Tags
Related Posts
Share This
The Summer of Love part 3: Love Is for Losers
[audio:LoveIsForLosers.mp3|titles=Love Is For Losers|artists=Christian St John]
Download this Podcast
Recorded July 18, 2010
My notes:
For the past two week’s we have been looking at love and so far we have seen that love is the very heart of God and defines who God is and that love should also define who we are as believers.
Well this week I want to continue my Summer of Love series and look at why I believe Love is for Losers.
What comes to mind when I say the word loser? Do you get the image of someone who doesn’t quite have it all together? Or maybe you are thinking about those who are middle aged and still living at home with their mother. And what about those people who back in school got locked in their lockers and had more swirlys than Slurpees.
Well today I’m not looking at that kind of loser… and if you thought any of the above you should be ashamed of yourselves. No, today I am going to look at those who have lost love… the losers in love if you will.
One of the hardest things that anyone will go through is losing love. And as anyone who’s ever lost love will tell you it feels like your heart has been ripped out of your chest. When this happens it’s easy to say things like, ‘I’m never going to love again,’ or ‘It’s just not worth it.’
And there are many, many people in this world, too many people, who have lost love and been hurt, and have spent their entire lives refusing to love again. And this includes many believers.
A recent survey claims that up to 35% of adults in North America have never been in love and that 48% of adults have never felt truly loved in any form. A whopping 76% of people who have lost love said they would never love again with up to 25% making good on their promise.
In the church 40% of people said they have not experienced brotherly love and it is predicted that over 15% of these people will leave the church never to look back. If you take nothing else from this series please remember this… the church is supposed to love. Forget our programs and plans and ministries and outreach programs, if the church doesn’t have love it has nothing and will accomplish nothing.
Proverbs 20:6 ‘Many a man claims to have unfailing love, but a faithful man who can find?’
The truth is when you fall in love, when you have good friendships, when family life is going well there never seems to be any reason to question love. And it’s easy when things are going well to say the words I love you. However, it would seem that many times when the going gets tough, a lot of people choose to simply walk away instead of hanging in there.
And one question remains… where’s the faithfulness?
Hands up all of you here today who have lost love and been hurt by those you love… do you remember how you felt when that happened. It wasn’t a nice feeling was it? In fact it hurt and you ached in places you never thought possible.
When I was a boy I fell in love with a girl who lived a couple of doors down from me. We did everything together… making mud pies, playing soccer, knocking on doors and running away… I was in love. Then a new boy moved into our street and she dumped me for him. I remember feeling abandoned and confused, and I said right there and then ‘I will never love another girl again.’
Ok, I was only five years old when this happened and thankfully I have learned to love again, but there are many people who because they get hurt never find it in themselves to love in this way again.
Over the years I have put a lot of thinking into what it means to love and I believe that…
If we are to truly love others then we need to begin by first loving ourselves:
Do you love yourself, not just like yourself, but truly love yourself? We sometimes take it for-granted that people have no problem loving themselves and that everyone should get with the program when God tells us to love one another.
Have you ever tried to do something that you don’t believe in, something that you have no heart for? The fact is, if you don’t believe in love how are you to ever share love. Likewise, if you don’t or can’t love yourself there is no way you can truly love others.
One of the most fundamental things for a Christian to do is love, but for many people love is a nice idea but something they themselves have never experienced. Either that or they have been hurt under the pretence of love.
The other side of this is people find it hard to love themselves due to things like low self esteem and maybe even religious beliefs… whatever the reason my point is this, there are those among us, maybe even here among us today, who have problems loving others because they have never felt they are worthy of love.
There are also those of us who find it hard to love because they don’t like where loving others takes them. The Bible tells us to love our enemies. To love and pray for those who use and abuse us. But how realistic is this expectation placed on us by God?
We argue that God loves because He’s God. But how fair is it for God to expect that we love in the same way as He?
Proverbs 17:17 tells us that ‘A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.’
Last week we looked at how we are to embrace brotherly love as a way of life, and how we are to value one another not just as fellow believers, but loving one another as close as brothers and sisters.
Proverbs 17:17 shows us that we are to love at all times and that we are to care for each other at all times even when we are faced with difficult situations, including when love is lost. Families will argue and fight and have disagreements and fall out with one another, but the sign of a good family is that they love at all times and are there for one another even in the hard times of life.
Life is not fair and lost love shows us this. But God calls us to love even when we have seemingly lost love.
Let’s take a closer look at this.
