I Will Choose Love

Choosing a good year. What I want to talk about today is the choice that Jesus said is the most important choice that you can make. So wow, what did Jesus say? The way I want to lead into this is by talking about something that Laurie and I discuss whenever we do marriage retreats. We're privileged to do these retreats around the nation once in a while, maybe a couple of times a year, and when we teach we often refer to the work by John Gottman.

Gottman wrote this book, this is a classic book on relationships, not just marriage. I recommend it to everybody. It's not specifically a Christian book, although he quotes a lot of scripture in it. It's called The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. John Gottman. Now what's interesting about Gottman, he's sort of a legendary research psychologist right now. He's up at the University of Washington near Seattle, and he has studied thousands of married couples over decades, going back to the 70s, where he has studied these couples to see what makes relationships work and what poisons married couples in their relationship.

And what's unique about his research is the way that he's done it. He has constructed at the University of Washington something that people call the "glass house," and he gets couples to voluntarily come in and live in the glass house for a week, and there's cameras and microphones everywhere except the bedroom and the bathrooms. He and his research assistants observe and tabulate like everything they say, all their gestures, and then they track those couples for years and years and years to see whether they stayed together, whether they were happy or unhappy in their marriage, whether they divorced.

So with all the thousands of couples, tens of years of experience, it's gotten to the point where John Gottman, after watching a couple interact for just one hour, he can predict with 94% accuracy whether they'll divorce in three years. Isn't that amazing? Now that sounds complicated, but he says it's not. He says he only looks for one thing. One thing. And if he sees this one thing happen a lot in that hour, that couple's headed for divorce. Wouldn't you love to know what that one thing is?

He says it's whether or not they support the San Francisco 49ers, which is remarkable. Who would have thought that? That was a surprise to me. That's not what it is. It's not what team you support. It's not whether or not you have arguments. Healthy couples have arguments. It's not whether or not you disagree politically. Healthy couples can actually disagree politically. It's not whether or not you have conflict. Healthy marriages have conflict.

What he looks for is really, he says you can summarize it in one word, and it's this. Contempt. He says if he sees signs of not just disagreement, not just argument, not just conflict, but contempt for the other person in the marriage, that marriage is doomed unless they get help. By contempt, this means you not only disagree, you just think the other person is beneath you, you loathe them, you're disgusted by them, and he says he looks for signs of contempt like sarcasm, hostile humor.

Not humor. He says humor is essential to making a marriage work, but hostile humor, where every joke is a barb, is a cut. And here's a big tell on contempt, eye-rolling. They observe, and if somebody says something and the other member of the marriage goes, "Like this, 94% chance folks." Now here's why I bring this up. Gottman says he's very concerned with our nation right now because he says we seem to be living in a culture of contempt.

We're no longer do people on whatever your political side is, whatever your side is on whatever issue. And I mean it could be the largest and smallest issue. He says it seems like people are no longer able to debate or disagree or agree to disagree or live in conflict. Now whatever you believe, you just have utter contempt and disdain for the other person. And so he says our country right now looks like a marriage headed for divorce.

So what do we do about that? Another one of my favorite books right now is Love Your Enemies by Arthur C. Brooks. Brooks also says we are in a pandemic of contempt, and what's interesting is his book came out before the pandemic. He says political scientists find that our nation is more polarized than it has been at any time since the Civil War. In the very moment in which we need to come together as a nation, we're being torn apart. We are living in a culture of contempt.

Here's my question for you. Aren't you tired of it? Wouldn't you love with your life to be an alternative to that? Wouldn't you love to shine as a light in a culture of darkness and hatred and contempt and disdain? Well you came to the right place because it turns out that Jesus was raised in a similar political environment of contempt. And he calls his followers over and over and over again to stand against his own culture's tide of contempt.

And when you understand the historical background behind so much of what Jesus said, you'll understand with more vibrancy what his words really meant to the first years and to us today. Jesus saw firsthand what contempt can do to a society. Little context for you. About a hundred and fifty years before Jesus, the nation of Israel, you know where Jesus lived, that was under the brutal oppression, brutal, brutal oppression of the Syrian Greeks.

And so there was an armed revolt led by the famous Judas Maccabeus. It's commemorated to this day in Jewish culture as Hanukkah when they were able to recapture the temple and repurify the temple. Sadly Judas Maccabeus, the victor in that revolution against the oppressors, was killed soon after and almost instantly. His political dynasty divided into two political parties that hated each other, betrayed each other, assassinated each other, and absolutely had contempt for one another.

