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At Sandals Church, our vision is to be real with ourselves, God and others. This channel features sermons and teaching from Pastor Matt Brown and other members of the Sandals Church preaching team. You can find sermon notes, videos and more content at http://sandalschurch.com/watch
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.
Alfredo Ramos:We must discover the power of love, the redemptive power of love, and when we do that, we will make of this old world a new world for love is the only way. Those were the words of doctor Martin Luther King in a sermon he gave called love your enemies back in 19 57, and I think those words still ring very true today. We must discover the power of love. There is no greater force in the world than that of love, and if you don't believe me, think about the last time or really the first time that you actually fell in love and how infatuated you became with one person. Now for me, it was Disneyland.
Alfredo Ramos:It was at night, fireworks were going, and I looked at Ashley and I just knew it. I didn't have all the right answers for it, but just something in my left brain and my right brain connected and came together and said beyond the feeling of this churro in my stomach and the overpriced ticket, I love this woman. Right? And now it's not just romantic love, but love I think in all of its forms. There is something that happens to us in the presence of love that we realize has the potential to make our life better in the same way that in the absence of love it has all the potential to make our life worse.
Alfredo Ramos:We long to be loved by another person, which is why I think movies, shows, music, all of it has spent so much time creating stories to help us understand, experience, feel, and sense, and share what it is we all know we're after in life, which is love more than any other topic, which is why over the next several weeks here at Sandals Church, we are going to saturate ourselves with some of the most stunning verses in the Bible you will ever read on the topic of love, and I say all this not wanting for us just to have a merely intellectual exercise, but for us to actually become people of love, to not think of love simply in the abstract, but to actually move it to a kind of action because can we get there? Yes. Can we do that? Yes. I say that because we find ourselves living in a moment where many of us are seeing active love, love in action, replaced by love as simply a feeling.
Alfredo Ramos:In other words, we live in a very sentimental culture where we are inwardly moved but outwardly stagnant. Case in point, for years, I can give all of my feeling and love for the show called This Is Us and be infatuated with the lives of fictional characters, but then very be very stagnant when it comes to the actual lives of my family. Why is that? We often feel the force and power of love inwardly, but we so rarely become love. But make no mistake about it, there is no greater calling in your life or my life than to become people of love, to move from the abstract into action because love is not abstract.
Alfredo Ramos:And when you think about it, love is kind of hard to define, but it's something we all know and experience on a regular basis. Like, if you were to ask me, Fredo, can you define for me love? I actually would have a really hard time trying to come up with a definition, which is why, honestly, y'all, this whole week, I struggled to write this sermon. But if you asked me to tell you about love, I would immediately think of people like Ashley, like Holly, my mom, Alfred, my dad, Donovan, my best friend, Pastor Matt, Brian, my boss, because they write me a check. You know, they love me.
Alfredo Ramos:But I can go on and on and give you names of people. It's almost impossible to explain love without actually talking about people. Why? Because love is never abstract, and when we strip it of that, it loses all of its power. It's a lot like in the morning when I get up and pack my kids a lunch.
Alfredo Ramos:One of the things I love to put in there is fruit, try to give them a balanced diet from our kitchen. Right? So I'll put in an orange, an apple, a pear, which is kind of an underrated fruit. Pear's a great fruit, and it's amazing that when it goes in, it it's fresh. It looks juicy.
Alfredo Ramos:So let if you were to bite into that, you know, man, flavors would just burst into your mouth. It it would, be nutritious for your body. It would give life and energy to your day, but then they come home. And I unpack that lunch. Right.
Alfredo Ramos:And I open it up, and I see this fruit. It's mangled. It's bruised. It's flat. And I'm like, Eli, help me understand.
Alfredo Ramos:What happened to the fruit today? Like, did you use this orange for dodgeball? I don't understand. How is it possible that something that once has the potential to give us nutrients and life can also just sit there when it's untouched and become rotten? The same is true not just in our kids' lunch, but on our counters.
