The Sum of All Virtues, Pt. 1

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Pastor Ben Mitchell Wednesday Night Bible Study

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All righty, hey everybody, thanks for coming this evening. If you want to turn to Galatians 5. At this point, we are beyond the point of me being able to do much review because we've covered so much ground it would take up all of our time.
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So I'll just say quickly, leading up to this point, we had like four weeks worth of introduction technically to the fruit of the spirit.
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That's what we're studying right now. And one thing that we've talked about that is worth repeating one more time is that we've made a couple of distinctions that are important and it's gonna be especially important this evening.
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And that is number one, there is a difference between the gifts of the Lord, that which the
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Lord grants to individuals based upon his providence, gifts, spiritual gifts.
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It could be spiritual gifts the way that Paul talks about them in first Corinthians or it could be gifts of like administration and leadership and those types of things as well.
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So he gives gifts to men that vary, that are different. He also gives all men personality.
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They're born with personality that is innate, that they deal with for better or worse for their whole lives on this earth.
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Those things are innate in each individual. It's what makes people different. But there's a contrast between those two things and what
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Paul calls fruit. In other words, the gifts are to be distinct from fruit.
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Not all Christians have the same gifts, but all Christians are expected to bear the fruit of the Spirit, which is the main thing we're studying tonight.
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And there's also the distinction between personality and what you might call character. So we've talked about this, character is something you build, personality is something that is innate.
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They work together for sure, but there are differences there. And as Christians, of course, we need to strive toward building better and better characters, becoming more like the
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Lord and all of the other examples that he gave us and people like Paul and other apostles. So I'll leave the review there for this evening.
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And we are now going to segue into the second section of the study, which is talking about the first dimension of the fruit, which of course is love, what
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Jonathan Edwards calls the sum of all virtues. And we're gonna dive into that a little bit more in just a second.
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So as Paul now breaks down the nine specific dimensions of what he calls the fruit of the spirit, this is
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Galatians 5, in verse 22 is kind of the key verse 22 and 23.
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He starts to break them down. He starts with the original context of the whole passage that we're in.
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Now, remember, we started way back in verse 13 and over the past four weeks, we've been setting the context, setting the stage, talking about all of these things.
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And remember, he's giving us these lists. First of vices, these sins, these terrible sins that kind of demonstrate the predicament that these
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Christians at Galatia were in. And then he immediately comes in and he gives us a positive list of virtues, the fruit of the spirit to contrast it with.
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And so he gives us these lists in the context of church infighting. That's how the context begins.
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He knows they're quarreling. He's heard about it and he lets them know, I know about it and you need to stop it.
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And then he tells them how to. So that's the context of him giving the fruit of the spirit, which is really interesting.
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And so he's giving them a moral principle as an antidote to their biting attitudes toward each other.
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And again, these are brothers and sisters in the Lord. These are Christians. These aren't just unregenerate people out on the street. These are
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Christians at church that are needing to learn these moral principles, these ethical principles.
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He said, just as a reminder of how this all began, the very beginning of the context, by love, serve one another, for all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.
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That's verses 13 and 14. So obviously, that's how the context begins for just this kind of subject change that he has on the fruit of the spirit.
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Obviously, this is foundational, that being love, not only in the context of Christian living in general, but also for all of the virtues that are to follow this one.
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Remember, love, joy, peace, long -suffering, gentleness, the whole thing. Everything that follows this one is going to be built upon a particular foundation, which is what we're gonna be looking at tonight and probably next week as well.
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There is a sense in which Christian love is the whole of morality. So when you look at the
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New Testament, you're going to see these moral principles pop up. You're gonna see these lists of moral virtues pop up.
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The apostles are just in there giving us these principles, showing us what godly living looks like, showing us what
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God's standards are for morality in contrast with the subjective cultural tendencies and changes and things over time.
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They give us the concrete principles that don't change even when 2 ,000 years goes by.
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But even though we have the specifics, even though they give us great detail, and we have talked about this many times before, anytime we see lists of instructions and imperatives and commands and things like that from the apostles, a lot of people bristle up at any kind of framework, any kind of rule, any kind of constraint, mainly because of the culture we live in, not necessarily throughout time.
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But the thing is, is if you really think about it, those lists that we're given, such as this one here, is a grace in themselves, because otherwise, what would we be doing?
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We would be saved, and then we'd be walking around wondering, what do we do now? Remember, the way the
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Holy Spirit speaks is not through an audible voice. It is through the words of Scripture that He inspired. That's how
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He moves us. That's how He guides us. That's how He keeps us on the straight and narrow, so to speak.