For example, Jonathan his brother was betrayed and captured. Then Simon another brother was assassinated. Then Alexander his grandson killed 6,000 fellow Jews. Then civil war broke out that cost 50,000 lives and lasted six years. And eventually both sides, both factions, appealed to Rome to come in and arbitrate their dispute. And Rome said okay and sent General Pompey who promptly killed another 12,000 Jews.

And then the Romans installed their puppet King Herod who killed all possible rivals including his own two sons, his wife's brother, and then his own wife. And then right around the time Jesus Christ was born, Judas of Galilee arose as a rebel leader and he said if you pay Roman taxes I will burn down your house and sell all your cattle and possessions. And the Romans responded by burning down Judas's entire city and selling all his people into slavery.

Just incredible 200 years of conflict before Jesus Christ's ministry. And the thing is all this surprised precisely no one. Because in those days this is just how leaders led. If you had the power you use the power to keep the power. And now Jesus is widely seen as the next man up in this cycle of violence and retribution.

Remember when he came into Jerusalem, the triumphal entry on Palm Sunday, everybody's waving palm branches. Do you remember what palm branches were? They were seen as the national symbol of Israel. They were waving a political flag of independence and revolution. Now Jesus didn't ask him to do that but what I'm saying is the crowd at the triumphal entry, Palm Sunday, they clearly saw Jesus as the next revolutionary and he was there to lead a revolution.

He talked about it. He keeps talking about the kingdom of God is coming. The kingdom of God is coming. The kingdom of God is here. But the crowd's expectations were political, right? They were military just like they'd seen for the last couple of hundred years. Even his twelve apostles thought that. Even at the Last Supper they're still jockeying for positions of power in what they think is going to be the re-established kingdom of Israel.

It's kind of like Judas Maccabeus 2.0 is what they're thinking. And so on the night of his arrest at that table the last Passover Supper he will ever share with his twelve apostles, Jesus makes his intentions crystal clear. He says, "Yep, a revolution's coming and I'm about to give you guys my marching orders." And Jesus says something historically radical.

Now that you know the context historically, what Jesus is about to say is something that would distinguish his movement from all the rest because these next words from Jesus are what his kingdom looks like. These next words represent a paradigm shift of epic proportions about what he thinks a lasting revolution will look like. Those other revolutions, they weren't revolutions, they were just repeats of the same old thing.

He says, "You want a revolution?" Here's what it looks like. You ready for this? "A new command I give you." A new command, new marching orders. Marching orders nobody's ever given their army before. Love one another. Would you just read that three-word sentence out loud with me? "Love one another." He clarifies, "As I have loved you, so you must," say it again, "love one another." And he doubles down on it. He says, "By this everyone will know that you're my disciples." Not by your power, not by your army, not by your political connections not by your brutality, not by strong arming it, but here's my brand.

Here's the mark of my movement. Here's what my revolution looks like. Here's how everyone will know that you're my disciples if you, say it again, love one another. Four times in two verses. Love, love, love, love. Can I just open my heart to you here? There is something that has literally made me weep over the last couple of years. I mean, as in, put my hands in my face and just cry.

And it's not the pandemic as terrible as it was. I mean, it was bad and is bad, but you know, pandemics happen in human history. There's nothing we can do about them. Epidemics will happen, so you just kind of grit your teeth and get through it the best you can. What has made me weep is something that's totally in our control.

First of all, just how our society has, as John Gottman observed, degenerated from a society that agrees to disagree into a society that just has contempt for anybody who disagrees with us on any small thing. And if you don't believe me, read the Santa Cruz Sentinel editorials about the real trail debate and how people are calling each other names. But that's not what's made me cry. What's made me cry is how Christians are treating each other and the people that they disagree with.

And I'll never forget what made, what started it for me. I've told some of you this before, but somebody, a couple of people sent me links to another pastor's sermons, a large church in another city, and I don't even remember exactly what he was talking about, but he was sort of ranting on his stage about some issue, theological or political or something, that he was all about.

And then toward the end of his discourse, he said this, and I quote, "Anyone," as he said, yelling, "anybody who disagrees with me must not have a fully functioning frontal lobe." That's from the pulpit of a church. That is no longer disagreement. That's contempt. And that should just break our hearts. To stand against that culture of contempt, which can poison families and poison churches and poison neighborhoods, we have to recover this.