Alfredo Ramos:If you leave a fruit untouched, the same thing that can give you life will magically have fruit flies around it, right? It will become rotten. That is the same thing if we only treat love in the abstract, and so as we begin this journey of working through 1 Corinthians as a church, be mindful of the caution ahead of all of us that we simply only know love in an abstract way and become aware of the ways maybe in which sentimental love is actually rotting our souls. It's rotting us because we have not become love. So with that said, let's begin our time in 1st Corinthians 13.
Alfredo Ramos:I'm gonna ask if you are willing and able that you would stand with me for the reading of god's word. Paul writes this starting in verse 1, and then I'll pray for us. If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Alfredo Ramos:Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It is not proud.
Alfredo Ramos:It does not dishonor others. It is not self seeking. It is not easily angered. It keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth.
Alfredo Ramos:It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. Amen. This is God's word. Let's pray together.
Alfredo Ramos:Father, we thank you for the opportunity today to gather as a church, and we pause in prayer to recognize that you have gathered with us. And so we ask now, God, that you would speak to us from your word, that as Jesus said, you would give us ears to hear and eyes to see so that we might become people of love. We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen.
Alfredo Ramos:Amen. Thank you so much. You may be seated. Now this passage we just read is often quoted and recited at weddings. In fact, maybe if you got married you might have had 1st Corinthians 13 read at your wedding, and why not?
Alfredo Ramos:It is beautiful, it is poetic, but keep in mind when Paul first penned these words he didn't have a wedding in mind. He was addressing a church, an incredibly gifted church, the church in Corinth. Now here's what you gotta understand. This church was dynamic, successful. It came out of a vibrant, large, growing city, but yet it was deeply fractured.
Alfredo Ramos:The city of Corinth was a multicultural hub, where people were obsessed with with pleasure. You'll find some incredible temples once given over to idols. They were obsessed with money. They were a fluent place. They were also very successful.
Alfredo Ramos:A lot of people traveled to Corinth, and so when Corinthians came to Christ, don't forget, they were extremely gifted people, but also deeply immature people. Now, we know what these kind of people are like in our lives, to be very gifted and lack maturity. That makes for a very dangerous recipe. So much so that as Paul pens this letter, he's dealing with their divisions. They didn't get along with each other.
Alfredo Ramos:They had sexual sin that went unaddressed. They had issues with which pastor they liked more. They had problems using their gifts for the good of others, which is why first Corinthians 13 is sandwiched after 12 and before 14. As you can tell, I'm full of brilliant insight today. Right?
Alfredo Ramos:And so when Paul's writing these letters or this passage in particular, he he's not so much having wedding bells in mind, but a school bell. Classes in session, people who are deeply gifted still don't know how to love. Does that sound like any one of us in here today? So he offers a strong correction in the form of one of the most poetic explanations of love we will ever see written, so much so that The Office, the TV show that many of us loved quoted this passage in one of its most important episodes that you'll probably watch on TV, and And I think what Paul want wants us to see is the same thing that he wanted the Corinthian church to see, which is this, that love is the ultimate aim of my life. Amen.
Alfredo Ramos:Amen. Take a deep breath in for a second. There is nothing more important that you will do or become than love. So I don't know what you're aiming at today, like, what you would envision for your life or what you think the good life is. If you're not aiming at love, you are aiming at the wrong target.
Alfredo Ramos:It doesn't matter how much you accomplish, what you do with your life, the goal, the aim is to become people of love. Twice in this passage, he says, if I don't have love, I'm nothing. If I don't have love, I gain nothing. At one point, he says, you're just noise. Think about that.
Alfredo Ramos:Some of us in all of our gifts, in all of our talents, in all of our pursuits, you know what Paul says? You're just noisy. Your life is just noisy. Now to help us understand it, let let me just ask it in the form of a question. Like what for you would constitute a well lived day?
Alfredo Ramos:Like what makes you say today was a good day? When you get home, you take a, like, a deep breath in, you've arrived, and when you get in your house and you have those kind of feelings that are either positive or negative, what's affecting that mood? In other words, how do you measure a good day? Do you say you had a good day because you were productive, you got everything done? Is a good day for you measured because people affirmed you, you got attention, the approval of others?