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The Spirit assumes that we're gonna be in the Word and forming our conscience so that He can guide us in the way that He wants to.
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And so here we are, Christian morality. We have all the specifics, and yet if you summarized it in one word, it would be love, in one virtue, it would be love.
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When one of the Pharisees, who happened to be a lawyer, so this is a smart guy, so not only is he a
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Pharisee in the religious sense, so he knows the law like the back of his hand, at least he thinks he does, he's also a lawyer, and so very smart guy across the board.
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He walks up to Jesus one day, right after the Pharisees and Sadducees are both trying to pin him down, and he asks
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Jesus what the greatest commandment is. And if you think about the historical context, it's an amazing thing because the
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Pharisees, all they were trying to do was figure out a way to put everything on paper because when you can get everything on paper, you no longer need a
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Savior and you no longer need to entrust your life and your soul in the hands of somebody else, you can just do it, you just follow all the stuff on the paper.
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And so, of course, that's where you get so many of the laws that weren't even the laws of God, they were the laws of men.
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But one of the things they were constantly debating was what is the greatest commandment? If we were to encapsulate the entirety of the law into one moral principle, which would it be?
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And this debate was raging all the time. So they come up and they wanna get Jesus' opinion on it, or at least this lawyer did, and Jesus, in short, his answer was love.
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Of course, what he says is the greatest commandment is to love the Lord thy God with all your heart, soul, and mind.
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And then he says, the second is like unto it, love your neighbor as yourself. But both come back to what?
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Love, this chief virtue that the Apostle Paul is now talking about as the first dimension of the fruit of the
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Spirit. So it's really the summary of everything. I've said it a couple of times. Jonathan Edwards puts it as the sum of all virtues, charity or love being the sum of all other virtues.
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When we exhibit true Christian love toward our brothers and sisters, we are glorifying God and seeking first the kingdom of God because we're putting everyone else before ourselves.
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Now, love obviously takes a preeminent role in the list of many virtues.
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And it's no coincidence that this is also the virtue that Paul began all of this with when he said by love serve one another back in verse 13.
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I believe that there is something to the way that Paul begins this list when he says, look at verse 22 with me in Galatians 5.
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He says, but, and that's a contrasting word with all of the sins that he listed prior, but the fruit of the
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Spirit is love dot, dot, dot. And then he goes on, but I believe there is great significance in the fact that he started there.
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It's how he started the whole context in the first place. And then he gets right back to it, right in verse 22.
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And when you think about it, the way he begins, the way that he perhaps emphasizes love, keeping it at the top, the human mind is it takes in these words of scripture, it automatically kind of locks in on that initial phrase, on that virtue.
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And it's easy to remember that phrase, even when we can't remember the whole list, we may not remember the order, love, joy, peace, all of them down, all nine of them, but what can we remember?
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The fruit of the Spirit is love. If we remember that one thing, then that is the foundation for all the others that then follow, whether we can remember them or not, we will exhibit them because it becomes the character of the
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Christian. I've talked about this before, although it's been a long time. There's a principle in logic that is called, it's called a causal chain.
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And what it means is we're all familiar with cause and effect. We talk about it pretty often. And it's a very important thing to remember because it can be the thing that helps clarify, bring clarity to a lot of scriptural passages where just to be frank, a lot of people, whether they be
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Arminian or Wesleyan or provisionist or whatever it may be, they have all, they grapple with all these things, the will of man and the sovereignty of God and eternity and end time, they do, they struggle with all this stuff.
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But, and we can struggle with it too. But when we remember the concept of cause and effect, it can help greatly because it helps bring things back into focus.
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So we're familiar with that. But there's this thing called a causal chain. So you can have a primary cause and that primary cause then leads to an effect.
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What's interesting is that in logic, that effect can then act as a secondary cause for other effects.
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Does that make sense? So let me give you an example. The spirit is the primary cause of the fruit.
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It's the fruit of the spirit. So this fruit is an impossibility to bear without the source, which is the spirit, the primary cause.
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So the spirit is the primary cause of the fruit. What's the first effect, at least that Paul lists?
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It is love. The fruit of the spirit is love. It's an effect of the spirit.
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It's the greatest of all virtues. And then it acts as the secondary cause of other effects that follow.
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For example, joy, patience, goodness, meekness. You kind of see what
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I'm talking about? It fits within this concept that again, logicians refer to as the causal chain.
