Faith & Love

But my name is Mark, one of the pastors here, and I want to welcome all of you. So glad that you are joining us, whether you're here next door in venue, watching us online, or on Public Access TV. We are just glad that you are part of this worship service today, and I hope that you are doing well.

Speaking for myself, I am doing exceptionally well today because starting this coming Friday, I will be beginning a summer sabbatical. So I'm going, "Yeah, yeah, pretty good." Thank you, thank you. Not quite sure what that applause means if you're like either happy for me, or yeah, happy that you won't see me till September. But anyway, I'll just choose to interpret that the way I would like to. We are so grateful because this is an incredible benefit and gift that Twin Lakes Church gives to its pastors every seven years, and I just got to tell you, we are so grateful for that.

What this means is that today, I get to say whatever I want. You have three months to either forgive me or forget what I said, but kidding aside, I am really going to miss you. I mean that with all my heart. I'm going to miss you. Most of you. No. Still kidding, so just a little bit loose here because I'm short timer here, but we will be, again, we will be missing you. I will be praying for you as well, and I would implore you to pray for us as well.

I don't know what it is about sabbaticals and vacations, but we don't have the greatest track record in that department. If you've been here for some time, our last sabbatical, my wife fell off a horse, broke her wrist and hip in that little incident. So I put a little damper on the second half of the sabbatical and beyond for a little while, her recovery. And then vacations, you've heard me talk about this. One of our vacations, my son Luke broke his nose due in large part to the help his older brother gave him with his elbow on that one in the backseat of the car of all places. But we were on vacation, so that's how these things go.

Another vacation not too long ago, last summer, in fact, my son Jack somehow managed to ram about a four-inch long splinter right through his thumb. We're about 20 minutes into that vacation there. And then, I didn't even tell you this because it kind of gets embarrassing after a while, but we went to the snow this year and Jack broke his wrist snowboarding. So we're lousy parents. I covet your prayers.

Here's a picture of our kids during our last sabbatical seven years ago. They do not look like that today. My oldest Jack, they're in the middle. He's going to be a senior in the fall. Luke will be a freshman. They'll both be at Aptos High. And then my little baby, Anna, that's my consolation. She'll be a seventh grader here in our middle school, so I'm still going to kind of see her.

But it's one of the reasons why this sabbatical is so precious to us because this would be the last one, you know, if we have another one in seven years, but this will be the last one where we'll all be living under the same roof, presumably, but we all know that it's not always the case. Someone came up to me after the first service and said, "Don't worry about it, man. You ain't gonna see them for a long time." So that's good. But it's also why this sabbatical is extra, extra precious and priceless to us.

And you know this, if you're a parent, there's really nothing you can do about the warp speed in which our children grow up. It just seems to get... It just increases in terms of how quickly the time goes by. So what you do is you pour your energy and your prayers into them growing up well, right? I mean, that's really the desire of every parent. And if you're a Christian parent, that means you want your kids to grow up into people who love the Lord with all their heart and love people as well. And that's really the bottom line.

And we're going to see that heart's desire really running through the passage that we're looking at today. We're in a series called Hope Agent, which is based in the little New Testament book called First Thessalonians. It was written by the Apostle Paul. And the Apostle Paul, you're going to see his heart unfold in this. We're going to be in chapter 3, which might confuse you if you were with us last week. We were in the middle part of chapter 2. We're jumping all the way into the middle of 3 because of the content, because this being my last weekend for a while, this passage is really about a pastor's heart for the people that he serves, and so I just couldn't resist.

We'll circle around in the next coming weeks and backfill the other passages between where we were and where we are today. Before we get too far into it, I want to give credit to a British pastor named Glenn Scrivner. His message on this text was influential to my thinking. And if you don't know a lot about the Apostle Paul, you might not know he...as far as we know, he was never married, he never had children, but the Thessalonian Church in a way are like his children. I mean he loved all of the churches that he planted, but they were special to him.

They were so special that back in chapter 2, verse 7, he refers to his relationship to them like a nursing mother caring for her very own children. And then in verse 11 he says, "We became like a father to you." So he has this very...this profound attachment to them. But if you recall, we learned in Acts 16, he only gets to stay there for somewhere between three and four weeks, and then because of strong opposition and bona fide threats to his safety, he has to leave Thessalonica.

