Love Is Something You Do

The preacher begins by interpreting Jesus’ command to love God and neighbor as a call to action rather than a mere feeling. Using Matthew 22:35‑40, he emphasizes that love is a commanded practice, illustrated by his recent experience at the Campus Crusade for Christ conference in Arrowhead Springs. There he was reminded that world evangelism remains possible and that the Great Commission is a practical mandate: believers are to go, preach, baptize, and disciple, empowered by modern media. He urges the congregation to start locally—first in Houston, then in surrounding cities—by employing simple evangelistic tools that can lead each person to win three souls a day, and he announces a September 10‑12 Lay Institute for Evangelism to train members in these methods. The sermon then shifts to the source of love’s power, the Holy Spirit, asserting that without the Spirit we can do nothing. He connects self‑respect, love for God, and love for neighbor, explaining that healthy self‑esteem is biblical and essential for mental health. He distinguishes the various Greek words for love, culminating in agape—the self‑sacrificial love that flows from the Spirit. By acting lovingly toward others, even those we dislike, the preacher claims the feeling of love will follow, and he illustrates this with stories from Dr. Bill Bright’s youth outreach and other cultural observations. The overall message is that love is an active, Spirit‑empowered command that transforms individuals and communities.

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Houston's First Baptist Church is a relevant biblical community where we gather our hearts, grow our souls and give our lives as we seek to fulfill the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19-20). This podcast provides weekly messages from Pastor Gregg Matte and others. Visit us at HoustonsFirst.org to learn more about HFBC, and visit us in person the next time you're in Houston!

Matthew chapter 22, verse 35. If I were to title this sermon this morning, it would be, Love is Something You Do. We think that love is something you feel, but according to the words of our Lord, love is something you do. Matthew 22, verse 35. Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him and saying, Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy mind and with all thy soul. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Allow me to parenthetically re -say that for you and make the two verses one. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and thy neighbor as thyself. Love is commanded. It is not merely felt. It is done. This week it was made possible on the second week of our vacation for my wife and I to spend a wonderful holiday resting and have a tremendous spiritual treat all at the same time. We attended the Campus Crusade for Christ world headquarters in the beautiful mountains in San Bernardino. There in Arrowhead Springs near San Bernardino in California, I realized and crystallized in my mind a new three very important things. One, that world evangelism is still a possibility. World evangelism is still a possibility. It is not harder to get people saved than it's ever been. It is not harder to introduce people to Christ than it's ever been. It's harder to get them to church to hear the gospel. It's harder to get Christians to go out and tell them about Christ. But people have never been as hungrily interested in the gospel of Christ as now. Jesus will never command people to do something that cannot be done. Again, there are no ridiculous commands in the Bible. There are no foolish statements. There are no words that are superfluous. The Great Commission says we are to go in all the world, preach the gospel, teach them, baptize them, and win all men to Christ. In other words, the task of world evangelism, winning people to Christ, indoctrinating them, making them solid in the faith, in the church, in the word of God, is commanded by our Lord Jesus Christ. Now, would he tell us to do something that could not be done? He said, these works that I do shall ye do and greater. Many times I have said to you that our Lord limited himself to the limitations of a man. He could have acted as God, but for 33 years he was God acting as man. He prayed, he worked, he disciplined himself, he paid the price, he had power with his Father, and did great works. And he said, you can do the very same thing and greater. And I submit to you that we can. With radio and television and the printed page and all of the genius and the mechanics of the 20th century, we can do these things and more. World evangelism is a possibility. But you and I are not going to win the whole world. We are not commanded to win the whole world. We are commanded to win the city of Houston. I believe that with all of my heart. And I believe the people in Galveston are to win Galveston to Christ. And those in Amarillo are to share Christ there. You and I are one by one to start where we are. The Campus Crusade people have developed a wonderful technique, a physical little tool that