So we're not caught up in the zero-sum power plays of our contempt culture. And so what I want to do is to go through these verses line by line, because frankly most of us, if you've been a Christianity a number of years, these are almost like they've got the Pledge of Allegiance factor. We've heard them so many times, we don't understand how radical they are to Jesus' culture and our culture.

What is Jesus' point? Three things. Jot these down in your notes, and if you're watching on the live stream, you can download the notes at TLC.org/notes. The first point is the clearest, love is how I obey Jesus, right? Love is how I obey Jesus. Everything else that we do is part of the spiritual life, you know, worship and Bible study and fellowship. Those are all good things and service to other people, but the point of them all is love, as Paul makes clear in 1 Corinthians 13.

And here's how Jesus commands it. "A new command I give you." Say it again with me. "Love one another." Now here is where we start to weasel out of Jesus' command. And we've all seen this happen. We know that Jesus said this, but we go, "Okay, yeah, he said love one another. That's cool." And then we define one another as really small, as people who think just like me.

I can love people who just are just like me and who like me. That's the way we define one another. Comedian Emo Phillips has a classic joke that you might have heard, but I love it. He says, "Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump, and I said, 'Don't do it. God loves you. Are you a Christian?' And he said, 'Yes.' I said, 'Me too, Protestant or Catholic?' And he said, 'Protestant?' I said, 'Me too. What the nomination?' And he said, 'Baptist?' I said, 'Me too. Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?' He said, 'Northern Baptist?' I said, 'Me too. Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Progressive Baptist?' He said, 'Well, Northern Conservative Baptist?' I said, 'Me too. Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes region or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern region?' He said, 'Well, Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes region.' I said, 'Me too. Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes region Council of 1879 or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes region Council of 1912?' He said, 'Well, Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes region Council of 1912.' I said, 'Die heretic and push them off.'

We tend to go one another right and define that pretty tight. But remember Jesus also said, 'Love your what? Enemies.' And guess who was sitting at that table? You know, by Jesus's day there were three main factions in Jewish culture. There were the Roman collaborators, right? The Herodians, the rulers, the tax collectors who supported them. Then there were the rebels, the zealots who were completely against Rome to the point where any means necessary were going to overthrow them, including killing them.

And then there were the religious people, the Pharisees who thought if we're only pure enough, then God's going to bless us with prosperity and a new nation. So you have these three factions. They all had contempt for one another. A first century historian, Josepha, says they would either at times, even at times, hire assassins to kill one another. So, you know, really like it was it was nascent civil war going on.

Guess who's at that table that night? Jesus looks around. He sees Matthew. What was Matthew's job? Tax collector. He looks over on the other side of the table. He sees Simon, not Simon Peter, the other Simon. How does the Gospels identify Simon? Simon the zealot. And by the way, he also had followers among the Pharisees, right? Like Nicodemus, who was one of the leaders of the Pharisees, kind of followed Jesus in secret at first.

So he looks at his followers and he sees Roman collaborators and rebels and religious. The three parties that hated each other, he goes, "Here's the thing. I want you guys who disagree on everything politically to actually get together and love one another. Why? In our culture, that's gonna be like a miraculous sign that God must be at work. It's gonna be like finding a baby in a manger. It's gonna be like feeding 5,000 people with a few loaves and fishes. People are gonna be those three love each other. This is something weird going on here.

Do you see how that relates to our culture right now? Now you might be thinking, well wait a second, how can I be commanded to love somebody, right? How can I be commanded to feel something that I just don't happen to feel for that person? Jesus isn't commanding you to feel something, he's commanding you to do something. To do what? Well he clarifies in the next point. He's saying, "You can't really understand my command to love one another until you see me as somebody who loves you."

Point two, love is how I need to see Jesus. Jesus says, watch this, "As I have loved you," say that phrase out loud with me, "As I have loved you, so you must love one another." Again, think of who is hearing this first. Those 12 disciples sitting at that table. And when they think, "As I have loved you," well he's just washed their dirty stinking feet.

But then I think that they were thinking back to the three years that they've lived with him, "As I have loved you, and you, and you, and you." As Andy Stanley says in his book, Better Decisions, he says, "I think Jesus could have gone around the table and said, 'Hey Matthew, Matthew, for example, Matthew, do you remember what you were doing when you first met me? Yeah, yeah, I was working for Rome, I was a tax collector. Do you remember what I asked you to do? Yeah, you said, 'Follow me.' No one ever asked me to follow them before. If I ever followed somebody, they were, they lived in fear and they ran straight to their house and they hid from me. You asked me to follow before you like knew anything about me.'

