Will you please open your Bibles to the 29th chapter of Genesis, beginning in the 10th verse. Genesis chapter 29, verse 10. And it came to pass, when Jacob saw Rachel, the daughter of Laban, his mother's brother, and the sheep of Laban, his mother's brother, that Jacob went near and rolled the stone from the well's mouth and watered the flock of Laban, his mother's brother. And Jacob kissed Rachel and lifted up his voice and wept. And Jacob told Rachel that he was her father's brother and that he was Rebekah's son. And she ran and told her father. And it came to pass, when Laban heard the tidings of Jacob, his sister's son, that he ran to meet him and embraced him and kissed him and brought him to his house. And he told Laban all these things. And Laban said to him, Surely thou art my bone and my flesh. And he abode with him the space of a month. And Laban said unto Jacob, Because thou art my brother, shouldst thou therefore serve me for naught? Tell me, what shall thy wages be? And Laban had two daughters. The name of the elder was Leah, and the name of the younger was Rachel. Leah was tender -eyed, but Rachel was beautiful and well -favored. And Jacob loved Rachel and said, I will serve thee seven years for Rachel, thy younger daughter. And Laban said, It is better that I give her to thee than that I should give her to another man. Abide with me. And Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed unto him but a few days for the love he had to her. And Jacob said unto Laban, Give me my wife, for my days are fulfilled, that I may go in unto her. And Laban gathered together all the men of the place and made a feast. And it came to pass in the evening that he took Leah his daughter, and brought her to him, and he went in unto her. And Laban gave unto his daughter Leah Zilpah his maid for a handmaid. And it came to pass that in the morning, behold, it was Leah. And he said unto Laban, What is this that thou hast done unto me? Did not I serve with thee for Rachel? Wherefore, then hast thou beguiled me? And Laban said, It must not be so done in our country to give the younger before the firstborn. Fulfill her week, and we will give thee this also, for the service which thou shalt serve with me yet seven other years. And Jacob did so, and fulfilled her week, and he gave him Rachel, his daughter, to wife also. So, the doctrine of compensation and retribution is everywhere mentioned and inferred in the word of God. He who deceives is deceived. He who lies is light against, and on and on. Jacob, who had deceived his father, and had deceived his brother, and had taken advantage of them, and had a birthright that did not belong to him, and a blessing that was not rightfully his, was now deceived himself. And so the great deceiver is deceived by his uncle, Laban, who was also to become his father -in -law. The truth of the story, I think, is greatly accented when one realizes that this man, Jacob, was 78 years of age when this story takes place. He fell in love. It was love at first sight with the beautiful Rachel. And he made a deal to be her husband with her father. It was quite common in those days. But after he had served for her for seven years, the Bible says that on the night of the wedding, Laban, his father, tricked him, and it was quite easy to do because of the veils and the nighttime ceremony that he really received in marriage the hand of Leah, the older sister. It was, and is still common among the Bedouin Arabs, that the younger daughter was never given in marriage before the eldest. She had to be married first. Now, whether he knew this or not, he did not care for her. He loved beautiful Rachel. There was a custom in those days that the first cousin often married her cousin. The intermarriage of closer relatives was much more common. The ongoing progress of sin has made that more difficult, and one must marry farther and farther as the centuries go by, away from his own relationship. He had the first choice of her. He was first obligated to marry, to have the right to marry, the older of his first cousins, or at least if he did not choose to do so, he had to give right and permission, his consent, before anybody else could marry her. But because of his love, he loved Rachel and worked during the engagement period for him. Now he was deceived, and after the marriage, it was discovered that he had been given Leah instead. You can imagine how he felt. The word Leah means wild cow. Now, you can imagine. The Bible says she was tender -eyed. Now with the Arabs, and with Orientals to this day, the sparkling caliber of the eye was the gateway to the soul. The word tender -eyed is not a compliment. It means simply that she was kind of sick in her eyes, and probably wasn't much anywhere else. You talk about the milk cow blues. Man, Jacob must have had them. He hoped to marry beautiful, lovely Rachel, but he woke up, and there was wild cow Leah. Now, I think it is no accident that the Spirit of God on this beautiful anniversary day and wonderful Valentine's Day has led us in the Word of God to this story of love. What a beautiful one it is that a man would work seven years for the one that he loved, and the Bible says after he was deceived, worked still another seven years, and the 20th verse says, it seemed to him as a few days because of the love that he had to her. Imagine. It was nothing to him. He did not keep time. He did not