Alfredo Ramos:Was it a good day because you had unhindered just comfort? Was it a good day because you had lunch? Amen, somebody. Or if you're like me, was it a good day because you just survived it, like you made it, or was today good because it was marked by your ability to love well? That's the point of what Paul is saying.
Alfredo Ramos:When he's stacking up all of these descriptions there in verse 1, he says, man, you can speak with the tongues, of angels. Man, how cool would that be to speak as heaven speaks, to have 10 different languages? What are you without love? He says you might be able to prophetically speak a word over someone. Now, I've been in a situation like this before.
Alfredo Ramos:Maybe you have too where you've been in a conversation and someone who's prompted by the Spirit of God just prophetically speaks to someone's life or situation and you can tell it resonates deeply with them. That's an incredible moment. Paul says, man, that's powerful, but it's nothing if you don't have love. He says you might be able to understand all the mysteries of life. You might be smarter than the smart.
Alfredo Ramos:You might know and memorize and be able to do every life hack on TikTok, but if you don't have love, what are you? He says the faith to move mountains, which is a phrase that means you can do the impossible. Like maybe when you pray over someone, they get healed and when you pray over someone, they get a job, or they're delivered from whatever they need rescuing from. He says it's nothing without love. You might do the greatest work of social justice, he says.
Alfredo Ramos:You might care for the poor well. You might even give your body over to be suffered for as a sign of your allegiance to Jesus. Without love, what are you? Mother Teresa said it like this, we can do no great things, only small things with great love. That is the absolute point of all of our lives.
Alfredo Ramos:It's not your resume, It's not your adventures. It's not the food that you've eaten. It's not the people that you slept with. It's not your Instagram presentation. It's not even what you accomplished.
Alfredo Ramos:At the end of all of our lives, it will be measured by one thing and one thing only. Have you loved? Have you loved? In Jesus' view of life, there is nothing more important than becoming the kind of person who can both receive love and then give it away to people. That is our aim.
Alfredo Ramos:The destination of our discipleship to Jesus is that we would become people of love. Amen. Secondly, we might also say that love is the infallible sign of the work of Jesus in your actual heart. This passage he gives to us, there's people who are doing incredible gifts. There's amazing power flowing through them.
Alfredo Ramos:You might have the power of Jesus flowing through you. People might be amazed at what you can do, but you still might be very immature. In other words, love is the ultimate sign of maturity and growth as a Christian. If you don't know how to love, you are immature. It doesn't matter how many times you go to church, how often you pray, read scripture, serve people, all good things, but they are means to an end, and that end is becoming a person of love, so much so that one time Jesus has asked, what's the greatest thing you can do?
Alfredo Ramos:Many of you know this passage. He says to love the lord your god with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and all your strength. That's the greatest commandment. Amen. And the second is like it, to love your neighbor as yourself.
Alfredo Ramos:All the law, he says, and the prophets hang on these two commands. In other words, everything is scripture. Everything that God has been doing, everything that God continues to do is to lead us to a place where we are people of love. Now, here's the thing. We all nod our heads at that.
Alfredo Ramos:I've exerted a lot of energy just to remind us what we all know. Why have I done that? Because we have to clarify what we mean when we talk about love, especially for those of us who live in California where we're all about the love. We love us some love here, but in my experience, our world often defines what love is very differently than the way Jesus does. For example, one version that's very popular today is that love is a kind of tolerance.
Alfredo Ramos:Now, don't hear me wrong, I'm all for tolerance, tolerance in the way that says, man, we can agree to disagree and that doesn't mean we have to hate each other or kill each other. I'm for that kind of tolerance, but there's another kind of tolerance that is subtly creeping up and becoming very popular, which basically says you do whatever the heck you want to do. I do whatever the heck I want to do as long as we don't get in each other's way Amen. And hurt each other. Now, at first that sounds incredibly liberating, but then what happens when what I want to do does get in your way and even hurts you?
Alfredo Ramos:Or what if we both agree that something is wrong and somebody else is doing that, like substance abuse, child trafficking, the oppression of the weak. There's so many holes with that kind of view of tolerance. Another understanding of toller of love is not just tolerance, but of niceness. We're just nice, And again, I like being nice. I like when people are nice to me.
