Recommended book.

1 Cor 13B -Characteristics of Love.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if all of us were just as these verses describe?

4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. (ESV)

·          We are not very good at changing ourselves.

·          Easy when all is going well for us and life is easy.

·          But when we have worries, pains, headaches, not sleeping - much more difficult!

·          Some people are more prone to these problems, and we therefore may judge them as not very loving.

·          But God alone knows the pressures each is under and He judges us justly and in love.

·          For the truth is that all love comes from Him.

Evolution and biology produce love?

·          Romantic love.

·          Mother for children.

·          Child for toy.

·          Man for his pleasures or career.

·          Might produce passions and infatuations but not that love that puts others before ourselves.

Agape.

·          That kind of love is only in the heart of God.

·          Only in so far as we choose to live from His life can we share in true love.

These words describe the love of God.

1.         2 things love does.

2.         8 things love does not do.

3.         4 things love does all the time.

1.         2 things love does.

Patient AND kind.

Patient Gk: Suffers long. You don't give up when trouble comes, but carry on.

Cynical proverb: He preacheth patience that never knew pain. HENRY GEORGE BOHN, Handbook of Proverbs

• But God suffers long!
• Cross opens out into all of history.
• Gen 6: God's heart was filled with pain.
• Has God been patient long with you and me?
• Being slow to anger is a sign of great strength.

Kind: If patience means bearing evil. Kindness is conferring good.

• The whole of creation, and then, eternal life is the good God confers on His people.
• We should try to confer good on others.

Eight Things That Love Does Not Do.

A.        Does not envy.

Envy is a very powerful force in the world - driving many to madness.

Love looks at the big picture.

Envy is obsessed with the details of the one of whom is jealous.

Love looks through a telescope; envy, through a microscope.

Every other sin hath some pleasure annexed to it envy alone lacks any pleasure. ROBERT BURTON, The Anatomy of Melancholy

Look at the millions in the world compared with whom you and I have so very much.

B.        Does not boast.

Wind bag - lit.

Balloon blown up and then bursts.

C.        Is not proud - inward attitude behind boasting.

Topic:  Satan's bargains  Source:  Mere Christianity Page 97

[Satan] is perfectly content to see you becoming chaste and brave and selfcontrolled provided, all the time, he is setting  up in you the Dictatorship of Pride  just as he would be quite content to see your chilblains cured if he was allowed, in return, to give you cancer.  For Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.

Topic:  Effects of competition Source:  Mere Christianity Page 95

Now what you want to get clear is that Pride is essentially competitive  is competitive by its very nature  while the other vices are competitive only, so to speak, by accident.  Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.  We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or goodlooking, but they are not.  They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or betterlooking than others.  If every one else became equally rich, or clever, or goodlooking there would be nothing to be proud about.  It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest.  Once the element of competition has gone, pride has gone.

:Legitimate pride Source:  Mere Christianity Page 97

Pleasure in being praised is not Pride.  The child who is patted on the back for doing a lesson well, the woman whose beauty is praised by her lover, the saved soul to whom Christ says "Well done," are pleased and ought to be.  For here the pleasure lies not in what you are, but in the fact that you have pleased someone you wanted (and rightly wanted) to please.

Topic:  A Really Humble Man Source:  Mere Christianity Page 99

Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call "humble" nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody.  Probably all you will think of him is that he seemed a cheerful intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him... He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.

D.        Is not rude.

·          Good manners.

·          Consideration of others in small as well as big matters.

·          Because God is love we can bring to Him in prayer small details of our lives.

E.        Does not insist on its own way.

·          Not power hungry.

·          Realise that others have different tastes than I do, and allow for that.

·          Meekness of God.

·          The greatest glory of God is not that He always gets His own way in every detail.

·          He allows us to go wrong

·          and then uses our wrong doing for ultimate good which,

-          if we allow it -

·          includes our own blessing.

F.         Follows then that not easily angered.

G.        Does not keep accounts of others wrongs.

·          May not easily be able to forget someone else's wrong,

·          but do not seek to pay back.

·          Do not demand recompense.

H.        Does not delight in evil.

·          One of the deep signs of the sin of mankind:

·          to enjoy stories of other people's misdeeds or misfortunes - gossip.

·          Newspapers keep us well fed.

·          We demand more and more stories of evil to keep us happy - violence and intrigue.

The intelligentsia will always applaud a new film or book portraying more and more evil - `courageous portrayal of the way the world really is'.

Children's books these days vividly portraying the misery of being bullied and abused.

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When love is drained away society becomes the opposite.

3:1But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. 2 For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3 heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, 4 treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, (ESV)

Opposite of love.

• Yet the word LOVE does appear. `Love of self'. `Love of money'. `Lovers of pleasure.' rather than love for God.
• `Rather' important word.
• We should love ourselves.
• Love Thy neighbour as Thyself.
• Money too is needed by all of us - economic collapse we would all starve.
• Nothing wrong with pleasure. `..He gave us. all things richly to enjoy'.
• But when we make them our chief love - our own gods - then we are idolaters.
• If there is no God to love us and to be loved by us,
• then there is nothing else to live for but
• self, money and pleasure even at the expense of others.

If society removes God, Christ, the Church and the Bible, it removes love itself.

3.         Four things What Love Does All The Time.

A.        Endures all things - endures.

-          It doesn't merely follow the way of convenience but is prepared to endure hardship for the sake of right.

-          Jesus endured the rejection of men for our sake.

B.        Believes all things.

Prepared to believe the best in others.

-          Opposite of cynicism.

-          Debunking heroes - David Livingstone- made out to be a small minded, cowardly and selfish man.

-          If we debunk heroes how do we expect society to produce people of courage and guts.

•           God believes in humanity however far we have fallen - incarnation.

C.        Hopes all things.

`Hope springs eternal in the human breast.' Alexander Pope'.

Love knows that this world which God created

- not end in futility -

what God began in creation He will complete.

D.        Bears all things

Does not give up.

God has not given up on you and me.

It might seem as if He has given up on this country - but no.

He still calls and loves.

C. S. Lewis: To love at all is to be vulnerable.  Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken.  If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.  But in that casket  safe, dark, motionless, airless  it will change.  It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable....  The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers of love... is Hell.

God made Himself vulnerable by

creating a world with the great risk that we would turn in on ourselves.

In Christ God made Himself vulnerable to our full pride and selfishness.

But out of it all came resurrection and glory

for all who put aside their pride and humbly look to Him for life and salvation.

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