Dr. Scott McKee: Last month I officiated a wedding in our chapel here, and, it's not uncommon for people to cry at weddings, but rarely is it the officiant. I didn't even know this couple very well, but there's one part of the service I got especially choked up. We got to that part of the ceremony where the bride and groom repeat after me their vows line by line. I take you, I take you to be my wife, to be my wife, and I promise, and I promise before God and these witnesses, before God and these witnesses to be your loving and faithful husband, to be your loving and faithful husband. And this is the part that got me in plenty and in want, in joy and sorrow.
Is sickness needed health as long as we both should live? And I was so struck by the by the power and the beauty of those words. And I thought this beautiful young couple have no idea what they are saying. They have no idea how these vows will play out over the next fifty years. How could they?
They love each other today for sure, but they haven't begun to understand the cost of love, the sacrifice of commitment. Over the last forty days, we have been talking about love. Not not marital love in particular, but love in general. How do we become better lovers of God and better lovers of people? How do we love like Jesus loved?
And today we're gonna focus on the eternal eternal and lasting nature of God's love. The eternal and lasting nature of God's love. The Bible says that nothing, not even death, can separate us from the love of God. And I find that comforting. And we are to love as God loves.
Jesus said, my command is this, love each other as I have loved you. And we are to love as Jesus loves. We are to love as God loves. That means reliable, unchanging, consistent, steadfast, unwavering, eternal, enduring love. Now how do you do that?
Euripides once said, it's not real love unless it's eternal. Is that possible? God's love is eternal. Can human love be eternal? Can human love even last the entire course of a lifetime?
I think it was Mark Twain who once said, You don't really understand perfect love until you've been married at least a quarter century. I think there is some wisdom in that. By show of hands, anybody here who's been married for twenty five years or more? Anybody in that category? Okay, a lot of people.
Anybody forty years or more? Okay. And how about if you're if you've been married or even if your spouse is in heaven now? Anybody? Do we have any fifty year marriages?
Anybody? We do. With a fifty year people please stand up. Fifty years of marriage. Now would you please come forward and teach this morning's lesson?
Yeah, thank you, you can sit down. Anybody married fifty years will tell you it was a piece of cake. It was so easy. They will not say that, what will they say? It took tremendous work and sacrifice.
I wanna be careful here because not all marriages can last fifty years. Not all marriages can be saved. Not all relationships can be reconciled. And I'm so glad to be part of a church that figured out a long time ago to suspend judgment and to move with compassion to those who know the pain of divorce. And those of you who have been divorced have a special challenge.
How do I love when I've been wronged? And Jesus knows something about that too. His love was consistent and unmerited. He loved till the end. He loves now.
And that is our goal, to love like Jesus loved. In this final session, we're gonna look at how to love for the long haul. We've been working our way through the famous love chapter of the Bible, Paul's writing in one Corinthians 13, we read it earlier. And today we're gonna hone in on verse seven. This is our verse of the day.
Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. And that is the four point outline of this morning's talk. Love always protects. Love always trusts. Love always hopes.
Love always perseveres. First, Paul says, love always protects. Love's instinct is to protect. When my kids were little, the school bus would stop on the main road and all the kids in the subdivision had to walk out to the school bus. And some of the moms got to talking that it would be better if that lazy bus driver would just pull into the subdivision, it wouldn't take much more time, and it would be a lot safer for the kids to board the bus.
And these mothers got each other really cranked up. And one morning, Angie came in and said, the moms have been talking, and they decided that I should talk to the bus driver. I don't know why they chose me. I had not been involved in the conversation. I don't like conflict.
I can only imagine this was a long time ago. Can only imagine that maybe there was something where the bus driver was a man, and maybe they thought this kind of conversation should be handled man to man, and they just got the manliest man they could think of. So I prepared for battle. I organized my arguments. I prepared my speech.
I practiced my intimidating vocal inflection. And the next morning, the kids got on the bus, and all the moms gathered outside the bus like an angry mob. And I got my signal that it was time to make my move, and I boarded the bus. And I thought about saying to the bus driver, look out the window at those women. I'm here to save your life, man.
