Morgan Teruel: Thanks for tuning in to the Sandals Church podcast. Our vision as a church is to be real with ourselves, God, and others. We're glad you're here, and we hope you enjoy this message.
Pastor Fredo Ramos: When we say the word love, what do we mean by that? So often in our modern world today, we talk about love in terms of what we're strongly attracted to or what we desire the most so that I could say I love him or I love her or I love pineapple curry with some nice chicken dumplings on the side. But oftentimes, those expressions of love are defined by what I can take from something, what I can assume, what I can have that makes it better for me. But love is it's talked about in the bible is not defined by a kind of taking, but kind of giving. When Jesus arrives on the scene, you see him as this incredible teacher.
No one taught like Jesus taught. And in his most famous sermon, the Sermon on the Mount, he talked quite a bit about love. Love even for our enemies, not just for our neighbors or for those who do good to us, but love for our enemies. And the specific kind of love he talked about was a kind of giving love, a self sacrificial or self giving love, a love that is not, marked not just by taking and consuming, but by giving yourself away, which is why one of his first apostles, John, when he wrote describing God and describing Jesus as good news, he said, let us continue to love one another for love comes from God, and anyone who loves knows God. Why?
Because God is love. Now this is an important word for us, I think, to consider. Why? Because notice the language. God is love, not love is god.
A lot of people today would kind of view love as the supreme power and force in the world. And so if we were to say that love is God, that means it's kind of impersonal and God somehow now must meet the standard of that love in order to be a loving God. But as John says, God is love is a way for us to understand that God himself is the standard. In other words, love is something that himself is the standard. In other words, love is something that flows from him.
In fact, that's exactly what he said. Love comes from God and that he demonstrates that love by giving to us his son so that we might have eternal life and experience forgiveness, which is why that I think Jesus, when he talks about this picture of love, what makes him so great is not just that he was an amazing teacher, but he embodied this. There's really nothing we can say about Jesus when it came to the way that he lived his life. He modeled self giving. He modeled not taking, but giving himself away for the good of others.
He modeled what it meant to have, express, receive and give to others agape love. A love that is marked by sacrifice. And that's the invitation for us. So that when Jesus says what's the greatest thing you can do with your life, he says to love God and to love others, but to love your neighbor as yourself really is what he says there, which I think offers us an important invitation and way out for a modern dilemma that we all face. And here's what I mean by that.
We value highly today in our world self love. You should love yourself. In fact, we celebrate people when they finally come to that place like, you know what? I love myself. I I finally can just accept who I am and I love who I am.
And we celebrate people for that. And guess what? We totally should. But the problem that we also face is that we detest narcissism. And so the challenge is how do we rightly love ourselves, but not become narcissistic or not become so ignorant that we're so self obsessed that we can't see and care for and give to others for their own good as well.
And so I would say a healthy self love understands that to love yourself well is to actually see there's something greater outside of yourself to also love. So a healthy human being, a healthy person like you and me can understand that what we're meant for is not just to be loved and to love ourselves, but to ultimately share that and to give it away with somebody else. And so that's the invitation of Jesus To actually discover who you are, to receive his love for you, and then ultimately to give it to other people. And so to be his follower is to fully trust that at the center of the universe is a divine being who is full of generous eternal, never giving up kind of love. To receive that, to be changed by it, and then to offer those around you.