The Power of Agape Love, Pt. 1 (07/30/2023)

Park Meadows Church

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Thank you, sir. Thank you, guys.

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Sorry, Matt wasn't able to be here today. I think you guys practiced and everything, and then he came down with something yesterday.

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So anyway, thank you for filling in. Ron, how's everybody today?

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Excellent. We have lots of folks here that have been missing a while. Glad to have you back.

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Glad you're able to recuperate, and the Lord's answered lots of prayers. So good to see all of you today.

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You can be turning to Ephesians chapter 5, and we're continuing on with our study on marriage.

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And a little bit of child rearing thrown in there, but mostly about marriage. And let's see, we kind of started out on Father's Day talking about the dads, right?

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And now we're moving more into some general things that really help in the home with the marriage.

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And I think it'll make a big difference. There's a lot of great practical stuff in the passages we're about to take a look at today.

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So I hope it'll be a real blessing to each family in the room and each potential future family as well.

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Let's pray together. Lord, we ask you to bless your word. We know you will. May your

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Holy Spirit be our teacher. May he call to mind the scriptures and thoughts that we get from you as we need them.

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And may you build strong marriages in this local church and across our country to try to help heal our nation.

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We ask it in Jesus' name. Amen. All right. In Ephesians chapter 5, verse 30,

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I'm going to review this little passage and use this to talk a little bit about the key thing in the marriage, which is the idea of love.

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For we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother and shall be joined unto his wife and the two shall be one flesh.

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This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church. Nevertheless, let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself and the wife see that she reverence her husband.

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Children, obey your parents and the Lord for this is right. And it's interesting that this passage begins talking about our relationship with Jesus and it ends talking about the fact that the marriage is a picture of our relationship with Jesus.

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And then in the middle, it gives some information about the marriage, two key things. And then what

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I want to focus on today is, in particular, so love your wife. And I want to talk about love.

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So I want you to turn to 1 Peter 1 and verse 22, if you would.

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We always need to remember in our marriages that we are presenting to the world a type or a picture of Jesus Christ and the church, his relationship to the church.

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So that when we have a marriage that is going well, it is giving a good picture of Jesus Christ and the church in that relationship.

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And when we have a marriage that's going poorly, we're showing the world a bad picture of the relationship between Jesus Christ and the church.

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And a third thing I would say about that is there is no way to picture a relationship of Jesus Christ being the groom and the church being the bride.

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If you have two men in a marriage or two women in a marriage, and that's why we don't call it a marriage because by God's definition, it's not one.

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And this world has gone crazy just in my lifetime. And we may have had that when

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I was growing up, but it was in the closet and now it's out and it shouldn't be.

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And nations that support it like ours is doing now so vigorously have all been destroyed.

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So we need to really pray for a change in the government of our nation.

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And thank goodness we have a Christian man as governor of Texas and a strong man.

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And I like him better than DeSantis because DeSantis wants power,

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I think. It just oozes out of him. And Abbott just sits there quietly, acts like a regular guy and runs the state.

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That is what George Bush Jr. did. You never heard any, he was never in the news when he was governor of Texas, never in the news.

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He just ran the state, ran it really well. And it turned out to be a good president. I think Abbott could be that someday.

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I don't know if he even wants to be. That's what I like about him. You don't even know if he cares about it, right? So God's blessed us.

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So that'll be the last rabbit trail for today. Maybe. So follow along with me in 1

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Peter 1, verse 22. Seeing you have purified your souls and obeying the truth through the spirit unto unfeigned love.

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Mark that little word love. See that you love one another with a pure heart fervently.

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Now mark that word love because in Greek they are two different words. All right, so it's interesting.

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The first word for love is phileo which means friendship love.

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You like the person. You enjoy being with the person because you like them, you're friends and so forth.

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The second one, see that you love one another with a pure heart fervently is agape. And we all know what that is in our little church here.

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It's God -like love. And I would say I wrote that that way many years ago and I used to call it

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God -like love. It's kind of a habit, but I would like to correct it because I've said it that way for so many years.

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It's really not God -like love. It's really God's love. You know, the concept of in Galatians 2, 20 and many other places where it says we're saved by the faith of Jesus rather than in Jesus.

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It's actually Jesus' faith given to us as a gift. Now, once we have it, we own it and it's our faith too but it's not the same as human belief, is it?