you can learn and memorize. And I believe with all my heart that using it, even with a halfway consistency, I can personally win to Christ three people every day. You just almost can't miss. Yes, I believe each of us could win 21 persons to Christ every week if we wanted to. I went out and did it. Others went out and did it. It is possible to do. The young people invaded the beaches and presenting the four spiritual laws and using it as a simplified tool by which men could be taught to come to Christ. One thousand teenagers went out in one afternoon on the beaches and won one thousand other teenagers to faith in Christ. It can be done. Men that had never done it were being taught how. Mark this date. September the 10th. Remember it. Write it down in your Bible. Circle it on your calendar. Forget everything else. Miss anything else we do if you must choose this year. But don't miss September 10th. For on that night through the 12th, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday here in our church we will be sponsoring a citywide institute for the Lay Institute for Evangelism re -teaching you how to do it. You will actually have the opportunity in a dummy experience of winning someone already a Christian to Christ right next to you in the auditorium. You'll go through it. You'll practice until you've got it. It'll become a way of life. It'll become a part of you. You'll realize you can do it and you will be amazed. And in those three days I believe that hundreds of you can win your first soul to Christ. Don't miss it. The second thing that I recrystallized in my mind is that the power that comes for us to be able to do this work is the power of the Holy Spirit. Jesus said, without me ye can do nothing. Something that is not. Something that does not exist. Absolutely nothing. The power for service comes from the Holy Spirit. He is not a commuter. We pray erroneously when we pray, Lord, send the Holy Spirit. He doesn't come and go. He abides in us. He lives in our hearts by faith. And the third word is that this, that the power to experience the fullness of the Holy Spirit, love and live in a plane of higher ground. A way of life that is different can be experienced by faith. We love by faith. We pray by faith. We are saved by faith. I've never seen Jesus Christ, and yet I love him. I've never seen God, yet I believe in him. Now, our Lord Jesus Christ reminded me very strongly of three things that I know. That is, that we can win people to Christ, the Holy Spirit of God empowers us to do it, and the compassion that this world needs to be saturated with love comes by that power of the Holy Spirit. Frankly, I like every kind of music. I'm not too hip on rock and roll simply because the musicianship is a bit thin. I mean, it doesn't take very long to play, learn three chords on a guitar. But I would be less than honest if I did not say that I really do like just about every kind of music. My radio goes all the time when I'm out. I like to listen to just about everything. Music expresses the thought. It says what people are thinking, and a church that's in the people -helping business needs to know what people are thinking. You know what people are thinking today? They're thinking love. That's the big word, love. What the world needs now is love, love, love. I long since learned the words to that song. I like it. I believe in its philosophy. Jesus Christ commands us to love. He says, thou shalt. Now mark these words. There are a lot of people who reject the commandments because they begin, thou shalt. God specifically tells us some things to do. Now one day the disciples came to our Lord and said, which of these commandments is the most important? Which one is the greatest? And he began with the commandment, with these words, thou shalt, and he put three into one. And he says, thou shalt love. Three expressions of love follow. The Lord thy God, thy neighbor as thyself. Now, when I look at these words, I'm confused. Is Jesus Christ commanding me to have an emotion? Is he commanding me to turn on and off emotion as though he goes around and says, hate this one, love this one, envy that one? Is it possible to command emotion? At first, it seems that that is what our Lord is saying. But he is not saying, thou shalt emote. He is saying, thou shalt love. Consider these three words. It's a homiletic natural. Number one, it is normal to love yourself. Jesus says, thou shalt love the Lord thy God and thy neighbor, but shame on you if you love yourself. Now a lot of Christians have believed that that's what religion's all about. That's not what Jesus said. He did not command, rebuke men for that. To the contrary, he said it's normal. It is normal to love yourself. Now these people who go around talking about how they hate themselves and how bad they are probably have a lot of complexes and are really trying to announce to us how they love themselves. One of the most important healthy mental attitudes is a good, normal, healthy self -respect. Not only are we not to dislove ourselves, but if we do, we will find that we develop