He thinks that he's going to be able to come back soon, but it doesn't happen. And as time marches on, he becomes increasingly worried about their welfare. I mean they're brand new Christians, they're facing persecution and strong opposition, and he even confesses at the beginning of chapter 3 that he's afraid that they're going to succumb to temptation and pressure, and they're just going to chuck their faith.

So he says, "When I could stand it no longer, I sent Timothy," that's his young apprentice, "back to Thessalonica to check on the well-being of this brand new little church. And when Timothy comes back with this report, Paul is, I mean, beyond stoked. In fact, he wastes very little time writing this letter in response, and you're really going to see that in the verses that we read today.

So again, 1 Thessalonians 3, I'm gonna begin reading at verse 6, and I invite you to follow along. "But Timothy has just now come to us from you, and has brought good news about your faith and love. He has told us that you always have pleasant memories of us, and that you long to see us, just as we also long to see you. Therefore, brothers and sisters, in all our distress and persecution, we were encouraged about you because of your faith. For now we really live since you are standing firm in the Lord.

How can we thank God enough for you in return for all the joy you have given in the presence of our God, or we have in the presence of our God because of you? Night and day we pray most earnestly that we may see you again and supply what is lacking in your faith. Now may our God and Father Himself and our Lord Jesus clear the way for us to come to you. May the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else, just as ours does for you. May He strengthen your hearts so that you will be blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all His holy ones." This is the word of the Lord.

This passage that we just read, it really is about two things, faith and love. Because faith and love are the markers of Christian growth. In fact, in another of Paul's letters, his letter to the Galatians, he's talking about religious ritual and religious tradition and the things that people do to gain God's approval and then he concludes in chapter 5, verse 6, he says, "The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love." Not like one of the things that counts. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love and that might be surprising to you if you've always thought of church as a place where you learn about all the things you can't do.

Or maybe you have experience where, you know, it was just like all you got from it was this laundry list of all these do's and don'ts and Paul says, "Wait, time out. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love." Now he doesn't say that it's a free-for-all. He says that we obey out of love, we don't obey in order to be loved. And so by faith, we understand we are loved of God through His Son Jesus Christ. That will inform how we live our lives and we won't violate love by how we treat other people or how we live our lives and so that's what it really boils down to.

And so when Timothy returns with this report of the faith and love that he sees in Thessalonica, Paul is just beside himself because his spiritual children are growing up. I found a great summary of this passage. It wasn't intended by Martin Luther to summarize this particular passage but he's really countering the same type of critique that if we're living under the grace of God then it's just gonna be a free-for-all in terms of how we live our lives. He says quite the contrary when he says by faith we live above ourselves in Christ.

In other words, we don't live by our base instincts. We live above ourselves and through love we live below ourselves in our neighbor. In other words, we're willing to stoop on behalf of others in order to love them with the love that Christ gives us. Now I'm sure you've been around the block a few times. This is not how human beings typically roll in life, right? Faith and love? No, to the contrary. Our innate disposition is to be somewhat curled in on ourselves. In other words, we innately kind of just want to curl in all the things that we want, the things that we need.

Our perspective is about, you know, myself, me, mine, and yet when we hear the voice of Jesus calling us, he calls us to a completely different kind of life. We live above kind of our natural ways and that's why we begin with faith. It's not accidental that Paul says faith and love in that order because it is through faith that we receive not only God's love, but his spirit that resides in us and gives us the power and the desire to then love others.

Now I want to say a word about faith because in our culture, faith has a lot of funny notions surrounding it. For instance, some people think that if you have faith, it means you're willing to believe things that other people just find too incredible, like too far-fetched. We're just, I guess, a little bit more gullible than the average person and so that's why you have faith. Some people, that's what they think.

Other people think that faith is the equivalent of some sort of like, you know, emotional, magical attitude that just kind of surrounds you and nothing really ever bothers you because you're just living in this cloud of faith all the time and yet you see Jesus at times being very distressed. You're going to see Paul, he's in his words there, he's going to talk about how concerned he was and so faith can't really mean that.

Or sometimes you'll hear people say this and they're really kind of drawing on those two notions. They'll say, "Well, I just wish I had your faith," right? You know, you might be able to buy it but I am, I don't, but I wish I did have your faith. Maybe life would be easier for me. Pastors get this all the time. "Oh pastor, if I only had your faith," as if pastors have some sort of, you know, gene in them that predisposes them to faith. I understand what people are saying in that but it really doesn't make a lot of sense.