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So when you look at these two words love, it's in a similar fashion. One of the things that God does for us when the

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Holy Spirit calls us and we're regenerated he gives us about 33 different things.

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And one of those things is he gives us God's love. So it's not God -like love, it's God's love.

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That's even stronger, you understand? You understand what I'm saying? Okay, so we have

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God's love. Now, we also have this human love, phileo love, which is friendship love.

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We have the capacity to do that. But as natural human beings, if you were not saved this morning, you would not have the ability to have agape love because that's given to you at salvation.

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So you have to be saved to have that. That's one reason we should teach our children to make sure when you're looking for a marriage partner that it's a person who's born again.

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And secondly, don't date someone that's not a potential marriage partner. So make sure they're born again.

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Don't assume they will be later because that never works out very well because you can't control a sovereign

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God. You don't know if he'll save them or not. You may want them to be saved your whole life. It doesn't mean they'll get saved or be saved,

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I should say, by God. So this agape love is a higher form of love.

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It's God's love in us that can only be in a saved person. So we need to realize that for a marriage to have much chance of lasting in this world, both partners need to be born again people so that they have this agape love in their marriage.

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The thing about agape love that's different is it does not depend upon the object of the love.

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It depends on the lover. And so the object of the love can be mistreating you, can be ill, can be weak, can be strong, can be treating you really well or not so much.

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And the love doesn't change if it's agape love because it comes from the heart of the lover. And it was placed in that heart by God and it's

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God's love. It's unchanging. Nothing changes it. Filial love, on the other hand, is up and down, up and down.

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It's just like human belief is up and down. You see the likeness of the two. You have human belief, it cannot save you.

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You get the gift of Jesus's faith and it saves you. And you have filial love for other people that you like if they're treating you well.

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But when you get born again, you can also have agape love, which is God's love, which doesn't depend on them at all.

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And it's the only thing that can make marriages work in my opinion. You need both, by the way.

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We'll talk about that as we go into talking about marriage. You need the friendship, love needs to be there.

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Very important, very, very important. And as we talk about that, the thing we need to understand about that in a marriage is that that can get stronger and weaker over the days depending on how we treat each other, the filial love.

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So it's important to treat each other really well in a marriage. And the words that we say are never forgotten.

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So we need to be very selective in the words that we say to our spouses in the home and to be very much under control.

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Dave was talking about control some in his Sunday school class today. And so all of that will come later.

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Right now, I want to talk about this second form of love, agape love. Paul talks about it in Romans chapter eight when he talks about that there's nothing that we can do to separate us from the love of God.

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Now, these folks that believe you can lose your salvation never read Romans eight, have they? Or they skimmed it.

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They didn't think about it when they read it or they were just taught false doctrine by their pastor is more likely and their parents and their grandparents.

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And you cannot go by what your parents and grandparents and pastors have taught you. You've got to go by this book right here and you need to lay aside anything they've taught you that doesn't fit the whole of scripture.

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It's just like, that's how you grow up as a Christian. You've got to grow up, be your own person and you got to compare everything everybody says to that book or else you will be led astray in something.

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It might be something little, might be something big but anything that's a non -truth, it's important. So always check everything out with scripture, of course.

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So Paul said in Romans chapter eight, something that totally blows away any preacher that would preach that you could lose your salvation because our salvation is based on God's love which does not depend upon the object of the love which is us.

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So we cannot do anything to make him love us more nor can we do anything to make him love us less.

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We are his children. What we do has nothing to do with his love for us. It could have to do with a whooping we might get, right?

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From Jesus, but not, doesn't change the love at all. And I don't know how people miss that about salvation.

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It's probably through false teachers is how they miss it because if they just read the Bible, they would get this. Because look at it in Romans chapter eight, verse 37, and all these things, we are more than conquerors through and because of it's

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Dea through the channel of him that loved us. So if you look at God's love, that is like a pipeline that just brings success into our lives.

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And I'm talking about conquering. I'm not talking about money here. I'm talking about conquering this wicked world that we're in, conquering all of the temptations to destroy a marriage, the ones that exist out there that could destroy a marriage.

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It will have you conquer over all that because God's love is channeled to you like through a pipeline through the

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Holy Spirit to you and you have it. And so therefore it's there.

