The Language Of Love

Well, good morning, everybody. How are you doing today? Wasn't that fun singing those old songs? I loved it. That's so fun. Well, my name's Rene, another one of the pastors here at TLC. Grab your message notes that look like this, but before we dive into the sermon today, I wanna start just by celebrating what God is doing here at TLC. If you weren't here last weekend, we saw 29 people baptized last weekend. It was wonderful.

Now, this morning, nine more people are gonna be baptized at TLC in Espanol. Add to that the seven that got baptized at Good Friday. 45 baptisms since Easter weekend. Let's just give God the glory for that. Let's encourage all these new believers. Fantastic. And if you are interested, the next baptisms will be July 27th and 28th. You can email adrian@tlc.org for more info.

Also, if you missed it, the TLC Hope Center Project is on. We are so stoked about this. This is gonna go right where our old crumbling portables are right now. It's gonna be a permanent home for our food ministries, recovery ministries, adult ed ministries, and so much more. You can learn more at tlc.org/hope, but if you've made a monthly pledge during our pledge campaign right before Easter, hey, we would encourage you to start giving now because the construction starts early next year, but the bills start now. So we would really encourage that.

Now, also, there's so many exciting things happening around here. Mark was just in Mexico visiting the orphanage with our junior hires. They ministered there. And another TLC team just came back from Japan, Adrian Moreno and myself and a dozen other wonderful team members. We had such a fun time back there encouraging pastors and missionaries and Christian educators and many more that were at an annual conference. And we did all kinds of stuff. We did vacation Bible school for the kids, nursery care for the babies. We had such a great team. Also did worship and teaching for the adults. Always so cool to see what God is doing all around the world.

Now, here's why I bring this up. While in Japan at the conference, I had a chance to meet Jeffrey Macchi. That's Jeffrey right there along with his absolutely amazing parents. Jeffrey was adopted as an infant there in Japan and they were all three of them at the conference together. Now, Jeffrey is severely autistic. He's almost entirely unable to communicate verbally. And to understand the story, I wanna explain when you meet Jeffrey, his hands are usually up in this position. He doesn't make eye contact. He usually looks up in a way like this and he either bounces or rocks back and forth.

And when Jeffrey verbalizes, he generally only makes what you might call almost animal-like noises. Do you get the picture? So most people, including his own parents, including me, when I first met Jeffrey, assumed that Jeffrey was severely cognitively impaired. But then his parents discovered through brain scans at a specialist clinic in the United States that the language center of Jeffrey's brain is actually highly functional. It turns out that Jeffrey is super genius level at what they call decoding. Jeffrey's able to learn most languages within weeks or months. Jeffrey can now fluently read, wait for it, 15 languages, including biblical Greek, biblical Hebrew. He says his favorite language is Portuguese.

Now I wanna clarify, Jeffrey has never taken a lesson in his life. He opens up books in other languages and just starts to read and starts to decode. His mom told me a couple of weeks ago when we were there in Japan that she wanted to see just how good he was after he's already learned 15 languages. So she bought him some Navajo books. And he said, yeah, this one's gonna probably take me two years. One of the most difficult languages on the face of the planet.

Now, how do they know all this? Well, it turns out that they also discovered he can communicate with a special keyboard. His fingers just fly across it. I've actually watched him use it myself. Jeffrey has even started a blog. It's at jeffreymockyinc.blogspot.com. And I've been reading his blog since I got back from Japan because it's just such a fascinating story. And I wanna read you a blog that Jeffrey wrote just last Sunday. He wrote, these are all his words. "What you see is not always what you get." A couple of weeks ago when I went horse riding, therapeutic horse riding, my regular horse had a leg injury. I was assigned a horse I didn't know. He looked old and skinny and not very inviting.

The trainer kept telling us he was a famous horse. Well, he didn't look famous. We got to the riding corral and I mounted him. He was responsive. I easily adjusted. And then he took off. He didn't run far, but he ran fast. Underneath the old skinny facade was a race horse. When we got home, mom looked him up on the internet. He was famous and had won several races. And then he writes, "The Bible talks about this. Man looks on the outside, but God sees what's inside. I saw an old broken down horse, but inside was a race horse. And on the outside, I look a mess, but inside I'm a son of the living God made in his image." Isn't this astounding?

