Dr. Scott McKee: I wanna welcome all of you joining us from our Farmington Hills campus just now via video feed, and those of you joining us online from places near and far. So glad we could be here together. I'm excited to see what God's gonna do over the next forty days. Over the next forty days it is our aim to love God better and love people better. Forty days from now we are gonna be better lovers.
Lovers of God, lovers of people. We're gonna We're gonna learn to love like Jesus loved. At the center of the forty day journey is this forty day devotional book called The Relationship Principles of Jesus written by Tom Holliday of Saddleback Church. And we had a bunch of these books for sale last week and were completely sold out. But they're readily available on Amazon and at Walmart.
I encourage you to pick up a copy of this book, The Relationship Principles of Jesus. Tom Holliday is the author. And it's designed as a forty day, forty days of daily readings. And forty days starts today. Actually forty days can start whenever you want it to start.
Some of you got an early start last week, that's good. But the readings will complement what we're going to talk about on Sunday mornings and what we're going to talk about in our small groups. So I encourage you to pick up a copy of that book and start your way through the relationship principles of Jesus. And to frame our comments on Sunday morning, we're going to use the famous love chapter of the Apostle Paul which you heard read this morning, first Corinthians 13, which closes the greatest of these, but the most important of these, the supreme value of these is love. Now this is not unique to the Apostle Paul, this idea runs throughout the New Testament.
Jesus himself said this in John's gospel, by this everyone will know that you are my disciples if you love one another. If you would conduct random on the street interviews and ask people what is the one quality, what is the one characteristic that marks people who follow Jesus, what would that characteristic be? If there's one characteristic that marks the people who bear the name of Jesus in this world, what is that? Jesus said, they'll know you're my disciples by the way you love each other. What Paul actually does in the first few verses of this very famous chapter of the Bible is he administers five shock treatments to the church that met in the city of Corinth in Greece.
Five shock treatments to Corinth Community Church that really would have been quite surprising to them in their time and place. And that's what we're going walk through this morning. Shock treatment number one, Paul says basically love is even a bigger deal in God's eyes than speaking in tongues. And some of are thinking, we're going to the tongues thing today, are we? That is confusing and controversial.
And maybe you're not that familiar with it, but you saw speaking in tongues once and it kind of freaked you out. Or maybe you came from a church that divided over speaking in tongues. Maybe you wish speaking in tongues was practiced more overtly here in this church. Or maybe you have no idea what we're talking about. But here is a short and inadequate description of speaking in tongues.
Speaking in tongues. Let's say it this way. To some believers, not all believers, but to some believers, Some believers are given by God a special spiritual gift of speaking in a prayer language which goes from their heart right to the heart of God. Now when this is practiced properly and biblically, it's a very edifying thing to those who have this gift. It's a good thing.
But in Corinth, in the first century, the people who had this gift, got very proud about their gift, and they elevated it way beyond where it was supposed to be. This is the context we need to understand at Corinth Community Church during the time of Paul's writings, this church had come to a near obsession with speaking in tongues. I mean, it was the thing to do. In that church, it's considered the true test, the acid test of true spirituality. In fact, we started competing with one another to see who could be the who could speak in tongues the best because that would prove who was really, really, really mature.
So over time, you see, what really happened is that instead of love being a supreme value in the church at Corinth, speaking in tongues became the supreme value. And it was into this culture that Paul wrote, if I speak in the tongues of men and of angels but have not love, I am merely a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. He said, it's like if I were a champion tongue talker, if my tongue talking was so great that they wanted to record it and sell it on Spotify. If I were so good at that, but I weren't demonstrating love to people in and around my daily life, it would sound like someone banging on a garbage can. And friends, you have no idea what a jolt this would have been to the church gathered in Corinth in the first century.
They would have thought there's no way that how we love one another could be as important in God's eyes as whether or not we can speak in tongues, Which is something we really value. Paul Sorta says this, keep holding your all night tongue talking sessions if you wish. But just know that when you finally go home at the end of the day, or when you walk into work on Monday morning, when you're with your neighbors after work, or with your family in the evening, know that it's loving acts of kindness. It's listening to people. It's the kindness you express.
It's how you love people. That is the ballgame of the faith. And again friends, this would have been a huge surprise to the people in this church. And I wonder if the Apostle Paul were to talk to Ward Church, what jolt might he give to us? Now, we don't do tongue speaking much in our public services, some of you practice that privately, probably wouldn't be that.