Not if you understand this, faith is equivalent to trust, in particular trusting Jesus and who he is and what his word says to us. I'll put it this way, I mentioned the little vacation sabbatical mishaps that we've had over the years, series of broken bones and because of that there has been a particular doctor in this church, an orthopedic doctor, I'll call him Tom, who has been incredibly helpful to us.

In fact, one time a couple years ago Anna broke a little bone in her leg, I didn't mention that because it didn't happen on vacation. It actually happened here at school, kind of a freak thing, and two doctors missed the fact that she had a break there and yet within 30 seconds of seeing the x-rays, Tom calls me, says, "Bring Anna back here, she's got to break her leg and I got, you know, treat her." And so he's a brilliant doctor and he has been, again, immense blessing to my accident-prone family and so I have a lot of trust in him.

And if you were to break a bone, my response would be, "Oh hey, I got just the guy for you, you need to go see Dr. Tom and you will be in good hands." Now would it make any sense if you said, "Oh Mark, if only I had your faith." Right? You wouldn't do that. In fact, I would say to you, "You don't need my faith, you just need to know the things about Tom that I know and if you did, the faith part would kind of take care of itself." You know what I'm saying?

Well that's in part of what Paul's strategy is about when he says in verse 10, "Night and day we pray most earnestly that we may see you again and supply what is lacking in your faith." That sounds kind of funny at first. If someone were to say, "I can't wait to see you so we can talk about what's lacking in you, you know. I've got a long list of your shortcomings and boy I can't wait till we get together." And they're thinking, "Well yeah, we can't wait for that either." But here's what Paul is saying.

He says, "I want you to know more about Jesus and what it looks like to live your lives in him." Because you know here's the thing, you know they only had him for a month at most and so there's certain things that they don't even really know yet. And so you'll see in chapter 4 he's going to talk about them living their lives with sexual purity. He's going to talk about what happens when people you love die. He's going to remind them that the Lord is going to return.

In other words, the point is, you know, there's not like, you know, "I can't wait to get to Thessalonica because we all have that little dial on our back, the faith dial, and I'm just going to crank it up to 10 and then you'll be all okay, right?" No, he's saying, "Look, you're doing good with the information that you have. You're trusting Christ with what you know. Now I want to add what is lacking to that. And when I do, that's going to give you opportunity. It's going to give opportunity for your faith to grow and strengthen."

Now it's not automatic. There's a lot of people who know a lot about the Bible whose faith is in a ditch, but as we come to understand and know more about Jesus, we have at least the opportunity to trust Him more as we know Him more. It's kind of like what René was talking about in his video devotional this last Friday when he quoted 2 Corinthians 3:18. It says this, "And we all who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord's glory are being transformed into His image with ever increasing glory which comes from the Lord who is the Spirit."

Now that's kind of a hard verse to wrap your head around, but what Paul's getting out there in that passage is that as we focus in on Jesus, as we meditate upon Him, as we have opportunity to peer into His Word and understand more and more about Him, the Holy Spirit uses that to transform our hearts and minds and build our faith.

So how do you cooperate with the Spirit's work in your life? Well you put yourself in the way of God's Word, that's what you do. In fact if you're a note-taker you might want to write that down. Put yourself in the way of God's Word. And of course you're all doing that this morning, so God bless you, but you can do that in a number of ways. You can do it as part of a Bible study, you can do it by joining us on the summer reading series that we're going to have, but bottom line it's like what Paul says in Romans 10 when he says "Faith comes from hearing the message and the message is heard through the," what? "The Word about Christ." And when that Word takes root in our hearts and our minds that again that innate kind of curvature to our spirit which is inwardly focused, it gets called upward and we begin to unfurl ourselves to Jesus as He calls us to this new life.

And when that happens it's not just a vertical thing that happens between us and the Lord, but then we start to, after looking up to Jesus we begin to look out to others in love because His Spirit is influencing our hearts. And this is why Paul prays in chapter 3, verse 12, "May the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else just as ours does for you."

Now let me ask you something, have you ever wished that you were a more loving person? Thank you, there's an honest guy right there. I do all the time. I desire to be a more loving person, but I want you to notice how Paul prays towards this end when he says "May the Lord make your love increase." Who makes our love increase? The Lord does. He makes it increase and overflow in fact. We become filled beyond the brim like a glass that can't hold anymore, just starts to spill out into the lives of others.

And that's exactly what's happened with Paul when Jesus Christ encounters him and really starts to transform his life, the love of God not only increases in Paul but it overflows into the lives of the Thessalonians as it fills their lives, it overflows into the lives of those around them. So the thing you might say about God's love is that it runs downhill. Love runs downhill.