keep track. He did not keep score. The love in his heart for her made it seem as though it were nothing. This world needs that kind of love. Smiley High School needs that kind of love. Sam Houston High School needs that kind of love. Every high school needs that kind of love. Soma, Alabama needs that kind of love. And Houston, Texas needs that kind of love. I need it. You need it. We need it. All well, it is so true, what this world needs is love. But through the pages of the Word of God, we find a very true and intense teaching of what love really is. And that is the purpose of what I want to say to you today. The songwriters and movie makers and storytellers, I think, have done us great disservice in suggesting that love is always emotion. Now, when we speak about loving someone or being in love, we mean that we emote, that we feel a certain way. Now, don't misunderstand. I am all for love. The old -fashioned, heart -throbbing, pulse -pounding, tear -sending kind, the kind that sends icy fingers up and down my spine, the same old witchcraft when your eyes meet mine. Now, that romantic, soupy, emotional kind of love is great. It's wonderful. But that's not the kind of love that makes the world go around. They say love makes the world go around. No, love just makes you dizzy and you think the world's going around. Love is not really what makes the world go around, at least not that emotion. Now, the emotion is good and God uses that emotion to attract and build and draw two people together. But it is not that kind of emotion that sustains a marriage or a life or a relationship to God. The blush of joy when the new convert meets Christ draws him to him, but there becomes a deeper relationship as in every area of life when emotion turns into action. The entire biblical concept of love is not simply in feeling, it is in doing. Listen to what the Lord says again and again. John 3, 16. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. You see, real love doesn't just sit around and emote. Love acts. Love produces. The love of God was resultant in the action of giving a son. The Bible says, Jesus told Peter three times, Lovest thou me? Peter said, I do, Lord. He said, Feed my lambs. Lovest thou me? Feed my sheep. And a third time he asked him, Lovest thou me? And he said, Yea, Lord, you know that I love thee. And Jesus said, Then do something. Then act as though you do. Again he constrained him to feed his sheep. Greater love hath this, hath no man than this, that a man do something, that he lay down his life for his friends. Herein is love. Not that we loved him, but that he loved us. And gave himself to be a propitiation for our sins. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself. Now does Jesus, who created human personality, who knows more about it than anyone in the world, not know that you cannot go around commanding emotion, that you cannot say, Hate this one, be envious of that one, love this one? Well, of course he does. Jesus was not commanding an emotional feeling. He was commanding an action. For we find that if people, when people say, If I love so and so, I would do so and so. People say to me all the time, I do not love my husband, I do not love my wife, and so I cannot live with it, I'm going to get a divorce. In other words, they're saying, I do not feel a certain way, and so I cannot be a certain way. Because I do not have the feeling, I cannot do the following actions. Jesus says, If you act, the feeling will follow. And we are commanded to love. We are commanded to express love in every relationship of life, and it is not merely a soupy emotionalism, which may or may not accompany the action. It is a task. It is an obligation. It is a command. It is a doing. It is a deed to which our Lord commands us. Now let me repeat. We say, If I loved, I could do this. If I loved my neighbor, who is black or brown or different than I, if I loved my country, if I loved my husband, if I loved this one or that one, I could do certain things. Jesus says that we are commanded to act in accordance with the basic rules of love, and the emotion follows. Emotion is not enough to build a relationship on. Emotion is not enough to build an existence on, a life on. But when the deed is there, our Lord says that the emotion will follow. Thou shalt. Love was not a command to emote. It was a command to act. There are all kinds of different types of love. We say, I just love my kids. And in the same breath, I just love pizza. And surely we do not mean the same kind of love. To love my school or to love my children is not the same thing. The love that I have for my wife and the love that I have for my church and my co -workers are not the same kinds of love. There's storge, of course, a kind of love that is the family love for child. And we know what the eros love means, romantic love, the love of a man for a maid. There is phileo love, from which Philadelphia is named, a brotherly love, a kind of camaraderie love. Of course, we know that agape is God's love, selfless love, giving love, self -sacrificing love. I spoke to you a few Sundays ago about narcissism, self -love, the kind of love for the man who fell in love with his own image, the product of Greek mythology. And someone reminded me about the old farmer that lived so back in the woods. They didn't have any of the modern conveniences. They didn't even have a mirror. And this fellow