all kinds of what the psychiatrists and psychologists call ego defense mechanisms. We must have a self we can live with. We must have a self -image of ourselves that we can tolerate, that we can accept, that we can respect. Before, if we really hate ourselves, we will do everything in the world. For example, many people are trying through overeating and through drinking and through many other things to actually kill themselves. They really are. A psychologist would tell you this because they do not like the monster that they are. And so in trying to destroy themselves subconsciously, they are only making the problem worse and compounding their difficulty. Jesus said, you must love yourself. You must have a normal, healthy self -respect. We do everything in the world to try to defend our self -respect. Someone says, you've gained weight. We just say, no, I really haven't gained weight. It's you. Your eyesight is failing. You don't see me as I properly am. We do everything in the world to defend our self -respect. Mothers and dads, let me say this to you. That boy or girl of yours is going to develop all kinds of overt behavior, all kinds of difficulties in future life unless he grows up with a security of love that he belongs, he is important, he is wholesome, he is worthwhile, he's somebody, and you love him and admire him and respect him and accept him as he is. Instead of always cutting down your kids and putting them down and knocking them and criticizing them, give them the security of a good, healthy self -respect. Now, this is not to ignore discipline, but to say that there are many areas in which mothers and dads can be painfully aware and keenly aware of the difficulties that their children are having. And with compliments and love and encouragement, these youngsters can grow up with a good, healthy self -respect, which is absolutely imperative to proper mental health. The world is filled with all kinds of people who are going to all kinds of strange situations and ends to try to be someone, to have a self -respect, to be accepted by their fellows and accepted by themselves. Jesus said, it is normal to love yourself. Now, the second word is, it is wonderful to love God. He says, what's the greatest commandment? What is the most important thing in the world? Now, Jesus had taught the disciples many things. They, because of their Jewish background, every one of them, used the word command interchangeably with teachings. They were not referring simply to the Ten Commandments, although the answer came in that context. They were referring to the teachings of Christ, which is the greatest. And Jesus Christ, our Lord, summed up all of his dealings with men in one great teaching. Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and thy neighbor as thyself. It is wonderful, he says, to love God. Our new television program, which begins September the 5th on channel 39 at the four Saturdays, is going to be called Higher Ground. The 30 or 40 second opening format is going to show a busy, excited city of Houston and people in all kinds of traumatic situations and in the hubbub of life. And then they're going to come around the corner and walk in the doors of First Baptist Church, where hundreds of happy people are going to be worshiping and singing. And the fast beat of the drum will change immediately as you come through the doors on camera to the singing of the people on higher ground. This is what we're in the world for, to elevate people to a plane called Higher Ground. Jesus Christ loves me. The genius of Christianity is that it is centered in a person, Jesus Christ. This person comes to me just where I am, but he does not leave me there on the road of life. He lifts me. He elevates me. He transfers me to a new plane. That plane is called higher ground. We do not need to live an animalistic type of existence. There is a plane of living. There is higher ground. You can experience it if you will learn to love the Lord thy God with all your heart. And so he says in this great teaching of all of these teachings, it is normal to love yourself. It is wonderful to love God. And the third and last word is this. It is commanded. It is commanded that we love other people. Oh, I like that song that says what the world needs now is love, love, love. But I wonder if they understand what love really is. The theologians tell us there are several words for love in the Bible. There is storge, the love of a father for his children, a kind of a love that there is within a family. There is eros, the passionate love, the love between the sexes, phileo, brotherly love, in which the word Philadelphia comes, that we love others. Then there is agape, selfless love, the love of one unselfishly for another as God loves us. So many words for love. We talk about true love and true romance and true confession magazines. Certainly that's not the same quality of love as is God's love. Someone says, oh, I just love pizza. Well, they don't mean the same thing as when a man says, I just love you to his wife. There are different kinds of