Alfredo Ramos:Right. And for a lot of us, you you might live in a suburban or urban context where you're around a lot of people, and oftentimes our interactions with people are, you know, they're short, they're somewhat shallow, and so, you know, the best thing you can do is just be nice to them, but we all know that you can be nice without being transformed. Sometimes someone is nice to you because they are a salesperson. They want to sell you something, And I think niceness, at some degree, really is a subcategory of what Jesus called love, but, I mean, honestly, there's gotta be more to it than just that. I think a lot of us are nice because we're just middle class people, and middle class people, we're nice people.
Alfredo Ramos:We're trying to make it. Or it's just your personality type. Right? The other way, though, that love is often talked about is not just as tolerance or niceness, but as desire. Love is what I desire, which I think is probably the most popular way that we understand love today.
Alfredo Ramos:Yeah. So that when I say I love the Lakers, y'all know what I'm talking about, because I say that on almost every sermon. Right. Or I love pineapple curry, or I love hip hop. I'm communicating to you that those things, they all do something for me that I love.
Alfredo Ramos:It's somewhat of a transaction in which I benefit from it. So often when we say, like, I love her or I love him, what we mean is I want to consume her or I want to consume him. It's about getting, not giving. And so I get an emotional pleasure from you. I get a relational pleasure or a sexual pleasure from another person.
Alfredo Ramos:I want to get and not necessarily give. The love as defined by Jesus and the writers, I think, of all the scripture define love not as tolerance, niceness, or even desire. It's completely it's something completely different. Listen now. Love is when I give of myself for the good of others.
Alfredo Ramos:That's love. We see that here in 1st Corinthians 13. Agape is the word that Paul uses. Agape, when you think about it, is a self giving act. Don't miss that.
Alfredo Ramos:Agape is a self giving act for the good of another person. Jesus said it like this in John 15. Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends. John, his apostle, picks up that idea and says this in 1st John 3. Dear children or brothers and sisters in the church, let not mere let's not merely say that we love each other.
Alfredo Ramos:Let us show the truth by our actions. Agape love is a self giving act that moves us beyond sentimental feeling into real life moments. So for Jesus, love is self sacrifice. Its essence isn't just a feeling or desire, though those things come along. But here's the thing, you can't control your feelings often, and you can't control your desires.
Alfredo Ramos:Agape is an attitude and an action that flows from the heart into real life, And this vision of love, 1st and foremost, is seen in the very character of God. We know this from John's statement there in 1 John 4 where he writes, dear friends, let us love one another. Many of you know this verse. Let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves God has been born of God and knows God.
Alfredo Ramos:He goes on to say whoever does not love does not know God. Why? Because God is love. Agape love. It's a word that's used there.
Alfredo Ramos:Now for a lot of people, what John is doing here is pointing us in the direction of, I think, one of the great mysteries when it comes to God and love, namely that it is agape love, which is why for many years, Christians have used this word to describe God as a triune person or the trinity, this idea that God is one God, but in 3 persons, father, son, and holy spirit. Now I get it. For those of you who are new to Christianity or even you've been a Christian for a while and this still baffles you, I I get it. It's strange. It sounds very bizarre, but when you start to think about it in the context of love, it begins to come into view.
Alfredo Ramos:Why? Because agape love cannot exist outside of relationship. By definition, it's giving of itself for another person. So if God is agape, then God cannot exist outside of a relationship. In other words, God as agape is God as a relationship.
Alfredo Ramos:God is a relational God who exists in a triune community of father, son, and spirit where they are others focused. The father focuses on the son, the son focuses on the spirit, and they exist forever and ever as this beautiful communion of love, generosity, creativity, and power. And the story of the Bible is that human beings were created by that loving God as an act of love for the sake of love. That's the story of the Bible. But, of course, we all know this story has gone terribly wrong because as beautiful as childbirth is, we all come out with quite a condition, which means that something in our minds, our hearts, and our bodies is bent out of whack, meaning your default setting and my default setting is not agape love.