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There is a primary effect from which everything comes from. There's no disagreement there. But if you want to get into the details, you see, oh, wait a second.
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Perhaps this thing, love, that is listed as the first effect actually acts as the secondary cause for all the stuff that follows.
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And this evening, I want to demonstrate why I believe that is the case scripturally. Not just saying it because it sounds neat or maybe
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Paul's talking about it, maybe he's not. I believe scripturally that is the case. And that's one of the things I want to dive into this evening.
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Of course, we ask, what is the point of talking about those types of things? Well, I believe that love is mentioned first because it is, as Edward calls it, the sum of all virtues.
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And I believe we see this, I believe we see that the New Testament emphasizes love over against other virtues, which we're going to look at more shortly in just a second.
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But for the moment, just assume with me for a second that Paul begins with love because it is in fact the secondary cause of all other virtues that follow it, the peace, the joy, the meekness, and all of that.
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I'm going to show you why I believe that's true scripturally in just a second, but just assume that that's true for just a second.
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The things that then follow, and we're going to dive into all this in the following weeks, such as joy and peace and longsuffering and all of that, what
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Paul is doing is he lists love first and then he expands or elaborates on love itself by talking about these other virtues that flow from love.
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He's giving some of the specific ways that love shows itself continually in the life of the
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Christian in all of these other ways. In other words, just if you want to think about it, it's kind of an analogy.
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Moses and Jesus each summarize the whole law in just a couple of statements.
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I gave you Jesus as a second ago. All the law and the prophets hang on these things, and he had just listed loving
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God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and then the second is like unto it, love your neighbor as yourself. Moses makes the same summary back in Deuteronomy.
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They summarize the entire law, which fills roughly four volumes in scripture in those simple statements, but then even though we know that summary exists, we also see that it is expanded massively throughout the books of Moses, I mean, in minute detail.
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So they expand, even though it can be reduced to one sentence, love the Lord with all your heart, soul, and mind, it's expanded in all of the detail you could ever possibly imagine.
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They're giving, again, specific ways in which the law manifests itself, so to speak, and the purpose of it, the intent of it as well.
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And so kind of like that, Paul takes the sum of all virtues, which is love, and he expounds upon it in these other eight aspects of the fruit of the spirit, the ones that follow love.
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That is what I believe is happening. Love is what produces the rest of the virtues, and the spirit is what produces the love.
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Primary cause, effect. Secondary cause, all other effects after that.
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So we need to take some time to study this a little bit and see if we can substantiate
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Edward's claim. Is love really the sum of all virtues?
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Is that a true, biblically sound statement? Is the idea that love is the secondary cause of all other virtues, is that a biblically sound argument?
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So turn to Deuteronomy 6 with me for a second. I wanna start Deuteronomy simply because, again,
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I wanna show just a taste of how this principle is all throughout
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Scripture, not reduced to the New Testament alone. The Bible is absolutely saturated in every sense of the term with love and the way it should be, the way it should look, and the fact that it is in everything.
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Everything God has ever done, every act God has ever done, love is behind it in some way, shape, or form.
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And so I just wanna kind of set a foundation here going all the way back to Deuteronomy and look at chapter six, starting in verse four.
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Moses says, hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one
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Lord. So this is a proclamation, this is a confession. This is the Israelites saying we believe in the existence of this
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God and he's the only God. The Lord our God is one Lord, and thou shalt love, key word, thou shalt love the
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Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy might. Remember, Jesus makes the same summary over in Matthew, but Moses did it first back in Deuteronomy six.
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And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thy heart. Really amazing thing.
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So what are the Israelites doing? What are they doing? They are proclaiming and confessing something, and that is the existence of the one true
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God of the universe, Jehovah. And when you do that, when they would do that, when they would make this confession and have faith that it was a true confession of faith, they would then live a life that is full of love toward the
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God they are proclaiming. So to acknowledge the existence of the creator is to then live a life where you have love toward him.
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That is the immediate effect of that confession, of that proclamation.
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This has been, again, the foundation for this virtue all along. And as we move to the
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New Testament, what we see is the apostles double down on it, even harder than Moses did, even harder than the prophets did.
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It started all the way back, and really, it's in Genesis. I went to Deuteronomy, but you can go all the way back. The apostles doubled down on it.
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And so now, let's segue back over to the New Testament in our final minutes here, and just get a taste of 1
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Corinthians chapter 13, which, of course, is an incredibly famous chapter known as the love chapter, of course, because as we'll see, all 13 verses within this somewhat brief chapter, well, number one, the chapter is absolutely packed.