And Jesus says, "Right, Matthew, now for the rest of your life, you treat people the way I treated you." And then he could have looked at Simon Peter and said, "Peter, do you know how you always seem to put your foot in your mouth all the time and you're always kind of saying the wrong thing, you're kind of a bull in the china shop and you're kind of awkward, you have good intentions, but why you just keep putting your foot in it?" And Peter's like, "Yeah, yeah. Now how do I treat you when you do that ultimately? Well, I can't believe it, but it's like you put me in charge of this group, me." That's right, Peter. Now for the rest of your life, I want you to treat the culturally awkward weirdos just like I treated you.

So now let's put you at the table. And Jesus says, "As I have loved you," now I want you to think, and it might be uncomfortable for you, but I know what I'm thinking of, think of ways that maybe you messed up in your life and it could be little things that nobody else knows, but God knows it could be stuff you said or maybe stuff you did and you know how gracious as God has been to you and how much God has loved you, how much God has blessed you, how much God has given you, things that you you don't deserve and didn't give you what you did deserve.

God's like, "Yeah, I remember how I loved you in Christ now. You go treat other people the same." See, the more you see Jesus loving you, the more you understand that you are embraced with the love of Jesus, that's the only way that it's really even capable of following this command, right? I got a great email from somebody that I want to read to you. This is remarkable because there's so many ways that the command to love one another can seem impossible until we understand how much Jesus loves us.

And I want to read this to you because it dovetails into this so perfectly. A woman writes, "I grew up going to church and had been taught some good values such as the command to love one another which puzzled me a lot because I hadn't learned that there may be a love in God." Now watch this. "Three days before Christmas when I was 12 my oldest brother was in a car accident. I was alone at home and got the call he had died and my idea of God died as well. I stopped going to church. My grief turned into anger against God, Jesus, etc. I became an avid atheist.

When I was 18 my dad died. Again, I got angry at God for a few years. When I was 24 my mom passed away. Now I had no faith in a positive future. Forget God. I don't even have faith in a future anymore. I was lost with no hope." Forwarding a few years I ended up in Santa Cruz. I started going back to a church as I wished to give my daughter a Christian upbringing with humanitarian ideas. I did respect Jesus's commandment to love one another. I wanted to share it as hard as it was to accomplish.

Watch this. "Slowly my trust in Jesus from childhood came back as I turned to Bible study which started when my husband got chronically sick. Finally I got that God loved me as a daughter, a precious reassurance for somebody without parents. Then later I realized I could have a closer walk with him who died over 2,000 years ago. I could learn to have a personal relationship as I let him in my heart. Now all my problems did not and will not go away and yet I have the assurance I'm loved with all my flaws. I am called to be one of his flock." And she ends with this. "At my ripe old age I learned that God, Jesus, loved me. I feel blessed I received the grace of faith to understand I am loved freely and unconditionally."

See the command to love one another can only really be activated and only really can be comprehended when you see how Jesus loved you. When you see that the day after he spoke these words to the disciples he is gonna go to the cross for the sins of the world including his enemies who are nailing him to that cross. It's that kind of sacrificial servant love that he calls us to. He says that's gonna be a sign and that is when we get to point three, love is how I share Jesus. Love that's how I share Jesus.

By this everyone will know that you are my disciples. If you what? Say it, love one another. That is our strategy. It's not fancy. You know as we kind of rebuild momentum of church all the churches around the world are doing this in the wake of COVID and so on. How are we gonna do that? We don't have to be super clever it's just man we just gotta love one another and love our neighbors and love our community.

Now think of this in this verse I don't know if you've ever thought of this before. Jesus is actually inviting people who are not Christians to judge Christians by this metric. He's saying I actually want them to judge you by that metric whether you love the world and one another. Now let me just clarify something this doesn't mean we have to compromise compromise one single biblical teaching. Of course not. What this means is no one has ever been insulted into the kingdom of God.

So if it's this important to Jesus then how does love act? Well there's a famous description of love in 1 Corinthians 13 right? Let's just look at it we don't have to really teach it but but just just walk us through this. Love is patient, love is kind, doesn't envy, it doesn't boast, it is not proud, it does not dishonor others. Is your response to people who disagree with you politically or on some other issue is it not just disagreement but does it dishonor them? Well that's not love.

It is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Are you easily angered at stuff you read or hear from people you disagree with? Well that's not love. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. Always trusts. Interesting what that essentially means is love always assumes the best. If you're always assuming the worst most nefarious motives of anybody who disagrees with you that's not love.

