpose, not a message of condemnation and dread. Is our sin our primary problem?
Absolutely. Is the righteous justice of God on sin something that we should hide from people in our gospel witness? Absolutely not.
But how Scripture phrases our appeal to the lost is not. If you were to die today, are you 100% sure that you would go to heaven?
Scripture phrases it, have you turned from sin and your own way of life to believing in Jesus' payment for your sin and owning him personally as your Lord? Are you loving in the way that you communicate the gospel to others?
Then we can see lastly here in loving through our evangelism that it is loving to call others from sin to righteousness. Verses 20 and 21 say this. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ.
Since God is making his appeal through us, we plead on Christ's behalf, be reconciled to God. He made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
I think you all know this this morning, but sin does not benefit anyone. Lying ruins relationships, jeopardizes trust. It can destroy your credibility and breeds constant fear and distrust of everyone else.
Anger demolishes connection. It instills fear and isolates people.
Sexual sins twist God's good design of faithful, exclusive, committed intimacy within marriage and exchanges it for an anything-goes life that ends up with unwanted pregnancies, diseases, feelings of being used and abused and forgotten and empty.
Nothing about sin ends up bettering anyone's life.
Instead, God is calling us to help reconcile others to Him so that they can have the effects, the fruit of the Spirit, which is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
Every single righteous action, word, and mindset God brings does change people's lives for the better. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. So don't view evangelism.
Don't view sharing about your faith in Jesus as a call to an oppressive, burdensome life. Life with Jesus is supposed to be life as we were meant to live it, in right relationship with God and with people.
Who will you share your faith with this coming week? Who will you invite to join you as you worship the Lord, or attend men's Bible study, or a small group, or come to the community cookout on Saturday at noon? I plugged it, Jim.
Can we truly say that we love others if we don't want them to participate in life with Christ? But not only do we love others through our evangelism, we love others through our patience and kindness. We can see this over in Colossians 3.
I would invite you to turn there during this next portion. There are more people in this world than you. Did you know that?
And there are more people than those that you know don't know Christ. So there's more than just you and the lost. There are also these troublemakers called Christians that God calls your brothers and sisters.
The truth is, though those brothers and sisters are called Christians or little Christ, they often resemble the bickering, feuding, judgmental, temperamental disciples more than they do Jesus. And how do I know this?
Because I'm one of them, and so are you. So how do we treat Christians how God treats them? We get that God gave us the gospel, so we need to love those without Christ by giving them the gospel.
But what about other believers? Especially as we worship together, serve together, learn together, spend time together, there's opportunity after opportunity for them to let us down.
To sit in our row at the church, to forget to invite us to something, to espouse a doctrinal view that we disagree with, to say something rude or insulting to us.
How are we supposed to deal with relational difficulties that come about as a result of being a forgiven sinner in a community of forgiven sinners? Paul tells us in Colossians 3.
He tells us first that relational difficulties are to prompt love, not to prompt leaving.
In verse number 12, he says, Therefore, as God's chosen ones, holy and dearly loved, put on compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another, if anyone has a grievance against another, just
as the Lord has forgiven you, so you are also to forgive. I would love to tell you that Tabernacle Baptist is the perfect place with no one in it that would ever intentionally or unintentionally cause you relational difficulties.
Unfortunately, I cannot guarantee that. Because as I look around the room this morning, and as I looked in the mirror today, I'm noticing a distinct lack of halos around the top of everyone's heads.
So how does Paul describe God's prescribed reaction to the failures and sins of other believers? He phrases it this way, put on compassion. Be concerned about what's going on in the other person's life that prompted their actions or words.
He says, put on kindness. Instead of returning anger for anger or intentional sliding for forgetfulness, intentionally be generous, be helpful, be warmhearted towards those who've done you wrong. Put on humility.
Instead of a prideful insistence on your way, on your position, on your rights, have the mind of Jesus that says, I did not come to be served, but to serve and to give my life as a ransom for many. Put on gentleness.
Instead of coming at others like a sledgehammer with outrage and sharp tones or words or volume, have an approach that mirrors Jesus' that he was gentle and lowly in heart.
And from Isaiah 53, that he wouldn't even break a bruised reed, but that he would gently care for others. Put on patience. One of the Old Testament words for patience that I love is long of nostril is kind of the literal thing.
It's like, it's patience. That it takes a while for a person to get riled up. How easy is it for you to get offended and angry and hurt by others?
Can I remind us that every day, we commit damnable sins before a holy God, and he has never condemned us or snuffed us out. If he's been patient with us, we ought to treat others with that same patience. It says we need to bear with one another.
The word bearing is defined as to regard with tolerance, to endure, to put up with. There will always be people, sometimes in your family, sometimes in your workplace or sometimes in your church, that God says, I endure with them. I put up with them.