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And because of that, we are more than conquerors. Now, how can you be? What is like, I know what it means to conquer, you win.

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Okay, how do you be more than that? How do you do more than win? Well, that's what it says happens.

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You're more than a winner. And that's with regard to marriage along with everything else in your life.

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For I'm persuaded that neither death nor life nor angels. Now you see that little word for, that verse 38 begins with, it relates back to verse 37.

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Okay, so what it's saying is we are gonna be conquerors. That means we're gonna be victorious.

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We're gonna be successful. We're not losers. We're going to be conquerors. And let's apply this to our marriages, okay?

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We're going to be able to stand up when we get to the older part. Sean and I were talking on the way to church today about like really we're in the very latter part of our lifetime.

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We don't think that way because we're baby boomers and baby boomers are always 18 years old on the inside.

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But we're toward the end of our lifetime. And if you're a young person in here, what you wanna be is when you get to that point, you wanna still be with that person that God made you be in love with.

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50 years later, you wanna still be with them. That is conquering. That's more than a conqueror really.

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In this world, what are the odds of it? What are the stats on that? Way less than 50 % chance of that happening.

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And so this is a promise from God that you will conquer in that arena if both of you walk with the

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Lord and have his love in your heart, which you do have that if you're saved. So if you're both saved and you walk with the Lord, here is a wonderful promise that you'll be more than a conqueror through him that love us, not through ourselves.

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I mean, we do need to work on ourselves, don't we? We need to be more like Christ every day and we need to watch what we say to each other and how we act and we can't just say stuff.

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We also have to do stuff and show love and all that. You can't just say, well, I love you, honey. Well, honey needs to have seen that already.

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And if she is not seeing that, you can say it all day long. It's totally meaningless. Women pick up on that really quick.

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A man say, oh, well, I love you, and then he slaps you around or something. I mean, it happens all around us.

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Just crazy things in these homes all around us. We're sort of protected by the word of God and by our little church and our wonderful families.

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That's great, we should be. But all around us is all hell breaking loose in these homes, inside the homes.

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I wouldn't wanna be a policeman today, would you? Domestic problems is probably the most dangerous thing they face.

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They go in there and those people are already out just like Dave was talking about this too. They've lost it emotionally and they're screaming at each other.

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Maybe he have weapons already and here comes the policeman right in the middle of it. Wow, so more than conquerors is what we want.

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Now the word for tells us why this happens. Why can we be more than conquerors?

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How does it happen? Because I'm persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other thing in creation is what that Greek word means.

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Not just a creature, any other created thing shall ever be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus, our

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Lord. So can you name something God left out? Not one thing he left out of that list.

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So there's nothing that can separate us from the love of God. Now I want you to think about that a little bit here a little differently maybe than you have before.

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Because what it says is none of those things which list everything in the universe, none of those things are able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus, our

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Lord. So when we have Jesus living in our hearts through the Holy Spirit, because we've been born again, nothing in the universe can separate us from the love of God.

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Now, when you first read that, you think it means, well, God loves me. And it does mean that.

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And that nothing can separate me from the fact that God loves me. Nothing I can do, nothing that the world can do, nothing that any created thing can do could ever separate me from God loving me.

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But that's not what the scripture literally says there. If you look at it carefully, what does it say?

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It says specifically it cannot separate you from the love of God. That love of God is in you.

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And it will always be in you now that you're born again. And nothing can take it out of you. It's the love of God that's in you that you can't be separated from, specifically in this verse.

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That is pretty powerful for a marriage if you think about it. The context that this verse back up in 1

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Peter 1, where it talks about unfeigned love, this agape love, it's not faked, it's real agape love, real love from God.

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The context of that verse about loving one another fervently resides, the context that that resides in makes it clear that this kind of love is impossible for the vast majority of human beings in the world today because they don't know the

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Lord Jesus. So this is impossible for the vast majority of human beings on the planet today.

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Natural man knows nothing of this kind of love, but its source is made clear in the very next verse.

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So back up to 1 Peter 1, we read a pretty little passage from verse 22 about this unfeigned love.

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Look what the very next verse says. Verse 22 says, so love one another fervently and the very next verse, verse 23 says, look, being born again.

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You can't have this without that. Being born again, not of corruptible seed.