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There's so much in this one chapter that you could spend absolute, I mean, you could spend months and months breaking it down verse by verse.
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But the main theme throughout all of it, even some of the more interesting verses that start all kinds of different conversations and open up all kinds of cans of worms, it all comes back to love in the end.
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So look at this with me. 1 Corinthians chapter 13. I'm just gonna read through the first roughly eight verses, and there's some interesting stuff in here, but just pay close attention.
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We'll break it down in a second. The apostle Paul says, though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not love,
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I'm just gonna substitute love for charity as I read. And have not love,
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I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy and understanding all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith so that I could remove mountains, and have not love,
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I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor and though I give my body to be burned and have not love, it profiteth me nothing.
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Love suffereth long and is kind. Love envieth not, love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil, rejoiceth not in sin, but rejoiceth in the truth, beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
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Love never fails. And I'll stop there for now. This is the beginning of verse eight. Now, there's so much in this chapter that it really doesn't do it justice to sweep through it quickly.
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But for the sake of time, we'll have to, mainly because what I want us to do is simply grasp an important point that Paul is making here.
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And the point is this. Anything you could possibly come up with, any act or any action that a
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Christian could possibly concoct in his mind, whether it's something he does or doesn't, maybe it's just some kind of daydream where he's imagining himself being this exemplary
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Christian and helping out all the poor or whatever it may be, it doesn't matter what you come up with. Everything is worthless in the
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Christian life, regardless of the work, act, thought, whatever it may be, if it is in the absence of Christian love.
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That's the point that Paul is making. And what's interesting about it is in that list we just read, where he's just going through all of these different things and saying, whether I do that, it means nothing without love.
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If I do this, it means nothing without love. It's almost like a miniature parallel with the book of Ecclesiastes where Solomon, for 12 chapters, goes on and lists every possible category of human endeavor that you could possibly imagine.
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And then he says, all of it is vanity, unless you have a knowledge and a fear of the
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Lord. Then all of a sudden it all has purpose, and that's why Ecclesiastes is actually not a bleak book like a lot of people assume.
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Yes, Solomon was in kind of a bleak spot in some places in his life, but as we read it we can see, wait a second, yeah, all is vanity without the
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Lord, but with him everything is purposeful, everything has purpose. So there's kind of this interesting parallel in the way
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Solomon approached Ecclesiastes and the way Paul just approached these seven verses in chapter 13 of 1
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Corinthians, because here's what's happening. Paul is using the rhetorical tool of hyperbole to basically describe a number of the loftiest scenarios a
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Christian could ever come up with in their head if they were thinking, how neat would it be if I did this, how amazing would it be if I did this.
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So Paul is just like, okay, rather than being super verbose here, I'm just gonna exaggerate on purpose, and I'm gonna say, even if I were doing these things, even those would be worthless without love being present.
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For example, talking in the language of an angel. Even if I did that, if love was absent, it would mean absolutely nothing.
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Even if I had all knowledge of the divine, did Paul ever have all knowledge of the divine in this life?
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Will we even have it in the next? We don't know the answer to that just yet. But he said, even if I do, it would mean nothing in the absence of love.
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If I moved mountains with my faith, which of course is playing off of something that Jesus himself taught, all it takes is the faith of a mustard seed to do that.
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The power is there. Of course, Jesus himself didn't do that particular act. So obviously, what is the purpose in that teaching?
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It's not that you need to go try to move mountains. It's that faith is simple. In God's grace, he made it where it only takes a little bit of belief in him that even when the unbelief is present, like with that one guy, it's still enough to move mountains.
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That was the hyperbole that Jesus used. Paul used it here as well. So he uses all of these hyperbolic statements saying these are all, here's just a smorgasbord of all these things that you could come up with in your head that would be the ideal
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Christian life, perhaps, or whatever he was thinking. And then he systematically, point for point, affirms their worthlessness in the absence of love.
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That was the whole point of his argument in those opening verses there. Now, I'll have to end with this thought.
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We'll have to pick it up here next week because we've used up our time. But bring it home. Bring it just a little closer to home. And you get
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Paul's point. It's strong. It's heavy -handed on purpose. But think about it in the context, think about his argument in the context of 21st century
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America and the church today. There are a lot of very active churches all over the place.
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Super active, just buzzing with stuff going on all the time. Very active churches.