So here's my challenge to you. This week for seven days ask yourself this question, "What does love require of me?" In this situation, what does love require of me? And I pray that this question becomes a habit for all of us for the whole rest of the year. Now let's put a bow around this whole series. To choose a good year, here's what we've been talking about every week in this series. To choose a good year I will choose humility. That was the first week. I will choose my story.

Remember we talked about the fact that events will happen and you can choose either a contamination narrative or a redemptive narrative. You can choose to see the stuff that happens to you that you don't like as either a curse or a blessing. I will choose growth. I will choose wisdom. I will choose love. Okay I don't want this to be academic. This is so important. Watch this. I want to show you what this looks like in real life.

I want to show you real-life people in a difficult situation and as you listen to the things they say, watch how they're doing these exact things. Here's the story. A few years ago I visited Zambia where Johann Combrick, one of our global partners you'll hear about next weekend, helps educate pastors. And Paul Spurlock and I hung out with a group of pastors in rural Zambia who wanted to start the first church ever in a little village called Chilenge.

Now the problem was there was a group of locals there who didn't want a church and they threatened the pastor that was sent to start a church. In fact they murdered him and dumped his body in a lake. Now in that honor-shame culture the natural thing to do in response would have been, "You dishonored me? We're going to respond in kind." But these pastors said, "That's not our marching orders from Jesus." And so we're going to offer practical assistance to this village and we're gonna send another pastor out to continue the work.

I had a chance to talk to the bishop over this group of churches, Henry Mumba. Now listen carefully to how the five things we've been talking about in this series are reflected in his response. Watch this. My name is Henry Mumba. What keeps me going as a pastor, as I pastor around here, in spite of the difficulties, is just the grace of God. Remember God's way to say that my grace is sufficient for you, my power is made manifest in weakness.

It is when you're going through difficulties in your life that we experience a grace of God upon our lives, helping us to move forward. So really the minister of various challenges that we are facing in the area where we are like a mother of a young man that we sent to Cherenge who was murdered and then thrown in the leg. At first you tend to say to yourself, "I keep on doing this." But in the conviction comes very strongly, we have to do what God has called us to do, in spite of the difficulties or challenges that might come our way, is grace will help us to overthrow.

His word is very clear that all things work out for good to them that love the Lord. In the midst of all these challenges, something good is being worked out for us as we continue even in the place where the young man was murdered. We are not stopping, we are continuing, we are sending someone to continue with the work in that place. And now I want you to meet the pastor they sent. Now remember this is someone who is being sent to a place where his immediate predecessor was murdered.

Again, listen to how he's incorporating everything we've been talking about in this series. Watch this. You know when the Bible says, "Trust the Lord." Okay? The Lord who protect you. Really what happened to the young man was heartbreaking and in one or the other it could instill fear to take up the challenge to continue with the work. But you know God is always faithful to the faithful.

And the death of the young man, you know there are two sides. It could be a case in the land because he was a servant of God and the blood was shed there or it could be a blessing in one or the other. So personally the way I take it, I take it as a blessing because the seed has been sown. Okay? The life has been sown there in that land. So when I take the challenge, I believe God to make that seed dominate, grow and then bear the fruit spiritually.

So what I shouldn't do is to entertain fear. What I shouldn't do is entertain fear. Are you both convicted and inspired by these two men and how their responses reflect all five of the things we've been talking about in this series? They responded with humility and with the story of redemption and blessing and choosing growth, choosing wisdom, choosing sacrificial love. That's what Jesus is calling us to as well as a church.

I'm gonna end with the question that I started with. Are you tired of the culture of contempt that surrounds us? Are you willing to stand up as an alternative to that? That's what Jesus is calling us to do. You already know this. You already know what our country needs. You already know what your neighborhood needs. You know what our county needs. You know what your family needs. You already know what our church needs. Less contempt, more love. Let's make that choice and let's change the world.

Heavenly Father, thank you so much for the words of Jesus in John 13. So powerful and God, I pray that these words would really change the way we respond. That we would ask that question all week long, "What does love require of me?" And for the man or the woman or the student who's listening or watching right now who knows in their heart that they need to act in a certain way because that's what love requires of them in some relationship, I pray that you give them the courage to submit to your lordship in this moment and obey.

And for the person who's saying, "Well, I want to plug into the source of infinite love, Jesus." I pray that they would receive you now as their Savior. And Father, I pray that this year all of us would choose to live in these five ways that not only gives us a better year but that points to you and gives you glory and draws people to you. In Jesus name, amen.