It's kind of like this week we were talking, the pastors were on Thursday and Jessica Frankel who's our junior high pastor, last weekend she was on a rafting excursion on the Klamath River and she's been on that river many many many times but she said this last weekend there was more water in that river than she's ever seen in her entire life, which isn't totally surprising after this last winter, but she said this is how much water there was. A trip that normally takes two days, we completed in four hours. So this is like a water slide. It's like we're done.

Paul's essentially praying that in verse 12 he's like "Lord let it rain. Rain down your love and just let it flow because man if there's water upstream it's just gonna flow all the way down." And you know the beautiful thing about this kind of love, this love that we receive from God is that there's no strings attached. And so as we freely receive his love we can freely give it.

Reminds me of how there's kind of a notion that hurting people hurt people. You ever see this to be true? Not not always, not absolutely, but often. It's hurting people that lash out and hurt people. Well the opposite is true in what Paul's talking about here. Where loved people love people because it just overflows out of us. And I'm not talking about some kind of fuzzy you know let's all just sing kumbaya together type of love okay. In fact Paul says in chapter 2, verse 8 if you were with us last weekend he says that we loved you so much we were delighted to share not only the gospel but our lives as well and he goes on to talk about it.

We toiled, we worked, we endured hardship out of love because after all true love is costly. True love involves work. I was just early this morning talking with Paul Barton. Paul and Nelda Barton this week celebrate their 67th wedding anniversary. Wow amazing. But you know I'm sure it wasn't just all you know rainbows and butterflies you know for 67 years. As beautiful as their relationship is.

You know I probably shouldn't tell this story but it's not their story. This just kind of reminds me. This old story some of you heard but it's about a couple another couple have been married well over 50 years and they're laying in bed one night and the wife says you know honey you never cuddle up to me like you used to and so with creaking of bones and a deep sigh he just kind of moves over and he cuddles up next to his wife. She says you know honey you never really rub my back like you used to and so with more creaking of bones he begins to just kind of rub her back very very gently and tenderly.

He says you know honey you never really nibble on my ear like you used to and with that he throws off the blanket and he marches out of the room she says honey where are you going? And he goes to get my teeth. That's an old one. But look you know we want you know we want love to be a young supple 20 year old ear to nibble on but you know I'll tell you the true love is true love is that same ear with a hearing aid in it and the room smells like Ben Gay. That's true love.

Okay. That you want to know you want to know when you truly love someone? I'll tell you. It's this if they're not doing well you're not doing well. They're not doing well you're not doing well. Paul is so invested in these Thessalonians that his joy is irretrievably bound in their well-being. He's just given himself to them. He's so desperate to know how they're doing he says in chapter 2, verse 17 we were orphaned by being separated from you. Out of intense longing we made every effort to see you and the word he uses in the original for intense longing most often it's used for lust.

But Paul's saying we we so intensely longed to be with you. We made every effort 2-19 for what is our hope our joy our crown is it not you? And then when he hears from Timothy he just begins to gush in 3-8-9 he says for now we really live since you are standing firm in the Lord how can we thank God enough for you in return for all the joy we have in the presence of our God because of you? I mean his heart is just wide open saying that now we really live.

In other words now I can breathe again. It's like when you fear the worst and then you hear good news about someone you go okay now we can go on. Now we feel like we're alive again knowing that their faith is intact and he goes on what I can't even thank God enough for you for all the joy we have because of you in other words their faith and love is his joy.

Now the world will tell you you want to be happy well what you got is you got to look out for what you got to look up for number who? Number one you ought to be careful about attaching yourself too much to somebody because you might get hurt you might be bereft and in an age where there's you know so much social mobility in an age where there's so much brokenness we can think that the means of happiness just look out for myself maybe put a coat of Teflon over my heart and then I can't I can't be hurt.

Paul's example could not be further from that because you want to be full of hope or a joy you'll be full of happiness you will experience joy to the measure that you love other people to the measure that you love God and love others that is the recipe for joy. In fact the most cheerful the most joyful person that I've ever had the privilege of knowing is my best friend Phil. Phil went on to heaven two years ago today and Phil was beyond delightful.

We met in third grade and so I know I knew him for 43 years we were best friends and so I think I can say with some authority what made Phil tick. Phil was incredibly warm and winsome smiles and laughter came so easily for Phil. People loved him because he was just he's kind of person it just made you happy to be around. He was incredibly generous. When I was a poor college student he was working and so if I one time I broke my bike in Nicene Marks he bought the park for me I didn't have the money.