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They're filled with people that are incredibly involved in various activities and committees and ministries and volunteering for this and for that.
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Again, it's buzzing as if the church was the healthiest it's ever been.
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But it's really all a facade when you look deeper into it and you see a lot of the things that are happening in so many cases.
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And it's not necessarily that there's anything inherently wrong with the activity itself. Perhaps, for example, a particular ministry or a particular, even committee, let's give the
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Southern Baptists their committees for a second. Maybe there's nothing wrong with that inherently.
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But the problem is the moment that the motive behind those activities changes to anything but love for God and for neighbor, then all of a sudden everything gets really ugly really fast because what are the motives behind the activity?
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What are the motives behind the busyness? What is the driving force behind the buzzing activity in the churches and things like that?
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Well, the driving motivating factor behind all Christian action, whether it's in the church context or not, has to be love for one another or else you can have the greatest church programs in the country and they're not even
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Christian anymore. By greatest, I mean they get the most attention, has the most volunteers and has the most people involved.
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You get the most show up rate. It could be that and not even Christian. There's no candlestick there, in other words, because the love left that church, that institution long ago and it was replaced with people that are maybe competitive.
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Maybe they're really prideful people that don't even love the people that they are doing the good work with to make them feel so holy and acceptable and reputable in the eyes of society.
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Now, that's a somewhat bleak note to end on, but it's the exact same point that Paul's making.
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It's just, it's in the context of what we're dealing with today. The point is, no
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Christian action, if you even wanna call it that, whether you can debate on whether it's legitimate or not, no
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Christian action is worth anything unless the love for God and the love for neighbor is present, the sum of all virtues.
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And I do believe, I'll cut to the chase, we didn't get to finish the notes for this evening, but I do believe that Edwards was correct.
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That is the sum of all others. And the reason I believe it is, not only did we just read a pretty hefty argument in those opening seven verses, but look at the last verse of that chapter.
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And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three, but the greatest of these is love.
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And so there are other motivating factors for sure, faith and hope, but what's the greatest of them?
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It's love. And I don't think love would be emphasized the way it is in both
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Testaments if it weren't this secondary cause of all other virtues.
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It begins with our salvation, which comes from one singular source, the grace of God. And the first effect that it puts in our heart,
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I believe, based upon the emphasis that it's given in so many places, is love.
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And then from that love for the brethren flows everything else, joy, peace, unity, gentleness toward them, mercy toward them, all of these things.
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And so that's where we'll end it this evening. Do y 'all have any thoughts or anything y 'all'd like to share before we move on to prayer requests?
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Sure. I think something that maybe wasn't mentioned in the first readings, but it's all throughout the
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Bible, it also shows how just love spreads, it covers a whole spectrum that you build.
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Because I've actually been pondering on these verses in Proverbs 27, starting verse three for a little context.
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It says, a stone is heavy and the sand is weighty, but a fool's raft is heavier than the boat.
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Raft is cruel and anger is outrageous, but who is able to stand before envy?
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Open for you is better than secret love. Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful.
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The full soul loveth a honeycomb, but to the hungry soul, every bitter thing is sweet.
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And we're supposed to be hungry. And to the bitter things are sweet. If it's through love, if it's through a friend, which
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I mean, I think that that saying, an honest friend who cares about you is better than someone who does not care about you.
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And just wants to affirm everything that you wanna be and all the sins you wanna indulge in.
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And so if that's love. Right. Rebuke. Yeah. Right. You see,
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I do it. Well, and it's interesting, because in the past orals that we're studying in Sunday school right now, we're only in Titus, but as we progress on, we will see
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Paul exhorting Timothy and Titus both to exhort and rebuke. Now, exhort is kind of the positive side of it.
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You're given exhortations and instruction, but the rebuke is there too. But what does
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Paul assume when he tells them to do that, that they have this Christian love that Paul is talking about in Galatians?
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So there are times when tough love, that we're familiar with that little concept, where that is absolutely a biblical principle.
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And of course, context is everything. So it just depends on what the situation is. There may be a time for an exhortation, but there may be a time for a rebuke too.
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And of course, spiritual discernment. And as we grow as believers is when we can know when to pull the trigger on one or the other and that sort of thing.
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So yeah, that Proverbs passage is amazing. And it's interesting. Just this morning,
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I was reading a blog post about one of my favorite pastors. He's not all that well -known, not a lot of people. He has, you know, he's out there.
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He has people that track him and stuff. And he's in a little humble church in Ohio. And he's just as practical as they come.