But how might the Apostle Paul give us a little jolt of surprise along these lines? Might Paul say something like this? If I volunteered with the intensity of the saints and of angels, if I showed up at church seven nights a week and participated in every single church activity, but had not love, my voice would be as irritating as this building's fire alarm, because God cares most about love. Now, tongues are used biblically and properly, it's a good thing. And if volunteering and serving and showing up to church is done properly and biblically, it's a fine thing.
It's just not the supreme thing. Love is supreme in God's economy. Shock treatment number two that Paul says, God is more oppressed by small acts of kindness than He is by biblical knowledge. And again, this would have come as a great surprise to the people gathered in Corinth at that church in the first century. Paul's words exactly that we heard read this morning are this, if I have the gift of prophecy, I can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, but do not have love, I am nothing.
I am nothing. Jesus changed the exam. People thought they were preparing for a knowledge based exam and Jesus said, no, it's gonna be a love based exam. Being a Christian is less about how much you know and more about how well you love. It's less about how much you know and more about how well you love.
Not only is God more oppressed by small acts of kindness than He is by biblical knowledge, God is more oppressed by acts of kindness than He is by home run sermons. A little context again to help you with this, the church at Corinth venerated their teachers. If you were a teacher at the church of Corinth, you were a superstar. You had the approval and applause and affection of everyone in the congregation. Not a horrible idea.
But they raised their teachers up to really dangerous levels. We read in one Corinthians, the teachers really had almost their own fan clubs. There was one guy named Apollos, and he was in the teaching team. When he got up, people said, Wow, Apollos, he's the man. And then Cephas would get up to preach and they would say, No, no, no.
Cephas is the guy that we follow. And it became divisive. I don't know if they had baseball trading cards in the church at that time or stuff like that, but I mean if you were a teacher at the church of Corinth, you were huge. Paul's words here likely were addressed to the teachers in the church. If you could preach paint off the auditorium walls, if you could hit grand slam sermons every time they get up to the platform, if you could really fathom all spiritual mysteries and a truckload of knowledge at your disposal, and you could communicate it compellingly enough to captivate the crowd every time you got up to speak in front, in your private life, in your private life, you lack the fundamental skills of relating in loving ways to people, What does Paul say?
You're nothing. I am nothing if this is me. He doesn't say this is a minor problem in your life that you need to address at some point down the road. He's saying no, in God's eyes, you'd be nothing if you had that. Now again, you have no idea the shock this would have been to the culture of that church in that time and place.
If the apostle Paul were here today, I don't think he would hesitate to stand up all of our teachers at our church, all of our volunteer teachers, all of our all of our small group leaders, and say, listen, is love your supreme value? Is love the supreme value? When you're not doing your public thing, how do you treat the cashier at the retail shop? How do you treat waitstaff at the restaurant? How do you treat the neighbor whose dog does awful things?
Because that's the acid test. Alright, third shock treatment. And this one comes with a little phrase where Paul says, if I had faith to move mountains, if I had faith and power to move mountains but had not love. And I'll phrase this third shock treatment this way. Growing in love is preferable to demonstrating power, even mountain moving, miracle working power.
Now again, this would have been a jolt, a shock to that church at that time. It would have blown the circuits off some of Paul's listeners, this one as well. I think when they read that they went, surely he is over overstating the case for love. Because there's no way that loving people could be more important than miracle working. If we had a miracle worker in our midst, think of all the good that could be done.
What we need around here is more power. Well, you know what Paul is saying here. He's saying, thinking over, what have we learned in history about power that's unconnected to love? Have we learned anything in the last couple thousand years about this? What generally happens to people who have ever increasing amounts of influence and power at their fingertips?
Do they generally leverage that power for good and for the good of others, or does darkness of spirit creep in and lead to corruption and evil? Paul is saying power is a dangerous thing when it's not anchored to love. Love is preferable even to mountain moving faith and power. Part of the problem is that we think of love as being sometimes very weak and mushy and low power, but maybe love has more power than we could possibly imagine. Here's a great question to liven up your next social gathering or your next small group.
Just ask people, tell about a time when you experienced the power of love. Tell about a time when you experienced the power, the power of love. Here's one story from a woman who said, when I was a little girl, seven, eight, nine years old, something like that, my parents were a mess. My dad took off, left the family, my mother drank most of the time, and ran around with other men. She said, was alone in the house most of the time.