I still give them their daily bread. I still give them my Holy Spirit. I still give them my church.
And I'm asking you to do the same. They might have a personality that drives you nuts. They might say things from time to time that are dumb or sliding, but I'm calling you to show my love to that other person.
One of the primary ways in which God has chosen to show his love to the world around us is through his body, through his hands, through his feet, which Paul would say is you all.
God's way to love others is through how you treat them, how you speak to them, what you do for them. Then he ends by saying we need to forgive one another as Christ has forgiven us.
To forgive someone is not to allow them to run roughshod over us, to consistently harm us, or to allow them free reign to do whatever they want.
Forgiveness is the releasing of ill will, of any personal desire that the person would be destroyed or gone from your life.
It's the opposite of what Jesus warns us about in the Sermon on the Mount, that the one that we would say you worthless person to is the one that we murdered in our heart. Forgiveness says you matter to God, so you matter to me.
Judgment belongs to his court and his ruling, and my part is not to wish you ill. It's to cancel the debt that someone owes you for what they've done. It's when you hand over to God your heart desire to personally make someone else pay.
That is a world changing new way to love. The world says love is to bring your significant other their favorite flower or food, or to care for them when they're sick.
God says love is to endure hardships and hurts, and to respond with a Jesus-like, I love you, I forgive you, you don't know what you're doing, but I'm not against you because of your struggles with your sin.
So relational difficulties are to prompt love, not to prompt leaving.
If all we ever had was kind of smooth sailing, and no one was ever able to love us or to forgive us during those hard times, really, we can't show the deepest parts of our God's love without going through those difficulties.
God so loved the world that he gave his only son so that whoever believes in him would not perish, would not die because Christ died, but that they would have eternal life. Jesus came to his own people, and his own people didn't receive him.
Jesus was the one that was put on trial by those that had memorized all the words that Jesus had given thousands of years before to Moses. He was put on trial by them, killed, beaten, mocked, and yet that's how he expressed his love for you.
That God demonstrates, he commends, he adorns his love for you in that while you were still a sinner, and frankly, all of us are in some sense still sinners, Christ died for us.
If his love was shown so clearly through the hurts, through the pain, that it shows us how much he loved us, we are called to pass that on to others. Then relational difficulties help us to shine out Jesus, not shirk from Jesus' family.
We can see this in verses 14 through 17 in Colossians 3. Above all, put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity, and let the peace of Christ, to which you were also called in one body, rule your hearts, and be thankful.
Let the word of Christ dwell richly in you, in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another through Psalms, hymns and spiritual songs, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts.
And whatever you do in word or in deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. Here Paul says to love other believers, to let Jesus' peace, not relational strife, rule in your heart.
He says to be thankful both in general and in the passage specifically for other believers. He also says to let God's word taught and sung, hope you grow with other believers.
And Paul says that everything you do, you need to do in the name with the authority of Jesus. That you should never take an action that you couldn't with 100% pure conscience, stick Jesus' name on it.
For Tabernacle, as we move forward into the future, we will, Lord willing, continue to grow, see more and more people come, and with more and more people, come more and more sinners, just as selfish and unkind and rude as me and you.
When we do encounter relational difficulties, will it prompt us to hold a grudge, to stop serving, to stop attending, or will it prompt us to shine out Jesus actions to those that need not another condemning voice like the world's, but the voice and
actions and arms of a Savior who can heal their brokenness? So we are called to love others through evangelism.
We can do all sorts of good charitable actions and say all sorts of nice things to people, but if we don't extend Jesus to them, then do we truly love them in the way that God has loved us in giving us Jesus?
We are called to love others through patience and kindness, that the relational difficulties that we will encounter as people, fallen sinners interacting with other fallen sinners, how do we react to that?
Well, we are called to react like Jesus reacted to us. And then lastly, we love others through sacrificial giving. We can go over to Matthew 25 verses 31 through 40 for this portion.
This was a passage of scripture that I had known vaguely, but upon further study this week, totally turned my understanding of the passage upside down.
And I love when that gets to happen, that I go, oh, okay, I thought I knew what God was saying before, but now I can see it a little bit more clearly. Grateful for that. Matthew 25 makes it clear that when we give to others, we give to Jesus.
The passage says this, when the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Are you looking forward to that day?
All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate them one from another, just as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on the left.
Then the King will say to those on his right, come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. So there's, if we were to fully expose it, Matthew 25, we'd be here a tremendously long time.
So just on a summary glance, here Jesus is saying, here's one of those telltale markers of who a true believer in Christ is. It shows up all throughout scripture. Paul gives some things in the Book of Galatians.
John gives some things in both 1st and 2nd John. There's some other places that deal with, here's how you know who a Christian is. This is one of those passages.
He says, for I was hungry and you gave me something to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger and you took me in.