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And he blogs a lot about just his, just wisdom and, you know, his experiences throughout the years.
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And just today, Matt, he was quoting that passage in Proverbs and talking about his anger issues in his youth and how he had to outgrow that.
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And it's interesting because love and anger are kind of two sides there. There can be such thing as a righteous anger towards sin, toward evil, absolutely.
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But the negative side of it is outbursts of anger at the drop of a hat, no self -control, that sort of thing.
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And sometimes that can be the result of a lack of love, a lack of Christian love toward the brethren and wanting to benefit of the doubt and that sort of stuff.
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There was a audio book I listened to that went into details on emotions, like figuring out emotions from a biblical frame of mind.
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And the chapter on anger was really interesting. One of the things he said was that anger will point you to what you love.
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So like people that are very, well, just think about people who love themselves most.
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And it's clear, they're prone to outbursts of anger because, well, you've offended me.
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This is, you are infringing on whatever I think that I should have and do right now.
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So the outbursts because of the offense. So righteous anger is when it's not a selfish anger.
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Maybe you're angry when you drive by an abortion clinic and you should be, but you should also be able to turn and give that to the
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Lord and not go blow up the abortion. No, I mean, it's an incredibly important principle just in that one example, and that is the
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New Testament is crystal clear. A lot of people get all bristled up because the apostles aren't in here just abolishing slavery in their letters.
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In fact, they even talk about it as an institution and give instructions on how to work within it. But it's because God doesn't want us to be revolutionaries and just go in there and blow stuff up.
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He wants us to reform things. Why? Because to reform takes time. To take time takes patience.
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And it takes faith that the Lord has a timetable and that he works through people and he works through means and he ordains that just as much as the ends.
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And so to your point, we can have this righteous anger towards something like an abortion clinic. And we take that frustration of the
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Lord and remember that vengeance is his, and then we go to the legislator and start doing the process to, yeah, in the right ways to shut that down.
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We're doing that right now, which is kind of amazing. And all that is love for the creator. Right.
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Well, that's what Ashton's point is, okay, so if you're angered because someone says, your shirt looks funny and you burst out in anger, just this absolute, you lose it.
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What is that telling the world where your focus in your predominant love is?
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It's yourself and the way you feel about your shirt and the way you look and stuff like that. But if someone blasphemes your
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God in your presence and you have an anger come over you and maybe you flip some tables or whip some people like Jesus himself did, then all of a sudden, maybe what that tells the world is that your love is for the
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God that you serve, not for yourself, because there's certainly no self gain in going in and fighting those battles.
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You'll get spiritually pummeled sometimes. You'll get depressed. You'll have enemies that you didn't have before and all these types of things.
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So obviously it's not selfish. It is because of that righteous anger that Ash was talking about.
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So yeah, those are some interesting things there, for sure. That was a great passage,
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Matt, Proverbs 27. All righty, guys, anything else? You know, I just wanna say,
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Jonathan Edwards, who had a great length to write about, but that which is perfect is come.
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Yeah, it's in that passage. He's teaching and prophesying words of knowledge shall cease. And it's interesting because I've always thought that means canon is complete, which
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I still believe that's what it means, but he believed it meant that, but he also believed that that which is perfect was the church, bringing
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God to a state where everything is motivated by love. He said when it's at that state, then it doesn't need tongue speaking.
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It doesn't need all these other things. And he took this much to say that it was very eloquent and it was all about love.
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The whole thing was about love. He sort of took away a lot of other people's arguments about that passage, which has been debated for years, centuries, and he just focused on love.
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And yes, when the church had the whole Bible, then it doesn't need partial prophecies and partial words of knowledge.
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And he said that too, that he really focused on the church getting to a place where it matures and operates off of love rather than off of the list of rules or tradition, things like that.
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Of course, they're always humbling the grown Catholics. Right, the papists in their terminology.
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Well, and obviously, I left out verses eight through 12 because sake of time, but isn't it interesting that he is using those things as examples of things that do fail to contrast and make the point stronger that this is love that doesn't.
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I'll just read just verse eight. Love never fails. I started it, but I didn't finish it. But whether there be prophecies, they shall fail.
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Whether there'll be tongues, they shall cease. Whether there'll be knowledge, it shall vanish away. It's all baked into the contrast of love, which is why
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I said that earlier. You can open up lots of cans of worms with this chapter. Lots of different topics you can dive into, but it all comes back to the point that Paul is trying to make.