So yeah, I kept reading his blog. Just one more from Jeffrey Mackey. This is the one he wrote two weeks ago. He writes these about every week. He said, "The other day, mom and I," his mom and he, "went for a morning walk at our local park. We were the only ones there. As we walked, we saw cherry trees in full bloom." You can imagine there in Tokyo. "Delicate light blooms covered the trees. And then we came upon a patch of beautiful daffodils, all in full yellow radiance. We circled the park for our own personal private viewing of God's splendor." It was so uplifting. I'm reminded of creator God, who fashioned his creation with precision and skill and detail. And why did he do that? To declare his glory. And he also made me to declare his glory. "Lord, help me show forth your glory so that my world can know you." I mean, you would never have suspected that, right? That that's what's going on behind that, as he puts it, facade.

Well, Jeffrey says he now sees himself as a missionary to the autistic community and an ambassador for the autistic community. He's even been appointed a missionary by JVenture, an official church group the Twin Lakes Church works with. Well, when I read what Jeffrey wrote, my mind immediately went to that famous verse that the apostle Paul wrote, 1 Corinthians 13:1. He said, "If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I'm only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal." And I thought, yeah, Jeffrey will never be able to speak in the tongues of men and of angels. Jeffrey will never be eloquent verbally here in this life, but Jeffrey speaks the language of love. And the Bible says that makes all the difference.

We've been in this series in 1 Corinthians 13, famous as the love chapter. We call this series the lost art of love because we live in a very rude culture right now. And you might remember the general context of this book of the Bible called 1 Corinthians. This is a letter to Christians in the city of Corinth. Corinth is a Greek city on a narrow strip of land between two seas. And Corinth was all new construction when 1 Corinthians was being written in the first century. Corinth was happening. Corinth was booming. Corinth was where you went to get rich. And the Corinthians were ambitious and innovative and confident and gifted leaders.

However, they were also impatient, unkind, envious, boastful, arrogant, irritable, and resentful. And that was the Christians. And so the Apostle Paul, one of the leaders of the early church, pens this letter. It's a personal letter to the church, to the Christians at this little church there in this like Silicon Valley of the first century there, Corinth. And he says, listen, it doesn't matter how brilliantly eloquent and gifted you are. You need to speak the language of love. That's what Jesus wants from you. And then he says, in case you kind of forgot what love looks like, love is patient and kind, not envious, not boastful, not arrogant, not irritable, not resentful.

Now this is what we've covered so far in 1 Corinthians 13. I kicked it off with love is patient, Val did love is kind, and then Mark covered these last week. And by the way, let's thank Val and Mark for doing a wonderful job while we were away in Japan. It was, they really did a great job. Now today we're at verse seven. And in just nine words, the apostle Paul packs so much content. If these, these are like petals of a flower, when they start to open, there is so much relational truth in these verses. So let's read verse seven out loud together. Are you ready? Let's read this. Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

And what I want to do is take these just one two word phrase at a time, starting with love, always protects. And what I take that to mean is love rallies around the weak. Love rallies around people who are weak and in need of protection like Jeffrey Mackey is doing with the autistic community. Like the Bible tells us to do in Psalm 82:3, defend the weak and the fatherless, uphold the cause of the poor and the oppressed, rescue the weak and the needy or 1 John 3:17. If anybody has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need, but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person?

This is partly what's motivating that Hope Center Project. And as part of the Hope Center Project, you might know, we are funding the completion of Nazareth Evangelical College in Nazareth, Israel. Now, this is the new section here, and we are with our contribution from the Hope Center, they'll be able to completely finish that off and more than double the size of their school. It's such an exciting project over there. But while I was visiting there last year, I had a chance to meet one of their teachers, Dr. Rula Mansour. Rula is a fascinating person. She has a PhD from Oxford. She was the deputy district attorney of Nazareth, Israel. She is an Arab Palestinian, Israeli citizen Christian.

And so she kind of sits at the intersection of all these different kind of opposing groups there in Israel. And she felt the burden of that as a Christian. And so now she actually left lawyering and entered full-time Christian ministry. She started the Nazareth Center for Peace Studies. There's Rula there with part of her team. It's an amazing group. They do so much good stuff, but among many other things, she and her team have organized relief efforts since October 7th for both Jewish people in Israel displaced and affected by the October 7th attacks and Palestinian people in Gaza.

They say that is the role of Christian people here, to be agents of hope and reconciliation, because they say God has kind of placed us right between these two warring groups. And what I love is they're not just talking about it. They're not just yelling about it. These men and women are actually doing something positive, sometimes at great risk, because this is what love does. Love always protects, right? Even if it's somebody that somebody else might say is your enemy, Jesus said, "Love your enemies, bless those who even come against you and serve them."