found one in town and fell in love with himself. And the old farmer acted kind of suspiciously, and he always kept his mirror out hidden in the haystack. And once in a while, his wife would sneak around and follow him, and there he was, just hugging that mirror and looking at it and loving his own image. Well, one day, he was gone, and she snuck out there and found it. And she picked up that mirror and held it at arm's length and looked it over and said, Hmm. So that's the old bag he's been running around with. Well, there are all kinds of love. but the heart of real love the Bible teaches, the kind of love that this man had for this woman was not merely an emotion, it was an action. For 14 years, he produced the classic Bible example of love of the Old Testament. I think there is no greater classic, of course, than the love of Christ our Lord in the New Testament, and no greater in the Old than this. We say sometimes, I just can't help falling in love, but this is not something that we cannot help. It is something that we must will ourselves into. It is a victory over that which is unnatural. Now, you work in an office, or you have a problem with a relative, or there is a child with whom you have become disenchanted, or somewhere in your relationship of life, there are those that we are commanded to love, though we may not like. And the Lord who came into this world to give love, who teaches love, whose very presence is love, gives us this simple insight as to the meaning of how to have peaceful relationships in the world. For if God is love, and the presence of God in a human heart in a situation is love, then I submit to you that the absence of love, the absence of the influence and presence of God is hate. And if we have a world that hates its neighbors of another color, and hates its government, and hates those who are in places of responsibility, and hates its employees, then the only antidote for hate is always love. It's so easy to hate. It's so obvious to see how easily people can express their hate. I was going out Monday to Preach Creek Baptist Assembly for a school with a retreat with some other preachers. And I pulled up at the stop sign about, oh, three or four miles back down the road from where we turned off to go to the retreat. And I guess I probably went six inches or maybe 12 inches with the nose of my car past the stop sign when I stopped. And it made it such that the man who was turning in front of me, that he had to swing out of his way just a little tiny bit. And if anybody ever exuded hate, if looks could kill, we'd be having my funeral instead of my anniversary today. And I said to Ben, how easily the world can be turned on with hate. A little tiny thing like six inches or a foot additional turning space that might have taken three -tenths of a second caused a man literally to feel in his heart for that flash of time that he could have killed me if he would have gotten his hands on me. Well, he didn't because I had the doors locked. But that is the basis that every relationship of life comes down to without God. And the stress and the tension in homes and in schools and in families when there are family arguments and that fat hatred flares for just a moment and that boss scowls at that employee and the man hates another at a stop sign. The only antidote to an exploding world that is exploding with hatred is the kind of love this man had for that woman. And there's only one way in the world that love can be expressed. The Christian dimension of love in the New Testament is the expression of Christ's action relived in us. It must be acted. It must be lived. It must be done. It is the deed, not simply the emotion. And the love that he demonstrates in the 14 years that preceded and followed the marriage to the woman that he did love so much. It was such a classic incarnation of everything that the Bible teaches us that love is. Over in 1 Corinthians, the 13th chapter, and you would do well, I think, to turn and follow along as we, in closing, look at these few verses of Scripture. Have the classic New Testament, if not all of the world, definition of what love is. Turn there in the 4th verse of chapter 13 in 1 Corinthians and remind yourself that the modern -day word for this New Testament Old English word charity is love, L -O -V -E. First Corinthians 13, 4. Here is the classic illustration and breakdown of what love really is. And in not one instance is it simply a feeling, it is desire translated into concrete, tangible actions and opinions and attitudes and deeds. Now substituting as is biblically correct the word love for charity, listen, charity love suffereth long. Now I've gone through this week and have garnered from the 29 best modern translations of the Bible what this means in modern language. I shall break them down for you. Love suffers long. Love looks for a way to go on being constructive during long seasons of difficulty. Again, love looks for ways of being constructive during long seasons of difficulty. Love is kind. That is, love is gracious. It is polite. It is considerate. It is understanding. It is downright nice. Love envieth not. Love envieth not. That means that love does not keep track of wrong done to it. It is not keep looking for a chance to get even. You see how as our Lord through the Holy Spirit inspired the Apostle Paul in writing the great love chapter of all of history, translated