love. What the world needs now is not just love, sweet love. What the world needs now is God's love. But how can God's love be experienced through man? It comes by the fullness of the power of the Holy Spirit. Now remember that Jesus commands us to love people. Now at first, this just seems ridiculous to me. Here's somebody I don't really like. I find them obnoxious and repulsive, and I just don't like that person. But I can love them. It is possible to love what we do not like, and it is a command of our Lord. Now he who created human nature knows vastly more about it than do we, and he would not command us to do something we cannot do. He would not say hate this one, love this one, and expect us to run the gamut of every emotion and turn our feelings on and off. That's why I say that love is not just what we feel. Love is what we do. Love is acting kindly toward people regardless of how we feel about them and discovering, listen closely, the strange and wonderful truth that the emotion follows the feeling. I do counseling with people all of the time. In any kind of interpersonal relationship, whether a husband, wife, a brother, a sister, an employer, employee relationship, there are always problems of tension, always problems of emotions. I just don't like them. I can't get along with them. But he commands us that we love them. Now Jesus says to us, in other words, that if we act kindly toward people, if we act as though we love them, if our deeds express love, the emotion, the feeling of love will follow. Oftentimes people say to me in counseling a husband and wife problem, if I loved him, well enjoy the vacation, enjoy this experience or that, do this or that. I just can't. I don't love him. Meaning I cannot do, I cannot act because I do not feel. But Jesus says, if you do, then you will feel. We turn the horse and the cart, that's what we turn around actually. It's not really the cart and the horse, it's the horse and the cart is what it is. We turn them around and we say, oh, if I felt I could do. Jesus says, if you will do, then you'll feel. Now let me run that back again. All of us have people we do not like, but he commands us that we love them. He says, I command you to love your neighbor as yourself. Well, I can't command me to love somebody. He can't command me to love somebody. I don't like. He is saying, act as though you did and you will feel it. Oh, if I loved him, I would do so and so. If I loved her, I could so -and -so. Jesus says you do that so -and -so, that act of love, and you will be followed by the feeling of love. Love is what you do. Now, that being true, as a Christian, how do I get love? How do I go about sharing and spreading love in a home, in a business, in a family situation, in a community, in a world that so much needs love? This beautiful, wonderful well of love dwells in all of us in the person of the Holy Spirit of Christ. Now, he is grieved oftentimes by wrong acts into one corner of our heart and life. But he says if by surrender to him and by faith we can claim his fullness, he will give us the ability to change our acts. Then the different emotions will follow the doing. And so it is imperative that the Christian know the fullness of the Holy Spirit. He is the love giver. He is the love author. He, the love source. Turn with me quickly in your Bibles, please, to Galatians chapter 6, verse 5, verse 22. Galatians 5, verse 22. Just before Ephesians. Our Lord is speaking through his servant, the apostle, and he tells us what the result, the fruit, the end result of the Spirit of God in our lives is. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long -suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance. Against such there is no law. Is that the way you've always read that text? It's the way most of it. I want you, of us, to read it. I want you to go back and look at it again, however. He does not say the fruits of the Spirit are love, joy, peace. You see, when one says the fruit of the Spirit is and enlists a group of attributes, something seems to be wrong with the grammatical construction of the sentence. But the Holy Spirit never makes mistakes. The only mistake is that we have not placed a semicolon after the word love. The fruit of the Spirit is love. The fruit of the Spirit is not tongues. It is not temperance. It is not ecstasy. It is not works. It is not excitement. It is not temperance. The fruit of the Spirit is love. It is He who gives us the capacity to love. You see, our Lord placed us in a world that needs love. Believe me, this world does need love. The flower children are calling for love. The hippies are demonstrating for love. The world knows we need love. Our society is rebuking us to give them love. Now, how do we get love? By claiming the fullness of the Holy Spirit. Now, all of these are the manifestations of love. Let's look at it again. The fruit of the Spirit is love. Now, the results of love are these. All the ways that love manifests themselves. In us and through us. Love has many ramifications. The world needs love. We are commanded to