Okay, so practical application for you this week. You might go, "Oh yeah, Jeffrey Macchi, Rula Mansour, these are very exceptional people and they really are." But you and I can do this too. And immediately, just look for somebody who needs help and you will find them all around you. I mentioned this in a video devo this past week. I was at the grocery store the other day, knowing that I would be talking about this. And I thought, okay, I'm gonna look for ways to serve the weaker brother.

And I'm in the checkout line at grocery outlet and next to me, an older guy rolls up and he's trying to push his shopping cart, but he has a walker that he's using with both hands. And so he's kind of nudging the cart forward like this with a walker, very old man. And so I said, "Please, sir, you can go ahead of me." I didn't recognize him or anything. And honestly, I felt pretty good about myself. "I let some old dude take cuts, so Crouch-like of me. I'm awesome." Well, a few minutes later in the parking lot, I see that he's struggling to get the groceries into his van. Again, he's got the walker. He starts to fall over every time he puts a bag into the van.

So I said, "Sir, can I help you do that too?" And he says, "Sure." And after all of that, he looks at me and says, "Well, Pastor and I, glad to see you practice what you preach." Just like that. And he says, "I'll tell you something. I haven't been to church in a few years, but now I might consider coming back now." And we got into a long conversation. "So you just never know." Look for ways to help. And I hope I see Mark's father back in church soon. No, just kidding. Look around for ways to help. Maybe at the store, maybe a child, or you know what? Maybe right now the Lord's bringing to your mind somebody who's grieving in your neighborhood. There's always somebody grieving, by the way.

And maybe the Lord is putting that person in your mind right now. You can write him a note or offer to come by and bring him a meal or bring them some cookies. Love always protects and serves the weak. And then he says, "Love always trusts." Now, true confessions. When I read this phrase, this is always the one that it's like, "I don't know, Paul. I think that's bad advice." In the King James, it's, "Love believes all things." Really, believes all things? Doesn't that make me an idiot? Or in the NIV, it's always trust. And I feel like, isn't that what codependent people do? Haven't you ever told a friend, "You know what? You need to wake up to reality and stop trusting everybody." And here, love believes all things. Love always trusts.

Well, here's how I wanna explain this. I think this, here's what this is getting at. Love assumes the best. Love assumes the best of people's motives. Now, I'm paraphrasing an idea here I first heard from Andy Stanley. In every relationship, there is a gap between expectation and behavior. And we've talked about this before. You know, you said you'd be here at six. Now it's 6.30, you're still not here. You said you do these chores and they're not done. There's a gap between expectation and behavior in every relationship all the time. Now, here's the choice you make every time. Into that gap, you either assume the best or you assume the worst of the person's motives. Every single time, it's one or the other.

You know, she's late. Well, she's been really busy and she's been doing so much. And I'm sure there's a good reason that she's not here. Or she never watches the clock. She's probably on her phone again. She just doesn't care about others. She does not care about my feelings. What a jerk. He's off budget again. Well, there's a lot going on this month. Maybe he just doesn't know. Or he's no good with money. His parents were no good with money. I should have seen this coming. He doesn't care about how this affects me. Hates me.

The point is in every relationship, all the time, at home, at work, with friends, at church, we put something in this gap. So here's my question. Where do you tend to go? Do you tend to go this way, assume the best, or this way, assume the worst? What motives do you impute when you actually don't know the motives? You know, as soon as you get the text, honey, I've gotta work late. Or I know I said I'd be home for dinner, but. Or I know I said that when you got home I'd have dinner ready, but me and the kids have to go to this thing so there's some Trader Joe's enchiladas in the freezer. You know? Whatever it is, do you tend to go this way or this way in your mind?

Here's what I've noticed. Couple of things. The people who learned how to love do this all the time. And if you do this all the time, you go, why would somebody do that all the time? Here's the thing about assuming the worst all the time. You get to be right every time. Or a lot of the time. In fact, some of you, you like it. When your spouse messes up, your kids mess up, your friends disappoint you because it gives you another excuse to be right. See, I told you he'd be late. I told you she wouldn't come through on her promise. I knew your sister could not manage money. I told you she'd go broke again. And you get into the cycle and you start looking for this almost gleefully.

And meanwhile, you're losing the most important relationships in your life. Because if you have consistently assumed the worst, guess what? Now they're afraid of you. Now they're never gonna tell you if they did something wrong. They're never gonna confess to you, which is what you need to transform your life. Now they're gonna dread talking to you. And if they're running late, they're gonna put off making the phone call. They're not gonna text you and you go, well, if you were running late, why didn't you call me? Why do you think they didn't call you? They don't wanna be yelled at because they know this is gonna happen to them every single time.