If I had car trouble he would find ways to assist me. Right before I was to go work up a camp hammer Phil had this beautiful guitar that he gave me for Christmas so that I would have a guitar to use up at Camp Hammer. He was just so generous in fact it's not an exaggeration to say that I felt often most alive when I was with him. You want to know what his secret was? Faith and love. That's his legacy. Faith and love.

So let me ask you who has God given you to love? Who has God given you to love? Now it's natural to think of family and that's great if you have children or you have grandchildren you're blessed in that way. That's God honoring that's wise that's that's completely appropriate. But I hope that we will not just look there. I hope that you will in fact look around you. Look around this room because there's hidden treasure in this room right now.

In fact some of your greatest joys may yet to be discovered in the life of someone else in this room someone else in this church through love. Through loving them deeply. Hidden treasure that God has put there in front of you. Again I mention this because you know we're not all in the same situation and you might hear these these talks about you know family and this and that and you're like well I don't have a family.

So I want to remind all of us you know Jesus didn't have a wife he didn't have children. In fact the only thing he had literally were the clothes on his back which went to the soldiers that nailed him to the cross. He has the greatest legacy in the history of the world and he always will. Why? Faith and love. Faith lived perfect trust and obedience before the Father. Love extended perfectly in those around him.

You know what I'd be saying well yeah he's Jesus Christ you know when when the eternal Son of God takes on human flesh and he's perfect well he's got a bit of an advantage. Well okay point taken. But how about the Apostle Paul? Ordinary human just like you and me. Paul doesn't have a wife or kids either. Paul has no social status. Paul has no financial estate. He has no political power. In the eyes of the world the Apostle Paul is a nobody. A nobody.

And yet God uses his life and his inspired writings to impact billions including us here today. And that's in large part because Paul did not measure success in terms of the Christian faith or in churches by you know buildings or budgets or how many bodies showed up. Paul measured the success of every Christian life by two things. Faith and love.

And so I want to conclude this morning first of all by saying and I speak for all of the pastors on staff when I say this and I mean this with all the sincerity I have in my heart. You are our joy in our crown. You are our joy in our crown. I mean we see we have a unique vantage point because you know many of us were here once maybe twice a week. We're here throughout the week. We see what happens within this church body and it's amazing the acts of generosity and kindness and service and sacrifice that just to play out and it's incredible and we don't really don't even know the half of it.

You motivate us. You fuel us. You inspire and bless us because of your faith and love and we are blessed as pastors by you. In fact when we go to pastors conferences we have to be kind of guarded about what we say in terms of bragging about you because most of the pastors honestly show up there bruised and bloodied because of their experiences in their churches and they swap war stories and we're like well I don't really know anything about that and it's like describing a feast to folks that are starving. You are our joy in our crown.

And I also want to say to any of you that are here and you're just kind of new to faith or you're coming back and you go you know Mark I don't I like what I'm hearing but I don't know how to live that out. I've actually tried to be a better person but my track record is really spotty. Well that's because you can't do it in your own power. That's the gospel. You can't do it except through Jesus Christ. He will give you the power. He will change your life.

And so not to belabor the point but if you're asking the question this morning how do I live this way it begins when we look up to Jesus in faith understanding all that he has done for us through his life death and resurrection and as his spirit indwells us and transforms our heart we are then able to look out to others in love he fills us and it overflows into the lives around us. That's the beautiful simplicity of the gospel that's available to all of us who believe.

And so I simply want to close praying for you Twin Lakes Church praying that our faith and our love would become an ever-increasing reality in this church and in this community. Would you bow your heads as we pray.

Heavenly Father we thank you for the destiny the calling that we have in Christ. And Lord I thank you for these wonderful wonderful people. I thank you for this church. Thank you for the way that it has blessed my life more than I could have ever asked or imagined. And not just me Lord but countless thousands of lives that have been blessed that are being blessed that will be blessed because of the acts of faith in love expressed through people in this church.

So I just thank you and I praise you for that. And Lord I pray in the words of the Apostle Paul that you would make your love increase and overflow in this congregation that we would have love for each other and for everyone else. And Lord strengthen our hearts so that we will be blameless and holy in your presence Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all His holiness of all His holy ones. For I pray this in the name of the author and the finisher of our faith our Lord Jesus Christ and all God's people said amen.