But instead I just said, Hey, if it's all the same, would you mind pulling into the subdivision to pick up and drop off kids? Just get off the main road and pull into the subdivision. And he said, Okay. I said, okay. He said, yeah, can do that.
I've got a much longer speech if you wanna hear it. I don't wanna get off the bus too early that moms would think I didn't do my job. Eventually I got off and I said to the moms, ladies it took some convincing, but eventually he saw it my way. I think everybody here has experienced the mama bear protective instincts over somebody that we love. Where you will fight and do battle and do anything to protect them.
I feel protected for my wife and for my kids. I feel it for my friends and for my church. I've had people feel protective over me, over my schedule, over my health. Love's instinct is to create places of physical and emotional safety. This is why physical and emotional abuse in relationships is so devastating, it violates one of love's key principles, love always protects.
A while ago, read a quote by Dinah Mollic Kraic. She's a novelist and a poet of the nineteenth century. She said, Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts or measure words, but pouring all of them out just as they are, chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep the wheat that is worthwhile, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away. In a fellowship where there is love, people will do almost anything to protect the other person. If you had a love that lasts a lifetime, be a safe person always.
Secondly, the Apostle Paul says, love always trusts. And this is gonna be the one we're gonna have the most difficulty with today. Trust is difficult, especially when it's been violated. There are three kinds of people in the world. There are gullible people who will believe anything.
You could tell them anything they will believe you. Did you know the word gullible is not in the dictionary? Anybody ever fall for that one before? Gullible people believe anything. And then there's the cynics who believe nothing.
They are suspicious, they're cynical, they won't believe anything no matter how much evidence you give them. And they're the gullibles and the cynics. And then there's the healthy people who love and who give people the benefit of the doubt. Now do you think it's possible to be too trusting? You can say it.
Yes, it is possible to be too trusting. Do you think it's wiser to be more toward the cynical side of the spectrum, overly cynical, or is it wiser to be overly trusting? Which do you think is better? Yes, if you said overly cynical, you are wrong, because every single psychological study says it's far better to be over trusting in life than to be overly cynical. It's far better to trust too much.
This question was studied in numerous studies. Psychology Today magazine reported about this in an article called Trust and its Consequences. Doctor. Julian Roder of the University of Connecticut spent years studying the consequences of trust in human behavior, personality development, and relationships. He developed a scale to determine the person's level of trust in their life, and then he compared how trusting a person compared with 10 different common behaviors for healthy living.
And to give you the results, I will put it in kind of a true false test. True or false, trusting people tend to be more gullible. True or false? Study says false. Trusting people are less gullible.
People do not pull the wool over their eyes. True or false? Trusting people tend to have a lower IQ. False, in this day, it's your trusting people actually have a higher IQ. True or false, trusting people live happier lives.
Absolutely true, they live much happier lives than cynical, questioning, suspicious people. True or false? Gullible is not in the dictionary. That is false. Let's not be ridiculous.
The study suggests that trusting people live much happier lives than do cynical, questioning, suspicious people. It's better to trust too much than to trust too little. And one of the key evidences of trust is your willingness to give people a second chance when they blow it. How quick are you willing to give people a second chance? When somebody turns you the wrong way or says something, about you, and you write them in your little black book and say, I'm never going back to that group.
I'm never going back to that ministry. I'm going to unfriend them on Facebook. I'm going to avoid that neighbor. And when you're not trusting them, you're also not loving them because love gives people a second chance. Anyone who's coached kids athletics, and we know we have a lot of coaches at our church, anyone who has coached kids athletics know the quickest way to restore a kid's confidence after a fumble is to give him the ball at the very next play.
Otherwise, kid gets a phobia, am going to drop the ball again, I am going to drop the ball again. The quickest way to restore confidence in a failure is to put trust in them immediately. Yes, you dropped the ball, but we're going give it to you right now. You have another chance to do it. God says, you want to build a lasting relationship, you're going to have to learn how to trust.
And you might say, but I cannot trust this other person. And if that's true, then I recommend you trust God. If you cannot trust your husband or wife right now, you need to trust because God knows what He's doing. And if you put your trust in God, He can do things in that other person's life that you are unable to do. You trust God when you can't trust that person because God knows it all.