love. We receive the capacity to recreate love through its many flowing channels by knowing the fullness of the Holy Spirit. The last night, second to last night that I was in Arrowhead Springs, I thought Dr. Bill Bright used some of the most tremendous wisdom that I'd ever seen in a man. He was speaking to the young people, and he told them that the new sign when the index finger is raised, where people say, one way, one way, one way, when people give you the victory sign and the peace sign, and we agree with them, yes, we want peace, raise the index finger, indicating that the one way to peace is Jesus Christ, that it must be given in love. Thousands of these young people were standing the last night as Dr. Bright spoke to speak, and they raised their fingers in unity and chanted, one way, one way, one way. I felt something of what he did. He said, young people, my heart chilled inside of me when I heard that because I sensed in you just a little tiny bit of resentment, of wrath being returned for wrath. He said it must not simply be one way. It must be one way, one way. In other words, it is a love way. It is not, it is not enemy action countered with further hostility. It is enemy action turned off, hostility turned away by love. It must be done in love. Dr. Bright said that he had gone into a riot. Young people were demonstrating, people were being attacked and slain, and the so -called peace movement was demonstrating everything but love and peace. And the flower children who talk about peace but know nothing of how to have peace apart from the love of God through Jesus Christ were rioting and people were being injured. He said he went over to one young man, a black boy. He said the boy had a knife in his hand, and Dr. Bright confronted him and put his arm around him and said, son, I want you to know that I am for everything you're for, justice, equality, brotherhood, love, and peace. And he said, I want you to know that I love you. And that the love I have in my heart for you is because of the love of God in Jesus Christ that liveth in me. And he said this boy literally melted before him. Now Dr. Bright added, had I gone to that boy in that hostile situation and said, I love you. And I really did not love him. He said that boy would have put that knife in my stomach. And that's the truth. The world needs love. But there is not just a philosophy that raises a finger and cries one way in Christian love behind a veneer and a cloak of anger that really is returning hostility for hostility. There is real love, the right kind of love that can only be expressed and realized through the fullness of the Spirit of God that lives within us. He gives love. It is only in knowing him and his fullness that you and I can go out and be spiritual resources spreading across in this loveless land, real love. The hippies, the flower children, they sing of love. They write their poems of love. They play their guitars to tunes of love. They write poetry of love. I went yonder to a group of hippies we saw on our vacation up in a little lake place, and I saw them bleary -eyed, a boy and a girl, as they snuck out of a store where they had stolen some things. And they put the things under their belts and snuck off to the other side where nobody would see them. I didn't say anything. I felt like calling the sheriff on them, but I figured that wouldn't be love either. And I thought, now that's really love. That's really love. You really know what love is. Stealing blind a man whose very life dependency is concerned with his ability to sell that merchandise. You see, it's good to talk about love, but they don't know how to love. They know nothing of love. It isn't just a philosophy. It is an experience. And if you're going to be able to really love, you must do it only by the fullness of the Holy Spirit of God. In one of the rock festivals in Palmetto, I think it was in California, the one in which the Black, the, uh, not the Black Panthers, the Hell's Angels were called in to, uh, protect the Rolling Stones in their concert. They lined up with guns under their belts and knives across the front, right there on stage in front of the cameras and the eyes of hundreds of thousands of teenagers with a new drug -oriented, sex -saturated, love -cult philosophy of life. As the stones sang and the hell's angels protected the singers, one of those hell's angels went over with a club right before hundreds of thousands of people as the man sang not ten feet from his feet and beat him to death. And the magazines all over the country now are heralding the awful irony and news of the thing. A life reporter said, an Esquire reporter said in their article, that one of the young women who was there said, Look at us. Look at us. We're out here with a new way of life for love and brotherhood and peace, and we have pulled out from society in rejection of society and recreated in miniature form all of society's ills in this concert. Hatred, injustice, wrath, selfishness, murder. She was right as she could be. 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