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In other words, you got life from your mom and dad physically, right? There was a seed planted and you came from that and you got life from your physical life from your mom and dad, but you didn't get this love right here that we're talking about from then.

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You can't get it physically. You can get the ability to love things and not love them, to hate things, love things, phileo.

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You can like things or not like them that you get physically from your parents, but you don't get agape love from them.

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You get that from being born a second time, the second birth, being born again.

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Being born again, not of corruptible seed, not from your parents, but of incorruptible by the word of God, which liveth and abideth forever.

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There are two things, the way that seed is planted in you and that new man or woman is born is two things.

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It's the word of God and the spirit of God. And it takes both for that to happen. And it happens.

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And it comes from the spirit of God working through the gospel, the word of God and bringing new life into you.

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And at the very moment, the Holy Spirit regenerate you and gives you that life. While we were yet in our sins, as he quickened us, he brought us from dead to life.

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At that very moment, he gave you 33 things, at least in one of them is God's love. He gave you this kind of love and put it in you and nothing can separate it from you.

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Nothing can take it out of you. No, nothing. You can think of the worst thing that could happen to you.

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It will not remove that love from you. So this spiritual birth, which can only come from the incorruptible

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Holy Spirit as he lights upon you and quickens your spirit, we call this the effectual calling.

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You don't hear it preached about in very many churches today. Probably a few Bible churches still preach about it, but not too many

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Baptist churches talk about it anymore. And it's sad. They don't talk about the calling. They think you save yourself by praying a little prayer formula.

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The Bible says you can't save yourself. That God has to call you and until he does, you won't be saved.

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You won't even look for it. It's interesting. I was listening to Dave's, I wish I brought my phone up here so I could read it to you.

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I left it back there, but I sent, I think I sent it to you, Ben. Why don't you read your text?

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You got your phone handy? Read the text I sent you while Dave was teaching. Came out of your passage.

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Listen to this. The modern gospel doesn't work.

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The modern God, that verse, that's what I hadn't seen in a long time relating it to some of these others.

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Like there's none that seeketh God, not one in Romans. That one is very powerful.

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It says nobody is seeking God. And it says they cannot, they cannot know him.

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They don't want to know him. They're not trying to know him. So how does the modern gospel work?

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If you, what you tell people is here, just pray this prayer, just ask Jesus in your heart, and you'll be saved. Give your life to him.

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Do all these things that the Bible says nothing about. It doesn't say anywhere you give your life to Jesus to get saved.

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That'd be something you did. It doesn't say that saves you. It doesn't say except Jesus anywhere to be saved.

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Not one place in the whole Bible does it say that. But how many times do we hear it growing up and from preachers and everything?

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What it says is while we were yet in our sins has he quickened us. That's called regeneration.

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It's something he did. You didn't have a thing to do with it. Just like you didn't have anything to do with your physical birth. Jesus said, it's the same.

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It works the same way. But people hate this doctrine because they're totally out of control. But I'll tell you this.

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Oh, would you read that one more time for me? Sorry. I meant to bring it up here.

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The whole verse? Yeah. Stop right there.

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Okay. God is not in his thoughts. Do you see that? Do you guys remember

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Otis teaching that if you've ever learned one thing from the Bible, you're saved? Didn't that strike you as a little bit?

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Not so sure about that one. It did me. I bet it did Dave Huber there, senior. Because you like to examine things.

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I mean, that one really makes you think. And I still think about it. I still think about, okay, is that totally true?

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Or is it a trick question? What's Otis doing there? But it comes from the concept in that verse right there that thoughts of God are not even in their mind.

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So what I like to tell people, and this is something I had to learn as a preacher as I got more and more into understanding how salvation really worked.

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I mean, I was beyond 50 years old before this started happening. I've been preaching since I was 24, basically, in teaching.

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And I was 50 when I saw this. And I had to re -examine how I talk about this in front of people.

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How do you have an invitation? What am

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I going to tell them? Jesus died for you? I don't know if he died for them or not. He didn't die for everybody.

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I used to think he did. It made it easy to give an invitation, right? I don't know that fact. God knows,

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I don't know. So how do you word it? What if you are preaching like I am right now and you have visitors in the room and you're afraid that they're going to think, well, if that's true,

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I'm not even going to try. I'm just going to forget about the whole thing. I'll just sit around and wait for God to call me. Has that ever crossed your mind that that's a problem?

