Scribbles From Sunday: The Love Project

The message from yesterday was from 1 Corinthians 13: 1-7. The famous wedding passage... love is. Yet what we found was an altogether more radical definition of love. More than words... so stop being all talk. Greater than gifts... so stop trying to be first. Not just for show... so think about what you are doing and why. The lifeline was this: 'A failure to love those around me reflects a hardness to the truth tht God loves me.' It is that when we get the Gospel our relationships become grounded in the Gospel. Your relationships are designed to demonstrate Gospel reality.

We then turned our attention to the list of qualities that love demonstrates. We packed them up into 10 things (it started as fourteen but we ran out of time... to be continued) that love says. Here are the first five. We will share the other five tomorrow.

1. My wait will outlast my hate (Patience). Think about the last time you were impatient and spoke in that frustrated fashion you do. Are the things that we get provoked about of greater value than the person that we are expressing our impatience towards? Stop making trivialities greater treasure than ppl you are called to love. More… consider the character of God. How much benefit have you received thru His patience? 2 Peter 3: 9

2. I will be benevolently beneficial (Kindness). Let your generosity be genuine. Love is willing to give what is needed. It determines to be active about the good of others. It is the pursuit of a sweet usefulness wrapped up in a spirit of gentleness. It shows care and compassion mindful of that which we have received from God through Jesus. Romans 2: 4

3. I will not make my security something secondary (Envy). Love refuses to allow envy to make someone an enemy. It calibrates a heart to helping not having. Envy is an outworking of insecurity. Envy is actually less 'got to have it' and more 'I’m nt enough if without it.'

The envy thing is how we all get in trouble in the 1st place. Consider Adam & Eve. They envied God… wanted to be like God. It is because of that kind of jealousy tht we all need Jesus. James 4: 1-3

Love is fruit of having desires directed towards what pleases God. It is finding security in His sufficiency so that everything else is secondary

4. I will elevate service over status (boasting). Love says ‘I am not first.’ It does so because it has a true understanding of our grounds of standing. The Gospel helps us see that because even our best is broken we have no grounds for boasting. 1 Corinthians 1: 27-29

5. I will regard influence for good as better than inflated glory (arrogant). Love is not proud. Love serves as a deterrent 2 becoming inflated with pride and vanity. The word pictures bring puffed up. A person who loves is not full of themselves because they are looking outside of themselves. Arrogance is thinking highly of yourself or thinking of yourself first. Love prefers the other/your neighbour. Romans 12: 3

The bottom line is this… you cannot arrive at the cross and retain any arrogance. When you come to see how Jesus gave Himself there is little reason to think much of yourself. That is helpful because pride is so harmful to our relationship with God & others.

Love says, 'whatever I can do for His glory and your good will take precedence over whatever makes me look good.'