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What is Paul trying to argue here? It is that love is something that doesn't vanish, whereas other things come and go.
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It's pretty amazing stuff. Did you have a thought, Raj, a second ago? Yeah, just when you were mentioning about becoming keys and words, and that's what in Revelation 2, the church in Ephesus, they labored.
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Right. They were sweating, they were working. But they forgot this first love. You've lost your first love. Right. That's actually one of my favorite examples of this concept,
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Raj, because the commendations that Jesus gives them are amazing ones because he said, look, y 'all have been so diligent in your work and in your study, you've been able to recognize the false apostles that come in here, and even you shut them down.
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Now, imagine being in a church where the layman, just the congregants, are so immersed in the scriptures that they can identify the false apostles, rebuke them, and get them out of there.
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That's an amazing commendation. But, and what I believe the first love is Jesus first and foremost.
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I think their attention was focused on some of those battles over against the
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Savior himself. So what Jesus says is, look, you've done an amazing job, but you also got so wrapped up in it, you forgot that I'm the reason you did that.
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I'm the one you're fighting for. Put me back as your primary thought, your love, and the power will remain.
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But if you don't, then he gave some warnings. Yeah, he did. Yeah, he was gonna tell me,
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I firmly believe that you cannot love your neighbor if you do not love thy neighbor. And of course not, yeah.
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And that of course goes back to kind of the lesson we did, I think two weeks ago, on genuine morality coming from the spirit alone.
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You can have situational morality, even if you're an atheist, because it might suit you good in that particular context, but what happens when the context changes?
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The atheist changes, but the Christian doesn't. He will exhibit these things whether life is awesome or whether he is in the middle of the
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Colosseum. That's the difference between the fruit of the spirit being a continual thing and unbelievers kind of changing with the times and doing what they need to to survive.
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And it's very interesting because, coming from a different religion, from a different culture myself, why is it that love is so attractive to everybody?
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You know, we talk about love. Why is love predominant? And the question is, well, all your religion is useless if there is no love.
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That's why Christianity is attractive. Right. Because it focuses on that. It's just a bunch of religious activities, you know, and that's,
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I know that that's all religions of the world. Well, and not to open up another can of worms, but go figure that love is one of those things that the culture around us, the secular culture around us, strives so hard to redefine.
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You take a predominant, we talked about liberty last week. Apostle Paul says, you have been called to liberty.
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That word is abused beyond recognition in our culture today and even in churches.
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Well, love is an even better example of such abuse. And so, again, it's not that love is the bad thing.
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It certainly isn't. What it is is, by what standard is it defined? Last week, we did that study on liberty.
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It's worth doing for love as well. Maybe we'll have time for it in the coming weeks, but the devil wants to disfigure this thing that the scripture beautifully emphasizes time and time and time again so that that way, nothing is love anymore.
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If everyone is love, if everything is love, then nothing is love anymore. And of course, you have the really silly, self -refuting phrase, love is love, because they want to equate perhaps sodomy with heterosexual marriage or something like that.
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But no one actually believes that in function. No one loves their neighbor as much as their wife.
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No one loves the church members as much as their own kids. People shouldn't love other nations as much as their own.
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That's a problem these days, but the point is we all have ordered loves. So love isn't love.
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There is a hierarchical structure to it, and of course, God should be at the top all the time. And yet people, the culture wants to make you think it's all equal.
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They equalize it with cute phrases like love is love, and then people start to forget why love is emphasized in the
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Bible and the potency that it has. You forget all that. If love is love, everything is love, everyone is love, then love isn't even around anymore.
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Yeah, Vice President Max made a statement, public statement, that we should love
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God first, and we should love our family next, and maybe he said church members next, and then the world next, and the
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Pope repeated it. He said, no, there's no hierarchy of love. Love is love. Well, Vance is who
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I was thinking of when I said that, and you know where he gets that from, right? Scripture, of course, but specifically,
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Augustine. The way he was, it comes from the Bible, but the way he was wording it was specifically from Augustine.
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And Augustine - And Vance. Vance, yeah. And Augustine, he was quite the philosopher as well.
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Augustine is where we get a lot of things like just war theory, knowing what a moral war is supposed to look like versus an immoral war.
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A lot of that comes from Augustine, but the order of loves, he articulated that unlike anybody else when he did, and to this day, we often refer to the order of loves based upon Augustine's articulation of it, but again, it comes from the
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Bible. He didn't invent it. He just articulated it in a very special way that has been with us ever since.