Alfredo Ramos:It wasn't, you know, agape love on March 8, 86 when I was born, and it wasn't agape love this morning when I woke up. It wasn't my default setting. Rather than being outward focused, I'm inward focused. Like many of you, we struggle to deal with how to love someone outside of ourselves. The Bible says the reason why that is is because we are locked in the prison of our own self love, and so we focus on what's best for me.
Alfredo Ramos:What do I want? What do I need? What do I desire? What's gonna make me happy? What's gonna bring pleasure to me?
Alfredo Ramos:So that one way then to state the gospel is that God, who is self giving love, sent us his son so that anyone who believe in him can be set free from their own egocentrism, and you can begin to see the world as so much bigger than just about you. If life and this world is ultimately about you, that is such a small, narrow, heavy burden to carry. And many of you have been viewing your life as like that, which is why you're miserable. And so, man, there is such good news about self giving agape love. Now, again, I say all that.
Alfredo Ramos:I've wasted a lot of energy and time now to communicate to something to you that you already know. This is Christianity 101. This is theology 101. But again, things are easier said than done. Like most of us nod our heads, yes, God is love and in his love he sets me free to love like him.
Alfredo Ramos:That's all easy to believe until your roommate never does additions or until your kids come home with fruit that's rotten now that you paid for or until you have a father wound that's devastated you. It's easy to believe that God is love until your heart's been broken by someone that you thought you were gonna spend your life with or until it's just another ordinary busy day in your life and you're faced with the reality that as beautiful as love is, it is so hard to do in the midst of a life that I'm just so busy in. As Dostoevsky once said, love in action is harsh and dreadful compared to love in dreams. Right. In other words, it's easy to love people in a fantasy world compared to real life.
Alfredo Ramos:Like, Christianity would be the easiest thing in the world if it weren't for you and people. It's incredibly difficult. How then do we begin to practice love? Paul gives us a beautiful picture in 15 different descriptions here in 1st 13 in, 1st Corinthians 13. And he begins there in verse 4, love is patient, love is kind.
Alfredo Ramos:Now, when you first read this list, you might think of them as adjectives. You would be wrong. They're all a verb. So love is being patient. Love is being kind, which is amazing to me as I sat down this week and and read that and thought to myself, man, out of all the ways that Paul could begin talking about love, he begins with patience.
Alfredo Ramos:Patience. This ancient text has so much to say about our modern world and pace. We live in an impatient world. One click checkout has revolutionized our lives. Right.
Alfredo Ramos:I love it. I was using it all week to buy commentaries to help me get ready for this, But it's amazing that Amazon has estimated that they would lose every year on average $1,600,000,000 if their web page loaded one second slower. It's crazy, and they're not the only ones who have discovered this. Streaming services have discovered through research that the amount of time that viewers like you and I will give to our favorite movie or show to download is 2 seconds. If it takes more than 5 seconds, they lose 25% of their audience.
Alfredo Ramos:I've seen this with my kids. Oh, I'm done. Gotta find the next one. That Internet, dad hasn't paid for yet. Right?
Alfredo Ramos:So that strength is kinda weak. They say if it takes 10 seconds to load your favorite show, they lose up to 50% of their audience. It's amazing what the modern pace of our world has done to us. Like, it's it's a gift that my mobile phone can send me information from across the world, go through outer space, hit a satellite, come down to me before I even blink my eye. It's a beautiful thing.
Alfredo Ramos:But over time, I've been shaped by speed in such a way to now expect that same pace from my kids, from my spouse, from my friends, from you guys. Please listen to me faster. We're running out of time. Right? And most importantly, from my relationship with god.
Alfredo Ramos:And when I am habituated to everything being fast, quick, and easy, I'm then confronted with the reality that the best stuff in life, like my character, the people in my life are not fast, quick, and easy. They're slow. They're painful. They're hard. It's ordinary, and you gotta slow down.
Alfredo Ramos:You see, the the gift of living in our modern world is that we have shaped incredible technology. The curse now is that that technology has now shaped us so that we struggle to embrace Paul's words that love is patient. We rush, and in the process of rushing, we have forgotten that the best things take time. So that when I hear the words love is patient, here's what I think about. Love is when I give others the time they need.