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Well, it's not really a problem because God really does do it that way, but we feel like it's a problem.

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And I don't like to leave that possibility in the minds of any visitors. We don't have any here this morning, so I can talk like this, but we might have a few out there.

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I don't know. If you're visiting, just keep listening, okay? But here's the thing.

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If you have thoughts of God in your mind, pretend we've got 20 visitors today, okay?

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I would be saying this. Even if we had one right now, I'd be saying this. I'd say, look, if you've had any thoughts of God in your mind where it concerns you where you're going to go when you die and you're concerned about your soul and you think about God from time to time, that is a good sign because goats don't do that.

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You've heard me say it before, right? Well, you gave me the verse to prove it this morning in Sunday school. I mean,

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I've seen other verses, but I mean, that might be the best one I've ever seen. Right there. Right in the middle of your Sunday school.

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I don't even know if you got to it yet, but I did. So, wow.

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So this is being born again. And if you want to look at the number one thing to make a marriage strong and where it conquers all things in this life, no matter what trouble and death and everything else you go through, it is being born again.

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Both parties in the marriage being born again. And so this gift, this spiritual birth, which can only come from the incorruptible

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Holy Spirit and the incorruptible Word of God, it opens your eyes and your ears and your heart and your mind to the

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Word of God. It is a gift of the Holy Spirit which He brings to you from the

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Father Himself. And it is God's love. It's just one of the many things

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He brings to us at that moment. At this very moment of spiritual awakening, life and sonship and connection to the

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Father, His Son and every other born again person throughout the universe for all ages of time comes to the believer at the moment he is born again.

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And God brings with this birth agape love. Agape love which only

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God can provide because He is love. So it's God in you.

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You can call it love or you can call it God in you. It's the same thing. Verse 24 says, for all flesh is grass.

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And if you're wondering where I am, I'm still in 1 Peter 1. All flesh is grass and all the glory of man as the flower of grass.

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The grass withereth and the flower thereof falleth away, but the word of the Lord endures forever.

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And this is the word which by the gospel is preached to you. So you take this phileo love that natural men and women can have, but they don't have

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God in their life. They don't have love in their life, not God's love. Then that love and that marriage can be just like grass that just burns away and then all of a sudden it's gone.

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Because a person who's not born again will never have this in his life. He won't have the word because he hates it.

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It's boring. I know because I was there before I was 24 years old. And one day,

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God changed my mind about this book. And one day, driving my car to work, I got saved. I went home and started getting an interest in this book immediately and church and I hated both.

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Honestly, my mother tried to get me to go. Not much because she didn't go at that time until later in her life.

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My grandma always went, had the biggest Sunday school class in Mahea, about 80 or 90 people in there.

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All the older ladies were her class. They came because they knew they were close to meeting the

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Lord. So they did not skip church. So she had a huge class and she always tried to get me to go to church and I hated it.

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And I would go for her once or twice a year and that was about it. And when I got saved, the first thing I want to do is start going to church again.

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Now explain that. How in one second did David Mitchell change? Did I change or did God do something?

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Did I just change my mind that day? Was I driving down in the car thinking, I think I'll just change my life for the better.

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I wasn't even thinking about God or church or anything. I was just driving. That's called being called.

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You can be anywhere when it happens. The least likely place you would be is up here at an altar where all the

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Baptists want to get you saved. That's the least likely place. It can happen there though. But most likely it happened out there before you walked up here because at the moment you had a thought in your mind to love the

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Lord and love Jesus, you're already saved. And you came up here and the preacher explained to you how to get saved so he could get your tithe money.

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But not everybody does it for that reason. I shouldn't be so cocky about that. But you know what I'm saying.

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It's more about religion than it is real salvation. Maybe they don't know it. I know as a young preacher,

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I would tell people that I wasn't doing it to get their money. So I should take that back. It's not always that.

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But I mean, it is ignorance at least, right? It's not knowing how God works. But at least you know how many times as an ignorant young pastor, now

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I'm an ignorant old pastor. But when I was an ignorant young pastor, I gave the gospel out quite well in a lot of places and God used it.

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Isn't that great to know? We cannot mess up his plan. But we certainly can teach people things that aren't true.