I would come home from school, and I would sit on the front stoop, and I would just cry because I wanted to have some parents around. She said, would look over at the next door neighbors, and there was a father to some kids in that family, and the father, every once in a while, would come out and he would mow the lawn. And this woman said, I remember wishing that I could walk next to that dad while he was mowing his lawn, because then I would feel like I had a father. I would feel like I wasn't so alone. And one day, this dad from next door walks over to this little girl and said, you seem really lonely.
Would you like to walk with me as I mow the lawn? And she said, yes, I would. So she put her hands on the handle of the lawnmower, and he had his hands there, and they mowed the lawn together. And he said, anytime I'll mow the lawn, you're welcome to walk with me. She said, don't think I would have made it in this life had that man not done what he did.
He was the first adult that conveyed, conferred any value, and showed any interest in me. In fact, she said some days I would come home from school, and I would look at his lawn hoping it was long enough that he might come out and mow it that day. How powerful is that kind of love? That's power. Friends, is what Paul was saying to the church at Corinth.
They were so captivated by tongue talking and by high powered orders and by miracle working wannabes. Paul's saying, listen to me, there's more voltage in everyday loving between everyday kinds of people than you could ever possibly think there would be. Paul said, you don't have to be a miracle working superstar. You don't have to be a grand teacher to have impact to people around you. You just need to learn how to love people deeply.
And friends, this is a skill that can be learned. Shock treatments four and five are sort of back to back in the text. Paul says, If I give all I possess to the poor, and if I surrender my body to the flames but have not love, Paul says, I gain nothing. So let me put these phrases in modern terms and talk about them for just a second. Shakruba number four, love surpasses vows of poverty.
And number five, love transcends martyrdom. Every once in a while, we get this idea or we hear people have this idea, I'm just gonna cash it all in, I'm gonna sell everything I have, I'm gonna give it all to the poor. I'm gonna take this vow of poverty. Or sometimes you hear this thought or maybe you've had this thought, I'm gonna move to a part of the world where Christians are severely persecuted, and I'm gonna lay my life down for Jesus. I would die for Jesus.
Now these thoughts are rarely actually lived out, but they're thoughts that we have in our hearts. And some people might be called to that. But Paul is saying to these spiritual romanticists, we can get romantic about these ideas, Paul says, before you cash it all out, just know that it could be likely a bigger deal to God if you would stay employed and stay alive and just grow a little bit every day in your capacity to love. Now, need to be ready to die for our faith, to die for our Savior, but the Bible talks most about dying daily. Not one big death, but small little deaths where we sacrifice and we yield our preferences.
We yield our will. And this is the challenge of Christianity, to get up every morning and put God's agenda ahead of your own. To die daily to greed, to die daily to materialism, to die to self centeredness, to die to all kinds of junk in our lives, to live for Christ and love for Christ every day. And these are skills that can be learned. So this forty day challenge that we embark on today, again includes multiple components.
There are six sermons in the next forty days on living, on loving like Jesus. We encourage you to hear all six sermons. There are 40 daily readings on relationship principles of Jesus. We're going to discuss these in small groups together. It's not too late to pull some people together, some friends, some family, some neighbors to talk about these things.
We've got videos and discussion questions for you to use for that. And we're going to practice these relational skills. When we read about one or hear about one or discuss one in our small group, we're going to practice these skills in the next forty days. So at the end of these forty days, we will be transformed to be loving, more loving people. Years ago, was a brilliant Dutch theologian who was at the peak of his profession.
He had already taught at Yale and Notre Dame and Harvard. He had already authored several bestselling books on spirituality. And he decided that even though he was growing in knowledge and popularity and influence, he was not growing in love. And this bothered him a great deal. In terms of his relational world, his heart was shrinking.
Anybody ever experienced this? Many things in our life increased over the years. Our houses increased in size. Maybe our bank accounts increased. Our waste lines increased.
A lot of things increased in our lives. But has your capacity to love kept pace with the other things that are increasing in your life? Has your heart been growing? Well, this man decided that his capacity for loving had not kept pace with the rest of his professional accomplishments, and he knew how God feels about the supremacy of love. So he decided, volitionally, no one forced him to do this, he decided to move into a home for mentally and physically challenged young people so that his heart for loving could be stretched.