Alfredo Ramos:Amen. That's what patience is. It's giving people the time they need. The word patience is a great word to think about, so we're gonna spend some time thinking about this word together. The word can also mean, long suffering.
Alfredo Ramos:The King James says, suffer longeth, but you do so without responding in anger. Now the word that Paul used in 1st Corinthians 13, patience, in the Greek is a similar word that was used in the old testament in the Hebrew language meaning slow to anger. Think of Exodus 34, God's sermon about himself. Yahweh Yahweh, compassionate, gracious, merciful, slow to anger. Now anger in Hebrew can mean hot.
Alfredo Ramos:It can be nose. It can also mean hot nose, meaning when you get furious and infuriated, your nose gets hot like Potiphar's wife. When she's telling him about everything that's like happened supposedly. It says that he burned with anger. His nose got hot is what it says in the Hebrew.
Alfredo Ramos:So someone who is slow to anger, the the word literally translates as you are long of nostril. It's hilarious. Long of nostril. As someone who's got an Aztec background, we're long of nostril. Right?
Alfredo Ramos:Long nostrils, big ears. That's the Ramos family. Right. Yeah. The long of nostril essentially means that it takes you a long time to get angry.
Alfredo Ramos:That's what it means to be patient. So meaning God, as a form of loving us, gives us the time we need. One of the best things I think about God is that God is not in a rush. When he created the world, 7 days. When he gave us a story I'll give you 39 books, old testament, not in a rush, A lot of chapters.
Alfredo Ramos:Jesus came not as a fully grown man, warrior king, born as a baby. Why? God is not in a rush. God has never been and will never be in a rush, and so why are we with people? Why are we in a rush?
Alfredo Ramos:You see, to be patient, to love someone in your patience is to have a long fuse, not a short one with them. You're approachable. You're safe. When people get close to you, they get close to Jesus because there's something that is welcoming, calming, and peaceful about you. You are not in a rush.
Alfredo Ramos:You have in mind the long game of who they are so that when you look at your spouse and you're bothered, or you look at your kids, your roommate, your neighbor, you don't just see them for who they are and where they are right now, but you see them for who they can become, who they will be one day. You're patient. You give them the time they need to grow. And what's beautiful is that Paul says love is patient, love is kind. Kindness is doing something that is good for the sake of another person, and so it's kind of a beautiful flip side to patience.
Alfredo Ramos:If patience is suffering long with others, then kindness is responding to them not with anger but with goodness. So to say that love is patient and love is kind is a way for us to understand that God is long suffering with us, and rather than responding in anger, he pours out his goodness on us. So as you think about real life right now, love is when you don't rush the growth of another person. Amen. But you, as Jesus would do, forgive them 70 times 7.
Alfredo Ramos:You keep no record of wrongs, and when injury comes your way from them, you show them patience and respond with goodness, acts of kindness. Again, easier said than done. For the last few years, I've been wearing this little necklace, and on it, it says slow down. I've mentioned this before, but I I got this necklace because I felt like this was God's word for me for, like, the next decade of my life. Some of y'all, you know, you get a word every year from God.
Alfredo Ramos:I get a year, or I get a word every 10 years from God. And so because and this happened because I realized the way that I have not loved my wife, my kids, the way that I hurt them the most is by rushing them, which is a bit ironic because if you're ever around me, I am like, chill, relax. I'm a peaceful person on Enneagram. I'm anything but going fast. Right?
Alfredo Ramos:But inwardly, I I treat you, I react to you with this kind of rushing pace as if I'm trying to control and dictate the way you grow, and I don't give you time. And so simply wearing this has been a reminder for me that God has been always patient with Fredo. It's just kinda weird to talk about myself in the 3rd person, so we'll move on, But let me just ask you, who in your life is God calling you to love by giving them the time they need right now? Who in your life needs your time, needs your patience, needs your ability to respond with goodness? Who?