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And that's unfortunate. But this agape love comes with the moment that we are regenerated.

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And if we don't have it, our marriage and that kind of love that we can have is like the grass.

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And it can be a beautiful flower for a short time. And when the sun comes out, which represents the trouble in the world, it can just wither away and die.

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And that's how so many marriages do. But the word of the

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Lord endures forever. And the word of the Lord is full of God's love and full of the attributes that we need to have and exhibit and be and do in our marriages.

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The Bible is where so much of it comes from. This kind of love that natural man has is like grass.

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It withers and dies and falls away. However, notice the eternal nature of this faith and this love that the born again person has.

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It comes from God and it comes by his eternal word. This is why this love is the only thing that will last forever.

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All of the physical things that can bring a man and a woman together wither and fade away.

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But this love never does. We change as we get older, don't we? But that love does not change.

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It is not based on the mirror. It's based on what's in the heart.

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The Lord not only exhorts us to exhibit and direct this love toward one another, but he defines this great love.

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When we comprehend the breadth and width and height of it, we see why a marriage based upon this godly type of love lasts forever.

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So Paul provides the definition for this kind of love and Peter defines the dimension of it.

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So maybe we have time for one of those, but not both. But Paul defines the definition or gives us the definition for agape love.

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Peter gives us the dimension of it and I want us to talk about both. We'll see how much time we have.

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So turn with me to 1 Corinthians 13, verse 4 and we'll first look at the definition of this kind of love.

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And we learn so much when we look at the words, when you do word studies. And we'll see a little bit of that in this.

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All right, 1 Corinthians 13, 4 through 8.

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And I'm not just going to read through the scripture, I'm just going to sort of break it down and we'll just break it down as we go, okay?

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In 1 Corinthians 13, 4 through 8, Paul defines agape love and teaches that the person who has this love has attributes and characteristics which are demonstrated in the following ways.

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So Dave talks a lot about be and do and have from the Bible.

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Be something on the inside that causes you to act a certain way. And this is going to show you the actions that come forth from a heart that has agape love inside of it.

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Are you with me? Now, so, you know how the great

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Spurgeon talked about that effects can never be the cause of the cause. But I would add this, a cause, if it's real, always has effects.

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So if the effects are not there, the cause isn't there. So you don't talk about people who are born again, look at the effects in their life.

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If you don't see it, it's just words. I mean, you don't know if it's a brother or a tear. They can be sitting there in church as wise and they know all this scripture and that scripture and they can certainly be a tear.

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And the only way you know is if you see the effects that come from that agape love that's on the inside. Well, let's look at that.

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Let's see what that is. Same with your spouse, same with someone in church or a pastor, anybody that says they love you, look at the effects that will be there if it's real.

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Okay, first thing it says love is patient. Now this personifies love as we read through here, but what it's really talking about is saying that the person who has been born again and received

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Jesus' faith and received God's love and has that within their heart does this.

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This is how they do, this is how they act and it comes forth from that love. It's not that they're even trying to do it necessarily, but it just comes forth because it's who they are.

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They are a born again person. And the first one is patient. Now, do you think patience would help in a marriage?

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Ask my wife about that. I think all of my kids and grandkids and close friends who've been around my family very much would know that it doesn't require any patience on my part to live with Charlotte, seriously.

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I mean, like she's the easiest person to live with. Of course, she's the only one I've ever lived with.

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But I did have five kids. None of them were that easy, not one.

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So like she is very easy to live with. I don't have to be patient with her.

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Maybe that's why I'm not patient. God's working on me on that area. Blame that on Charlotte, that's a good one.

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I turned that around, kind of a backhanded compliment there. But she has to be patient because I have some interesting idiosyncrasies.

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And, or you could just take the first half of the word, I'm an idiot, right? But I am a man, right ladies?

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There you go. You all live with one. So you have to be patient. It's interesting that the

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King James word is long suffering. And I think it's a wonderful translation for this Greek word.

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You put up with things for long periods of time. If you have patience. Things that aren't perfect, things that aren't going particularly well, whatever.

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So that's the first thing listed. And the second thing is, you will be kind. If you have agape love in your heart, you'll be kind to other people.

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Wow. And I want you to think about that in church relations. How many times have you had church people that just dress up nice, they look great.