One of the problems with loving others is that Love calls us to become vulnerable:
If you’ve ever been in love you’ll know that to truly love one has to allow the other person in for the relationship to work. If one or both in the relationship is standoffish then that relationship will probably not work.
But we don’t like to be vulnerable. Because this means that we have to let down guards and let people in. And the worst thing is by allowing people in we run the risk of being hurt at some point, and no-one likes to be hurt.
Every time we choose to love someone we are putting ourselves out there because at any moment things can change. People fall out of love, things are said, life takes a twist and a turn and BAM! We find ourselves on the tail end of lost love.
A few years ago there was a revealing report in a popular magazine that had a story on the toy industry. It was revealed that toy makers take a big interest in the divorce rates. Why do toy makers watch the divorce rate? When it rises, so do toy sales. According to analyzers employed by the toy makers, when parents get divorced toy sales go up… instead of two parents and four grandparents, four parents and eight grandparents tend to compete for the child’s affections, so buy many more toys.
When it comes to love humans can be so fickle.
But God calls us to love regardless and by doing so He calls us to be willing to become vulnerable. God knows we could get hurt because He knows what it is to be hurt in such a way.
Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane was betrayed by one follower and abandoned by the rest. These are people He had spent three years with. He had travelled with them, walked and talked and joked with them. He had loved them and they had loved him. And yet when things began to look really grim they hightailed it out of there with their tails between their legs.
So God understands our dilemma to love or not to love. But ultimately and good news for us, He chose to love regardless of our predisposition to being double-minded. In fact Scripture tells us that ‘God is faithful even when we are faithless.’ He loves us even when we don’t deserve it and in His grace loves us us with an unfailing love.
We are called to love even those who have hurt us:
Scripture tells us that love is the fulfilment of the law (Romans 13:10) and in John 15:17 Jesus said, ‘This is my command: Love each other.’
Now I can love those who love me… maybe… if they are loveable. But what about those people who are unlovable? Do I have to love them?
And what about those people who do bad things and cause me to stumble and fall? And what about him and her and them and those I don’t get on with and see eye to eye with?
If the truth be told and if we were to be brutally honest we would all probably be able to come up with a long list of people that are hard to love. And we try and justify not having anything to do with them.
But we are called to love. Not just the loveable… even our enemies.
Jesus had many enemies. And even today in this day and age He still has many enemies. And yet the Word tells us that He loves all people regardless of whether they love Him back.
There is one thing that we tend to forget in this world of fleeing love, love that is here today and gone tomorrow, that love is a choice.
I have lost count at the amount of times I have told a couple facing problems that love is a choice. We choose to love. And this is something that is debatable. God chose to love us, so we should chose to love Him and love others as He chooses to love them.
Life is filled with choices and when we become believers we are encouraged to love. No-one is going to force us to love, how can you love under such pressure? But we are called to love and therefore we should choose to love.
But what if it goes pair-shaped and we lose love? What if I become a loser of love? I’ve been there before and I don’t want to go down that road again.
Part of love is choosing to continue loving even when we have been hurt.
The thing is if we base all of our experiences on one experience then we will probably never love again. The first time I visited the Coast I hated it and I couldn’t wait to go home to the Valley. But I didn’t let that one bad experience dictate my future choices. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here today.
When we let one bad experience in love cloud any future chances to love we are not considering that not all people are the same. Not everyone is out to get us or rip us off or hurt us.
But what about those that do rip us off or hurt us in some way, can we stop loving them? Does God stop loving us when we do wrong things? True love is choosing to love others even when they have hurt us.
Another reason why we get hurt in love is because sometimes we place too many high expectations of people. Brothers and sisters we need to remember one thing from all of this, and that is if we choose to love, we will get hurt and we will hurt others. But through it all we must never give up on love.
Because Scripture tells us that love never gives up on us. The world may look at us and call us losers, because it’s counter cultural to love without limits, to love even our enemies.
We may risk losing love, but if we choose to walk with God we will never truly lose love. And if we choose to love others regardless of whether they love us back we are choosing to not only walk in God’s ultimate will, but also in His love.
And the love of God has and will continue to change lives.
Many years ago a poorly dressed boy walked several miles through the snowy streets of Chicago, determined to attend a Bible class that was conducted by D.L. Moody. When he arrived, he was asked, “Why did you come to a Sunday school so far away? Why didn’t you go to one of the many churches near your home?” The boy simply answered, “Why? Because here I know I am loved.”