feelings into action and breaks it down to us and tells us the actions that are the result of genuine love that we may act thereby and literally spread love in this world. Love wanteth not itself up. That means it is not anxious to impress, and it does not act as so to bring itself into the limelight for a position of self -boasting. Love is not puffed up. That means that love is not overly impressed with its own importance. Love behaveth not itself unseemly, is not rude, obnoxious, or unmannerly, or loud. Love seeketh not her own. That means it is not selfish. It is not self -seeking. It does not go around demanding its own rights and swinging its weight around. Then the Bible says love is not easily provoked. Love, that means, is not short. It's not touchy. It's not sensitive. It's not irritable. It doesn't get its feelings ruffled. It doesn't fly off the handle in just a moment. Now you say, preacher, there has come in the hostile situation of our home a touchiness, and we're sensitive to each other, and we interpret things wrong. And all we have to do is just look like we're going to say something, and the other one just flies off the handle. There is a touchy, almost dynamite -like, explosive situation in our home. Well, our Lord is telling us that if we will realize that the loss of the emotion that has produced this situation, if it is in reverse acted out to where one becomes patient and is not touchy and endureth all things, then the emotion that produced the original relationship will follow. Well, he goes on, love thinketh no ill, no evil. That means love doesn't add up the score. It doesn't keep track. You know, it doesn't sit around and say, all right, that's two. That's three. One more, and I'm going to let you have it. Love doesn't know where it is. It doesn't keep score. It's not, you were better to me this week than I was to you, or I was better to you than you were to me, and I'm going to get you. Jesus said, how, when asked how many times ought we to forgive men who do us wrong to seven times? He said, no to 70 times seven, which literally means endlessly. Love rejoiceth not in iniquity. That means it isn't glad when others go wrong. I suppose the worst thing that Christian people do is to have the habit of standing around in church and conventions and places where Christian people gather and spreading juicy gossip. Say, did you hear about old so -and -so? I was so sorry to hear it, but they weren't sorry to hear it at all. They were tickled to death to hear it, so they had something to pounce on, which satisfied a kind of a neurotic littleness in them, when the only ego support they could get is that, well, I'm not as bad as others are. I'm not man enough to bring myself up, so I gloat over the fact that others are no good either, and dragging them down to myself, I get some kind of inner satisfaction. Love doesn't behave that way. Love rejoiceth not in iniquity. Love rejoiceth in truth. Love is glad when the right is victorious. Listen to how all of these things applied to this man, Jacob. Love beareth all things. That means it has no limit to its ability to overlook the faults of other people. It does not forgive people to a degree. It does not tolerate the faults of those less fortunate in its own happenstance in life to a limit. It is limitless. It is boundless. Love believeth all things. It always believes the best, and it always looks for the best. If that's the kind of attitude you have in life, then you will find a genuine relationship of love for other people. Love hopeth all things. It keeps hoping under all circumstances, regardless of how difficult the hour or trying the situation. It believes there is a way. Love endureth all things. Love has limitless endurance of wrong done against it. And most of all, love never faileth. That means it never quits being. Love is the only eternal relationship of life. It never quits happening. It has no end. It has no boundary. It has no border. It always is. The hymn writer said of Jesus, Thy foes may have despised revile. Thy friends unfaithful prove. But unwearied in forgiveness still, thy heart could only love. When the hippies first happened, they were the flower children, the love children. A reporter asked one of them who had been caught for stealing and arrested, how do you equate your love philosophy with stealing from a man and taking what is his? Is that the way you express love for him? Is that what love does? Is that love for other people taking by force what is theirs? And he said, well, I guess we have more than a philosophy. We have a, I guess we do not have a philosophy as much as we have a desire. In other words, we would like to act, but our philosophy has no innate power to act. Now it's one thing to theorize and philosophize as to what love is and how we ought to act love to have love. But the real hardcore problem of the matter is that like the philosophy of the hippies, we do not have in our philosophy, any innate intrinsic quality to act that way. Except as we are related to God through Jesus Christ. For God is love and the way that men get to God is through the reality of the indwelling presence of Jesus Christ. And so when we have him and unless we have him, then we cannot act for a day or a year, let not alone. Fourteen, as did Jacob. And all of these things that seemed as nothing to him because of the love that he had to her. May we pray.