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They carry in the bigger Bible than you got and they do not treat you with kindness. And you just say, oh, that's their personality.

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That's not what this says. This says there's something they don't have yet. They don't have agape.

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Well, why don't they? Because they ain't born again yet. You have got to be born again from above and it's not something you can do.

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It's something God has to do to you for you to have this kind of love where kindness comes forth from you more than transparency.

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I hate that term nowadays. Churches are teaching it. They teach their young couples to be totally transparent with each other.

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Tell each other everything you ever think or do. That will ruin your marriage within a year. You don't tell each other everything you think.

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That would be the worst. Especially if you're a guy, you don't tell your wife everything you think. Was that Dave or Ron that said that?

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That was Ron. He said, that's Dave. That's hilarious. That is good.

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But you know who you tell that to? Jesus. We're not Catholics, right? I mean, we don't need a priest, a human to talk to.

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Yeah, we just tell those things to Jesus. And we walk with the

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Lord, right? Our walk needs to be predominantly with the Lord because our flesh is bad, men and women.

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I'd hate to even know what women think and do. I do not know, don't want to know. But I bet you it's equally bad as men.

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It's just different. It's just different. But, you know, kindness is something that's really hard to fake.

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Have you ever thought about that? You can fake it for a while, but it will come out.

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It will come out. And what you will exhibit to people if you don't have this agape love is you will exhibit what they would like to call transparency, which means you're going to make sure they know everything they're doing wrong because you're going to tell them.

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You're going to point it out to them. Would you say that's kind? I mean,

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I know there's times we're supposed to rebuke and reprove, but if that's your predominant direction towards people, they're not going to perceive you as kind at all.

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They're not going to even want to hang out with you. Bible itself says, if you want to have friends, show yourself friendly.

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So the predominant characteristic that you need to have as a Christian is not judgment. It's not being judgmental towards people.

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It's not even listed here. When it talks about love, it doesn't list judgment here.

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It lists kindness. I can't overstate the importance of it.

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In your marriage, kindness will show itself lacking in every little detail of every day if you're not careful.

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You get short with your spouse just because they're your spouse and you can get away with it.

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Whereas one of us here at church, you would never do that. Somebody up here spills a cup of tea or something.

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Oh, let me help you with that. Brother, sister, and some child in your home or your wife, or you do it.

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My soul, what'd you do? What happened? You're short with them. I know this by reading books about all your marriages.

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That's how I know this. So kindness is something we have to work on all the time.

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I hate it when there's kids in here that I raise that have seen this in action in our home. Kindness comes from a very long

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Greek word. Maybe that means it's a really important word, right? Let me see if I can say it.

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Christiou omahi. Christiou omahi. Or it's not

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Christi, it's Chrosti. Christiou omahi. To show oneself useful by acting benevolently.

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Barely can say the English. So to furnish that which is needed is another

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Greek meaning for that word. To furnish that which is needed. To show kindness and benevolence.

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If you remember last Sunday, we talked about an interesting verse in English where it says that your duty is the highest.

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Is to show your wife due benevolence. Remember what that meant? You know what that's talking about. And the other way around for the wife and the husband.

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This word kindness carries that connotation too. But it's all embracing in the marriage of kindness as opposed to the opposite of that which is always rebuking, always correcting, always short with the other person.

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And then it says that love envies not. So if you have agape love towards another person you don't envy them.

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You want good things to happen to them. You want them to rise up and be great for God.

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And a spouse who's worried because maybe the other spouse rises up and in the world's view they're very successful and they're envious of that would be really, really bad.

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Really harmful for a wedding, for a marriage. So envy not, this

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Greek word, selo means feeling against someone, having feelings against someone.

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At least it connotes that. To be moved with envy, to be jealous, to have, it comes from the word heat.

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It's like hot feelings of just, you're emotionally against what's happening right now.

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You're just letting it show. And that's the opposite of what love does. Love does not let bitterness stay in that heart.

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Bitterness by definition to me is envy that's lasted over a period of days. And it turns into bitterness.

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There's no place for this in a marriage. And one of the greatest verses we'll get to in the study, it'll be the first one maybe next

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Sunday, is don't let the sun go down on your anger. So if you have bitterness or anger towards your spouse you kiss and make up before you go to bed that night.