But when you do the positive, when you assume the best, now you create margin, you create a safety net and you communicate, I trust you and I accept you. And here's what that sounds like in real life. Honey, I'm running late. Hey, that's okay, it happens sometimes. I wish you weren't, but you got a lot going on and I'm gonna keep dinner warm for you. And what happens is that actually makes the gap between you smaller because the person responds to your grace. So don't always assume the worst.

Now I had some great conversations about this after the Saturday night service last night. So I wanna clarify a couple of things. I'm talking about assuming the best or the worst of people's motives when you don't really know the motive. For example, I kind of experienced this personally, this past Thursday on my daily little four minute YouTube video devotional. And if you don't know, by the way, we at TLC do these daily every weekday at 7 a.m. Little three or four minute daily video devotionals, you can subscribe at tlc.org/devo. But anyway, on this last Thursday, it was the National Day of Prayer and I forgot.

Usually on the annual National Day of Prayer, I lead people through a prayer for the nation and for the world and for themselves, for the church. And I just forgot to mention it. I did get to it the next day, but wow, some of the messages I got. The comments on the YouTube channel, people were ticked. Here's some of them. "Pastor, your silence speaks volumes. I am so disappointed you clearly undervalue prayer." I mean, listen, let me just tell you as a pastor, and that didn't offend me in any way. It kind of amused me, but it's a great example of what we're talking about here.

When it comes to your pastor, if I forget something like that and you have a choice between assuming I am sinister or I'm a knucklehead, always choose knucklehead. That's the safe bet every time. And this is what I'm talking about, right? Assuming somebody's motives. Or here's another example. Let's say you're driving out of the parking lot this morning and your car gets hit by another car while you're each trying to go for the exit, right? Now you can assume that person was trying to kill me or you can assume it was an accident, it was a mistake. As angry as I am, they're probably even angry at themselves because now their insurance is gonna go up and so on. And they were surrounded by witnesses so they can't get out of it. You can assume the best or the worst of somebody's motives every time.

Now somebody asked me, "Well, what about discernment? I mean, aren't there cases where somebody, you know, you need to wisely protect yourself from somebody who's just repeatedly hurt you. Are you saying we're not supposed to judge them? The Bible does say do not judge." And this is where it's critical to understand the difference between discernment and self-centered judgment. Obviously there are situations where trusting somebody is dangerous. Life presents us with all kinds of complicated situations and relationships and discernment is always needed in life every day.

But discernment is evidence-based, discernment is not emotion-based, discernment is gauging whether or not somebody's safe, discernment is gauging whether a course of action is wise, judgment is emotion-based, judgment is assuming the worst of somebody's motives, judgment is labeling somebody as evil and unsalvageable. And in Scripture, discernment is always encouraged and judgment is always discouraged. But generally speaking, when it comes to most of life's daily interactions, it's always better to assume the best of somebody's motives because that gives the relationship margin and actually a chance to grow and improve.

So love rallies around the weak, love assumes the best. And then third Paul writes, "Love always hopes." Love always hopes. Now, why is love so, rather hope so important? Have you heard of the town of Flagstaff, Maine? It actually doesn't exist anymore, it's been wiped off the map. Because in the 1940s, the state of Maine decided to build a dam at the end of the valley and they told the people down in the valley, "Your whole entire town is gonna be underwater in 20 years." Now at the time, Flagstaff was a lovingly maintained New England village with tidy homes and cute shops and the state even said, "Listen, we will buy all your homes but you can still live in them and you're gonna be able to live in a house mortgage-free, rent-free with money we gave you for your house in the bank for the next 20 years until the dam is built and then you'll have to leave."

Now you would think, good deal, right? Well, a reporter visited the town where he had grown up just one year after that announcement and he took these photographs and he said his hometown was almost unrecognizable. It had fallen to pieces, even though there were two decades before the dam was gonna be finished, even though people still lived there. All repairs stopped, broken windows weren't fixed, litter wasn't picked up, yards were overgrown and he wrote this great summary line to his story, "Where there is no faith in the future, there's no power in the present." All they had to look forward to was destruction.

And Flagstaff, Maine is a giant metaphor, a giant picture of what it's like to think of your relationship future as hopeless. If you look at your relationships as hopeless, you lapse into disrepair, but Paul says love always hopes. When you have hope, you're gonna fix those broken windows. When you have hope, you're going to repair the little things that are broken in that relationship that you need to kind of stay up on because there's hope for the future for that relationship because you think it's gonna be great and so you're not improving it out of nagging, you're improving it because man, we're gonna be together for 20, 30 more years and it's just gonna keep getting better.