Alfredo Ramos:Think about them. This is love not in the abstract, but in the actual world. Love in real life. Who needs time from you right now as a demonstration of love? Because have you ever noticed how much harder it is to dislike someone when you've been patient story we have not heard yet.
Alfredo Ramos:Come on. That's story we have not heard yet. Come on. That's enough for us to chew on, man. The Quakers got it right.
Alfredo Ramos:They got no electricity, but they got some wisdom. Right? An enemy is one whose story we have not heard yet. The practice and the art of listening becomes such a gift of allowing us to better understand someone, to move an enemy to a friend, to be a better demonstration of love. The question is, have you been patient long enough to actually hear them, to know what's going on?
Alfredo Ramos:There's this incredible story, Stephen Covey in his book, 7 Habits of a Highly Effective Person. I think I got the title right. If you've read the book, you might be familiar with the story I'm about to tell, but he talks about one morning, early Sunday, he gets on the subway train. He lives in New York City. The train's empty, which is a rare thing in New York City, and he's just enjoying the quietness.
Alfredo Ramos:He's reading a book. His heads down, and all of a sudden, a family gets on the train. A dad and his young kids get on the train, and they just start running amok, running up and down the aisles, causing a stir so much so that people who are sitting next to Steven, they get up and they go to another cart. And at one point, Steven kinda just loses his patience, and he realized the kids are wrestling on the ground, which the ground of a subway car is not clean. You know, it's Pucci La Mano for sure down there, and he tell he turns to the man, and he says, listen.
Alfredo Ramos:Like, can you get your kids? And the dad gets out of this phase. He said, oh my gosh. I'm so sorry. You know, we just left the hospital.
Alfredo Ramos:Their mom just died. Immediately, his impatience moves to love. Why is that? Because he's listened. There was enough time for him to raise an issue that led him to better understand what this person was working through.
Alfredo Ramos:Their mom just died. Let the kids run. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, only love gets close enough to know. Only love gets close enough to know. Patience is a way in to know someone and to give them the gift of time because, after all, this is what God has done for us.
Alfredo Ramos:Hear these words from 2nd Peter 3. The lord is not slow in keeping his promise. Not slow as some understand with, slowness, he said. Instead, he's patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. That's right.
Alfredo Ramos:He's patient with you. Romans 2, Paul said it like this elsewhere, do you, don't you see how wonderfully kind, tolerant, and patient God is with you? And then Paul asked a question like this. Do you does this mean anything to you? Does it mean nothing to you?
Alfredo Ramos:Can't you see that his kindness is intended to turn you from your sin? God is slow to anger. He gives you the time so that you might come to the realization of how patient he's been with you. Like, how many times have you said sorry for the same thing to God or to your spouse or to your children? How many times?
Alfredo Ramos:I I remember vividly the moment I came to Christ crying in my room, and what had me most broken was replaying my life before me. I was 21, so there's only 21 years to play through, And what stuck out to me the most was that in every year of my disobedience, of my rebellion, God was there being patient. Yeah. Yeah. Patient.
Alfredo Ramos:I attended a Christian school. I learned bible verses, laughed them off. What was God doing? He was being patient. Patient.
Alfredo Ramos:As Paul said, patient to the point that it might lead me to a place of repentance and change. And so as we begin this series, love is, the first invitation for us today is to realize the ways in which God has been patient with you, has watched you in your rebellion, in your pride, in your sin, and know what his response has been goodness towards you. So that you might see how much time God has given you now that you might turn and say this is the time. This is the time to change. This is the time for me to receive the gift of God's patience in my life and in turn give it to others.
Alfredo Ramos:Love is patient. Love is kind. We are not here today had God not been patient with us. That's right. The good news is you are here today.
Alfredo Ramos:So who will you give that patience to? Who will that kindness go towards? Let's pray together. Father, we thank you for your patience. God, we thank you that you are the demonstration of sacrificial love and that in so doing you give us the time to grow, to become who you see us in all that we can be in Jesus.
Alfredo Ramos:And so we ask now, God, that your loving patience would transform us, that it would lead us to a place of confession and repentance where we might turn and say thank you, We might give this kind of love to other people. We should do this work in us now. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.