And then Paul says, love always hopes. Love always hopes. The ancient world was devoid of hope. In Acts 16, Paul makes this great turn in his ministry when he gets this vision of the man in Macedonia asking Paul to come and help in this area that would include Greece. If there's one area of the world that was thought not to need any help, it was Greece.
The Greek culture was thought to have everything. They had the great philosophers, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates. They had great architecture, the Pantheon, this great temple that still marvels people today. They had arts, they had athletics, they had stadiums. One classical historian said of the Greeks that anything the Greeks needed, they had invented.
Anything they wanted, they had. But this writer was wrong. There's one thing they did not have, They did not have hope. And because they didn't have hope, they gave themselves to all kinds of sensual indulgences. That is true in their culture.
It is true in ours. The historian Matthew Arnold put it this way, On that sad pagan world, disgust and secret loathing fell. Deep weariness and seated lust made life a human hell. As Paul said, they were without God and they were without hope. And if there's one city in Greece that typified the hopelessness of Greek of Greece, it was Corinth, this thriving metropolitan port city located between two main bodies of water.
At the center of the city was a temple to the goddess Aphrodite, the goddess of sexual love and fertility. And at one time at the temple, it's reported there were between 5,010 temple prostitutes to do her bidding. And with that number of prostitutes, you can guess it was a very popular religion for the sailors who would port at Corinth. Corinth was thought to be morally downgraded place. A Corinthian was understood as someone without morals.
It was thought of as a place with thieves and robbers and sexual perversion. It was moral darkness without hope. And then one day a little Jewish man from Tarsus strolls into town and goes to the marketplace. And by his own admission, he was feeling very weak. He did not feel up to speaking into the darkness a word of hope, but he did.
And I imagine at first, the Corinthians kind of wrote him off or maybe laughed at him, but eventually they stayed and they listened to the message that he proclaimed, Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ crucified. And somehow, eventually, this message grabbed ahold of them. These people cast themselves with reckless abandon upon God's grace and truth, and they were changed. They were legitimately changed. They saw the error of their ways and they began to place their hope in Jesus Christ.
Paul called them to a higher way of living and being and they rose to it. Paul believed in them. Hope says people can change. Hope says people can experience freedom from sin. Hope is believing that the impossible is possible with God.
Hope believes the best and calls people to a better future. Bruce Wilkinson tells a story about his experience as a first time college professor. The faculty were gathered, handing out class assignments for the semester, and one of his colleagues looked over at Bruce's assignments and said, Oh, Bruce, you're a lucky dog. You got two Section A classes. And Bruce said, What is a Section A class?
Section As are the brightest students in the university. They are advanced placement. Every year we figure out who the best kids are from test scores, and we put them in Section A classes. They are a joy to teach. They are smart, they are bright, they are funny, they are engaged, they want to learn.
You are going love teaching those classes, and you are so lucky to get two of them as a first time professor. And Bruce Wilkinson says, this was really true the whole year, said, I absolutely love teaching those kids. They were so much more fun than their classes. They were smarter, they were brighter, they asked better questions, they were more intelligent, they could handle more weighty assignments. It was a joy to teach Section A classes.
At the end of the semester, the faculty gathered together to get the assignments for the next semester, and Bruce made the comment, Man, I hope I get some Section A classes this semester. And a supervisor said, Bruce, there are no Section A classes. Bruce said, Oh yeah, there are. Somebody told me about them last semester. No, Bruce, we canceled that program six years ago.
And Bruce said, I couldn't believe it. He went back to his grade books to test, and sure enough, his Section A classes got more As, the other classes got more Bs and Cs. But then he did the real test and he reread the term papers. And the term papers in the Section A classes were actually objectively better papers. They wrote longer, they wrote more, they put more into it.
Bruce said, I set them up with my higher expectations, and they rose to it. French, who are you setting up with your expectations? You can set people up with nagging, which takes people down. Why do you always do this? And when we say things like that, all we are doing is guaranteeing the perpetuation of the past.