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It's just a rule. Because if you let that last a day or two, it turns to bitterness and that's hard to cure.

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You bring a pastor in for counseling and it's still hard to cure. Sometimes it cannot be cured if it goes long enough.

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All right, and then, so it says envy not. Then it says, does not seek the well -being of self first.

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I'm kind of giving you the English definitions of these Greek words. It does not seek the well -being of self first, but of the other, okay?

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So agape love will look more towards the partner first more than yourself.

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And that does not happen naturally for humans. I guess you know that, right? It's not natural for humans to be that way.

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That is God. That's how God is. He gave his own son for us, did he not? All right, so the next thing is, it is not easily provoked to anger.

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Not easily provoked to anger. So that kind of comes along with patience, doesn't it?

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And kindness. And then the next thing is it thinketh no evil. Now this is very interesting

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Greek combinations of smaller words. And literally what it means, it is base meaning is it does not take inventory of evil things like an accountant.

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Agape love, if you love another person, you will not sit there and pick at every little thing they do wrong or every little thing in their character that you don't like and make a list of it in your mind.

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You won't do it. And that's exactly what the Greek means here when it says thinketh no evil.

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It means literally you're not making an inventory of the negative little nitpicky things because if you want to start that, let me start on you, right?

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Isn't that the most ridiculous thing a human could do towards another human? Is well, you always do that wrong or you always do this or you always do that.

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You should do it this other way. Okay, well, let me start on you then if you want to do that, which is nonsense.

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And agape love does not do this. It doesn't even make a list. And if you have things on a list toward your spouse, you need to go home and get an eraser out and erase them.

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And we need to work at this. We don't make evil inventories of the evil and weaknesses of our spouse, the things they do that aren't right, the things that you wish they didn't do.

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Don't make a list of it. How about just pray for them and say, you could take that out of their life.

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I'm gonna trust you to do it. Why wouldn't that be okay? So think if no evil carries a lot in it when you look at the

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Greek, it does not take inventory of injurious evil things. Once you kiss and make up, you need to forget it and never bring it up again.

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Now that was a rule Dr. Freeman and Pat Freeman told me in Charlotte when we were just married, very young, about,

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I don't know, three years after we were married is when I got saved and I met

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Dr. Freeman three months later. And so we were a very young married couple and they had the largest counseling service in Fort Worth for over 25 years.

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So they were counselors and spoke with many, many people about marriage counseling, but they would tell us things to help our marriage from time to time, even when we didn't ask.

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So usually if we asked, but one of the things Rocky told me in Charlotte, we were sitting together and Pat was sitting there and he said, look, here's a rule, make this rule and always keep it your whole life.

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And we did, from that day we did. It's like, if you have a spat, which all couples have that, there's nothing wrong with it, just happens because we're humans, right?

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If you have a spat, work it out, get to the bottom of it and kiss and make up before you go to bed that night.

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And secondly, in a future spat, you're not allowed to bring that spat up again. Whatever that was is gone.

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Cause once you make up, you forgive it and you act like God and you forget it and you're not allowed to bring it up in a future argument.

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Isn't that a good rule for a marriage? It's worked for ours. It's not fair.

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People do it all the time. Well, two years ago, you did this to me. So don't get all over me.

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Well, you shouldn't be allowed to bring that up in this argument. Let's just argue about this, okay?

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Cause we're not who we were two years ago. So it's a great rule. So, all right.

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The next thing is agape love rejoices in truth as opposed to things that aren't true.

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So you enjoy and rejoice in truth together and you focus on truthful things, not on things that are not real or not truthful at all.

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And I think since we're out of time, I'm gonna pick this up where we are and finish this out next time.

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It won't take very long. And we'll finish Paul's definition of love. And then I want, what I'm really excited about is getting into Peter's talk about the dimension of love.

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It's very fascinating. So stand with me and we'll be dismissed for now.

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And contemplate these few points we made today. Work on them in your marriage.

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And you say, well, if I've got agape, why do I need to work on it? Because what you need to work on and what I need to work on is being spirit -filled so that those attributes can come out and the opposites of them don't come out.

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Let's pray. Lord, thank you so much for your word. We ask you to bless it in our hearts, bring it to our remembrance and our marriages as we need these truths and go with us into our time of fellowship.