You could put it this way, love believes people can change. Love believes people can change, people have a future, it is not hopeless. And you know, I actually don't think most people believe this. They say in every language on earth, there's an expression that amounts to you can't teach an old dog new tricks. In fact, I read this week that this is one of the oldest expressions in modern English. It started way back in the 1500s when English became what we would call modern English. Apparently, the doubt about people's ability to change is so universal that there is an equivalent saying in every language. Like in Spanish, the expression is an old parrot can't learn to speak. Here's the French expression, literally it's you can't teach an old monkey how to pull a funny face. Or in German, (speaking in foreign language) what little Hans didn't learn, big Hans will never learn.

But the Bible says from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come. The old has gone, the new is here. Somebody said in everything we are to be forward looking, believing that God is continually working in us, in others, and in our circumstances to make us new creations for his glory, amen? It's a practical application for this point. When you see a child, when you see a friend, when you see your spouse, when you look at your church, when you drive through your city, think to yourself that person has a great future. Our city has a future, there's real possibility here.

Now you may be surprised at how difficult this can be. But here's your assignment, this week everybody you see, every place you see, think I am believing for this person or this place's future. And then you start to tell people, I believe you have an amazing future. I believe our church has an amazing future. I believe our city has an amazing future. When you start to see things and people and organizations through that lens, guess what happens? You automatically become a force for good. You automatically become a force for love. You start fixing the broken windows. You start working on improvements in the relationship. But that only happens if you have hope the future is bright. They can grow, I can grow.

And then finally Paul says, love always perseveres. Love plays the long game. Love puts down roots, love doesn't give up, love makes it clear we are in this relationship for the long haul. As far as it depends on you, you're not going anywhere. Did you notice in this one verse the repeated, half the words in this verse almost are one word always, always, always, always, always? Love is consistent. How much of an antidote to our current cultural moment is this in a chaotic and uncertain world? You can depend on me always. That's what love does.

So this week, look for ways to speak the language of love. You don't even need words. Jeffrey Mackey doesn't have speech, but he does every single thing we've just talked about. Jeffrey Mackey looks out for the weak. He believes the best. He has hope for change. He's consistent. He speaks the language of love. I'll close with this. I've shared before how my mom, as a Swiss immigrant, had a very hard time with English. Of course, most Swiss people, they are able to just speak all these other languages fluently, but for some reason for my mom, it just got comically worse the longer she lived here.

And I loved her dearly, but for example, ordering at a restaurant was always an adventure. She'd look at the menu, "I'll have the cesarean salad, but it must be glutton free. So hold the krautens." "I'm sorry, ma'am." "Hold the krautens." She means hold the croutons. "That's what I said, hold the krautens. It must be glutton free. I'd like to see your desert menu." It was always something that she was pronouncing wrong or getting wrong. But after she passed, person after person told me stories like, "You know, after my operation, she came over and cleaned my house every week for six months." "Or I was new to the neighborhood, she brought me cookies every day." "Or I couldn't drive and she drove me to the doctor, drove me to church for two years." Odd, there were a hundred of these stories.

English was hard, but in the language of love, she was fluent. Like Jeffrey Mackey. And you know, there's a word for this kind of love. There's a word for love for the weak, love that believes you can change, love that never ends. The word for that is grace. And the good news is God shows you exactly this kind of grace. This is how we are loved. God loves you like this. And when we show this kind of love to each other and to the world, that is revolutionary. That is unique in our world. And it begins not when we try harder to love this way, it begins, listen carefully, when we understand that God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, and that through him, we who receive him, have all received grace upon grace upon grace.

And then we overflow with the grace that we've received to other people. And since we've been loved like this, then we just overflow with that kind of love for other people. And when people who aren't yet believers ask us, how can you be like that? Then we are able to say, well, it's not because I'm eloquent, and it's not because I'm smart, and it's not because I'm great, it's because of Jesus and what he has done for us. And so that is what we're gonna remember at communion right now. Would you bow your head and pray with me?

Lord, we wanna grow in love. We wanna speak the language of love. That's where we wanna be eloquent. But we know God that we're incapable unless you transform us, unless we ground it in the divine love that we can receive from Jesus Christ, our Lord and our savior. And then we're transformed by your love day by day, moment to moment. It's so easy in our world to be angry and unloving to be one of the angry crowd, the mob. But we choose today instead to be part of the crowd at the foot of the cross, and to look on you with love because you first loved us. And we pray this in Jesus' name, amen.