Don't tell it like it is, tell it like it could be. That's love. Love always expects the best. Love does not nag. Love says, I see what you could become.
I see what you're becoming. I believe in you. I expect the best. Love always hopes. And lastly, Paul says, love always perseveres.
When I was in the hospital, I was on the phone with my wife Angie, when the nurse walked in, and I said to Angie, look, I've got to call you back. In a few minutes, the nurse just walked in, I love you baby. And I hung up. And the young nurse said to me, how long have you been married? I said, thirty three years.
She said, oh, that's terrific. What's the secret? She said. What advice would you give to this younger generation who hopes to be married someday? And I thought about repeating something I overheard a guy say one time at a Coney Island.
It was his anniversary and his buddies were asking him, what's the secret? And he said, guys, I learned a long time ago, I don't try to control her life and I don't try to control mine. But instead, without much time to think about an answer, I simply said to her, just don't give up. Just never give up. And she said, oh, that's great.
I don't think my generation is very good at that. She said, thank you. She said, love asking that question. This last part got hurt. She said, whenever I meet an old person, I ask that question.
Well, if you really want advice, don't call people old people. Perseveres. Love is persistent. It is determined. It is diligent.
It is resolute. It is almost stubborn in its insistence that it will not give up. It will not give up on the relationship. One of the great secrets of a lasting love is simply this, don't give up. Hang in there.
Refuse to give in. And I think maybe God brought some of you here today to tell you that. There are things you will learn from hanging in there that you will never learn any other way. The purpose of marriage and friendship and Christian community is not just to make you happy, but to make you holy and to make you more thoughtful of others and less thoughtful of yourself. Great people just don't know how to to quit.
As we've been learning together, learning to love is the single greatest lesson in life. Jesus said, love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. And the second is like it, love your neighbor as yourself. And Jesus didn't just teach this, He modeled it. He embodied it.
And He told us to do the same. As we wrap up this series on Loving Like Jesus, I want to remind you of God's eternal love for you. This love that always protects, always trusts, always hopes and always perseveres is the love that God has for you. God protects you more than you know. God has watched over you since the day you were born, even when you were in seasons of recklessness and foolishness.
God is trustworthy and He places trust in you. He is the God of the second chance. And our God is all about hope. He knows what you're capable of. He doesn't nag you about it, but He says, this is what I see in you.
And God's love for you endures through all your rebellion and throughout all time. Nothing can separate you from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. Nothing. I'm grateful for the enduring and eternal love of God. And I've been thinking a little more recently about eternity.
I was reading recently a blog for cancer patients. And I was discussing some of the language used that people use to encourage someone who has cancer. And the debate was really around some of the battle imagery that's often used. Right? You're in the battle of your life.
Keep fighting. You're a warrior. Fight on. And the concern was that once you describe it as a battle, it necessitates there be a winner and a loser to every battle. And often an announcement is given, something's published, and it says, Tom lost his battle with cancer.
He fought bravely, but he lost. And some cancer patients are saying, I don't want the last thing said about me is that I lost, that I'm a loser. And Tom didn't fight his battle any less hard than anybody else. It wasn't Tom's lack of effort or courage that ended his life. It was just the nature of the disease.
Now other cancer patients reported they found the battle language quite helpful in motivating them to stick with the treatments and to endure the side effects. Personally, when my obituary is written someday, I hope that it will not say that I lost. And if the battle imagery is going to be used, I would prefer I say something like this: After a long battle, cancer was unable to take away Scott's joy. But cancer put up quite a fight, but it was never able to diminish Scott's faith. And when Scott took his final breath, and it looked like cancer had won, against all odds, Scott stood up because the same power that rose Jesus from the dead was at work in him.
And now Scott stands victorious, untouchable by cancer, physically incorruptible, healed and whole. O death, where is thy sting? The love of God goes on forever. And the ripple effect of our loving effects go on forever. In the end only three things remain.
Faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these. Let's pray. Oh God, you are love, inexpressible and eternal. Help us to be transformed by your love and to share it with others.
This we pray in the life giving name of our true hope Jesus. Amen.