Do you know who I am talking about now? Henry Nouwen is his name. And he passed away some time ago, but I encourage you to pick up anything Henry Nouwen has written and read it. His new living arrangements really did start to increase his capacity to love. And then he started doing something else.
When he would go and speak somewhere, he would bring one of the residents, one of the people from the home with him, one of these mentally or physically disabled people, and so he would enroll in the school of love wherever he was. And one of his books, Henry writes about a time they took a young man with him on a speaking engagement, and he learned a little bit about love. And I read this years ago, and I come back to it every now and again to remind me of to have a growing capacity for my own loving. But listen to this as we get ready to wind down this first message in our series. Henry Nauwon was going to give a talk in Washington DC, and he was making some opening remarks, and this is what happened, and I'll read this now from his book.
He said, I opened by saying that I had not come to the speaking engagement alone, but was very happy that a guy named Bill had come with me. He was from that home. He said, I took out my handwritten text, I began to talk. At that moment, I saw Bill had left his seat in the auditorium and walked right up to the podium, planting himself behind me. It was clear that he had a much more concrete idea about the meaning of doing it together than I did.
Each time I finished reading a page of my talk, he took the page away and put it on a table close by. I started to feel at ease with this and started to feel Bill's presence as a support, but Bill had even more in mind. When I began to speak about the temptation to turn stones into bread as the temptation to be relevant, he interrupted me and said loudly enough for everyone in the room to hear, I've heard that before. And he had indeed heard that before. He just wanted the priests and ministers who are listening to me now to know that he knew me quite well and was very familiar with my ideas.
For me, it felt like a gentle, loving reminder that my thoughts were not as new as I wanted my audience to believe. Bill's intervention created a new atmosphere at the ballroom. Bill had suddenly taken away all the seriousness of the occasion and brought to it kind of a homespun normality. As I continued my presentation, I felt more and more that we were indeed doing it together, and it felt good. When I came to the second part of reading my message, I was reading the words, the question most asked by handicapped people with whom I lived is, are you going to be home tonight?
Bill interrupted me again and said, that's right, that's what John Smelcher always asks. And again, was something disarming about his remark. Bill knew John Smelcher very well after living with him in the home for several years. And he simply wanted people to know about his friend. It was as if he drew the audience toward us, inviting them into the intimacy of our common life.
After I finished my talk and people had shown their appreciation, Bill said to me, Henry, can I say something now? My first reaction was, Oh no. How am I going to handle this? He might start rambling and create an embarrassing situation. But then I caught myself in my presumption that he had nothing of importance to say.
I said to the audience, would you please sit down? My friend Bill would like to say a few words to you. Bill took the microphone, and he said, with all the difficulties he has in speaking, he said, last time, when Henry went to Boston, he took John Smelcher with him. This time, he wanted me to come with him to Washington, DC, and I'm very glad to be here with you. Thank you very much.
And that was it. And everyone stood up and gave him a warm applause. As we walked away from the podium, Bill said, Henry, how did you like my speech? Very much, I answered. Everyone was really happy with what you said.
Bill was delighted. As the people gathered for drinks later, he felt freer than ever. He went from person to person, introducing himself. I didn't see him for more than an hour. He was too busy getting to know everybody.
The next morning at breakfast before we left, Bill walked from table to table with his cup of coffee in his hand, saying goodbye to all the people he had met the night before. As he flew back to Toronto, Bill looked up for the word puzzle that he always had with him wherever he goes, and he said, Henry, did you like our trip? Oh, yes, I answered. It was a wonderful trip, and I'm very glad you came with me. Bill looked at me attentively, and he said, and we did it together, didn't we?
Henry writes here, often I wonder how much of what I say will be remembered by anybody. But I knew that what happened that night would not soon be forgotten. When we landed, I turned to Bill and I said, thank you for coming with me. It was a wonderful trip, and we did it. We did it together in Jesus' name.
And re ends the chapter of this book by saying, and I really meant it. Friends, that's a level of loving that I have not arrived at yet. But I pray that I'll get there. I pray that you'll join me in growing in our capacity to love as Jesus loved. Will you join me in prayer now?
God of goodness, we thank you that we are recipients of your great love. Your love has transformed us. Teach us to love as you love fully, unconditionally, beyond measure. He teaches what it means to die to ourselves, to be great lovers of God and of people. By this love, may the whole world know that You are God.
And we pray this through Christ our Lord. Amen. Amen.