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So the Pope is smarter than Augustine. Well, yeah, of course.
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No, dad, it's because culture has taught us so much more. We've learned a lot since for 2 ,000 years.
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Yes. But it just shows you how important it is for you to truly know what love is, and the way we know that is in the word of God.
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Sure. Because human beings do not know what love is in a natural state. Right, well, and this will be.
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It's that third love of self. Exactly. Yeah, and then you have the other sensitivity of loving yourself first before you love someone else.
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Amen. It's one of the things we're liberated from is that. Right, yeah, so to go back to the false definition of liberty that we talked about last week, one of the things, one of the false perceptions out there is that we can be liberated from the duty of loving others before ourself.
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That's another secular, psychological phenomenon that we're dealing with now, where even if you're a parent with kids, you have to prioritize yourself.
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And duty to others should be shunned because your mental health just can't take it, sweetheart. It's true, it's true.
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It's easy, you have it, because that's what matters to you. Exactly. Well, Ben, I was gonna say, I think, when people get into self -love, let's open this can.
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It actually gets overshadowed with self -hate. Of course.
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You're not hating yourself, never. Well, and that's why you have a continual endeavor for fulfillment.
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You never have it. Because you're trying to fill the void with all the wrong things, and maybe there is pleasure in moments in time, but at the end of the day, you're empty and depressed.
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This is just the other day, like, we were going to look at, like, you picture these, you feel sad for these people who get this horrible advice.
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Yeah. And then you picture, I picture them going back to their apartment or their home.
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Oh, I know. Maybe with a pet. It's a devastating thought. And they're by themselves, and they just were bombarded with this advice, whether it's from a pastor or from friends or whatever.
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Psychologists. And they're just sitting there, and they're just utterly alone, and utterly without God and without family and without friends, because it's all about them, and it's so important.
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You're so important. What is it? A few minutes. It's awful. It's sad. I wonder if they're confused in today's culture, because love is love, but gender is subjective.
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Mm -hmm. They don't see truth. Right. Yeah, the -
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How can you rely on love being love if you can't rely on a man being a man and a woman being a woman?
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Right. Everything is subjective, except for the fact that my feelings rule all.
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And then you get all of the mess we've been dealing with for so long.
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It's just absolutely crazy. Back in the, what was it, 70s, with the phrase, when it feels good, do it.
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Right. Yeah, it feels right. Well, and even the phrases like live and let live and that sort of stuff, which the libertarians kind of introduced.
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They may be conservative, but let him go do whatever he wants to do, because he's his own individual man.
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All of that comes from the same place. And so, I'll end with this before we move over and do some quick prayer requests, is we will spend more time on this virtue than any others for all the reasons we just talked about.
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Number one, if it truly is the secondary cause of all other virtues, then we need to spend some time on it for that reason.
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But secondly, to the point that Raj made a second ago, everyone wants to redefine it.
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Everyone wants to disfigure it, mess it up, confuse everybody on it. So therefore, where do you go to get the objective standard for how to define it in the scriptures?
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And it is just full of this virtue. So we will have to spend a few weeks on it, which will be a delightful thing, and then we'll move into the points that follow.
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I have no idea. I don't know if that's a 20th century phenomenon or not, but it's a terrible thing, that's for sure.
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In the proof text that they use for it, Matthew chapter seven, read the verses right below it.
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Judge not, for the judgment with which you judge, you will be judged yourself. So that means that if I, I'm not gonna put myself in that situation.
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Let's say you have a street preacher preaching fire and brimstone on fornication, but he's off doing the same thing that he's preaching against, because he feels righteous while he's preaching it.
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But then he goes and indulges in the same sin. The judgment with which you judge, you will. Yes, that's a great example.
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So Jimmy Swagger. So he may, from the pulpit, judge the sin of fornication, but the judgment with which you judge, you will be judged yourself.
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So that will come back on his head. But you have MacArthur up there preaching against fornication.
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He can judge it, because he's not fornicating. And so he gets to judge, because he's not in a position where he is doing that sin.
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So he can therefore call it out and say, don't do that. So anyway. So he's judged by the same standards.
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That's the point. Everyone's judged by the same standards. So be careful. All Jesus is saying is be careful not to be passing judgment on a sin that you yourself are indulging in right this second, because you're gonna be judged for that too.
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He's not saying you can't judge. And we as Christians are absolutely called to judge and call out sin.
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There's Pharisees in this crowd that day. Oh yeah, for sure. Preach that. Yeah, absolutely.