I was naked and you clothed me. I was sick and you took care of me. I was in prison and you visited me.
Then the righteous will answer him, Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and take you in or without clothes and clothe you?
When did we see you sick or in prison and visit you? And the king will answer them, truly, I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.
This passage is talking about our care for other believers. It's why Jesus says these brothers and sisters of mine. Earlier in the Book of Matthew, he specifically draws that connection of the one that follows my words.
These are my family members, my brothers and sisters. How you treat Christ's body, how you treat his bride, the church, is indicative of your belief in Christ and his word and what he says about his church.
Can I ask us this morning, do we personally know anyone in this church well enough to know if they're hungry or lacking clothes or in need of something?
And if we happen to know someone in that circumstance, are we helping them or are we at least willing to help them in some way? God intends for his body to care for itself, that if my pinky is hurt, the rest of my body would put a splint on it.
If someone in our church has fallen on hard times or needs a ride or needs someone to walk with them through a situation or heartache that we would care for them, in doing so, it's not wasted time spent on people.
It's spending time on Jesus' family, which serves Jesus himself. Now, the testimony of scripture, as I'll mention in a moment, isn't that all of our kindness, all of our generosity is just strictly to the people in this room.
God has a lot else to say elsewhere about it. But here in this passage, God views how you treat other believers, how you treat Jesus' brothers and sisters as a huge indication of where your heart is with him.
As we can see in this next portion of the passage, verses 41 through 46, that when we neglect others, we neglect Jesus.
He says, then he will also say to those on the left, depart from me, you who are cursed into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink.
I was a stranger and you didn't take me in. I was naked and you didn't clothe me, sick and in prison, and you didn't take care of me.
Then they too will answer, Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or without clothes or sick or in prison and not help you?
Then he will answer them, truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me. And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.
Once again, this is talking about our lack of care for other believers, the brothers and sisters of mine, those least of these.
Indifference to your fellow believers is not a matter of personality alignment or common interests, but obedience to the word of God.
In fact, Jesus here says that it's so important that one of the identifying markers of those who were just playing religion or playing church throughout their lives is that they just didn't care about Christians and specifically Christians in need.
Now, is it also true that we ought to care in general for the poor and needy? Certainly.
God set up in the government of Israel specific laws and regulations to allow for the poor to be able to eat and have their needs met and eventually to regain everything that God had portioned for them.
Proverbs in particular talks much about our heart posture towards those who do not have the same resources that we do.
And one great way over the centuries that Christians have shown people that God loves them is by supplying medicine and food and clothing for caring for the sick.
It's one of the ways in which evangelism was done was through meeting needs of people and proclaiming the gospel to them.
However, Matthew 25 isn't communicating that a lack of donations to the Ronald McDonald House will condemn me to hell, but it is communicating that your heart, your love for Christians, shows your love for Jesus in a much realer way than a list of
religious accomplishments or personal righteousness does. As we look at the building blocks of Tabernacle, the last piece we have to have is a genuine, actionable, forgiving love for each other, born out of a heart that realizes that Jesus loved us,
gave himself for us, and forgave us. And that same love spurs us to love those we interact with and to tell them the gospel. I'd like to do this, I'm going to read 1 Corinthians 13. This is the love that Jesus expressed for us.
It's the kind of love that God wants you to exemplify to others. It starts off with Paul saying this, if I speak human or angelic languages, but do not have love, I'm a noisy gong or a clinging symbol.
If I have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so that I can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.
And if I give away all my possessions, and if I give over my body in order to boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient. Love is kind.
Love does not envy. It is not boastful. It is not arrogant.
It is not rude. It is not self-seeking. It's not irritable.
And it does not keep a record of wrongs. Love finds no joy in unrighteousness, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things.
Believes all things. Hopes all things. Endures all things.
Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end. As for languages, they will cease.
As for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child.
I thought like a child. I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put aside childish things.
For now, we see only a reflection as in a mirror, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully as I am fully known. Now these three remain, faith, hope and love.
But the greatest of these is love. Our world views people, general populace, as loving. And they view the church often with a distrust, with a thought that we are the most unloving.
Part of that goes back to Christians, fallen sinners, that we are often acting like we don't know Jesus. But if we're going to make a difference in our world, we have to love others.
But can I tell you, it can sometimes be a lot easier to do acts of charity, to serve at a soup kitchen, to maybe do outer acts of charity, than it is to do the kind of suffering love in the church that Christ calls us to.
It's why Jesus would tell his disciples, by this, everyone will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another. We are called to love the world around us.
You are not excused to love just the people in this room and to look down your nose at everyone outside. You are called to the same sacrificial, self-giving love that Christ showed you.
But our love for one another is that DNA piece that we cannot miss. If God has so loved us, we ought to love one another.
