Preeminent Power of Love- February 16,2025

rebooting our spiritual life in 2025 and I encourage those of you who have a Bible in front of you to please turn to page 1,000 and if you would like please feel free to read along silently as I read aloud I ask you to hear now First Corinthians chap 13 veres 1-13 if I speak in the tongues of men and of angels and have not love I am a noisy gong or a clanging symbol and if I have prophetic powers

and understand all Mysteries and all knowledge and if I have all Faith so as to remove mountains but have not love I am nothing if I give away all I have and if I deliver my body to be burned but have not love I gain nothing nothing love is patient love is kind love is not jealous or boastful it is not arrogant or rude love does not insist on its own way it is not irritable or resentful it does not rejoice at wrong but rejoices in the right love Bears all things believes all things hopes all things endures all

things love never ends as for prophecies they will pass away as for tongues they will cease as for knowledge it will pass for our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect but when the perfect comes comes the imperfect will pass away when I was a child I spoke like a child I thought like a child I reasoned like a child but when I became a man I gave up childish ways for now we see in a mirror dimly but then face to face now I know in part then I shall understand fully even as I have been fully

understood so faith hope love abide these three but the greatest of these is love this ends our reading of God's holy word may God add to our understanding and our application of its truth in each of Our Lives will you join me in a prayer Lord God we do thank you for this beautiful passage that the Apostle Paul wrote for the church in Corinth thousands of years ago and yet its power and its beauty are as impactful on our lives today at our hearing and Lord we do pray that the words of my mouth and that the

meditations and thoughts of all of our hearts and our minds will be acceptable in your sight speak to us Lord for this we pray in Christ's name amen well as I mentioned we are in the third part of a series called rebooting your spiritual life for 2025 thinking that this is probably a good time at the beginning of of the year for all of us to stop and take stock of what needs some adjustment in our spiritual walk now for those of you who have not been with us to this point and for those of you who have please bear with me but I

think it's important to remind us all of what rebooting that process is for instance if you have a cell phone or a computer that's not working correctly and you call customer service you will probably get someone on the the other line that will say I want you to do something for me go over to the plug the wall outlet and unplug your device or turn off your cell phone wait 15 seconds and then plug it back in or turn it back on and then come back to me and amazingly so that seems to do the trick more than not by unplugging and plugging

it back into its energy source your device somehow has the ability to get everything back into order so that it might operate the way it should so this is my attempt for us to look at how we can unplug from our life our schedules that seem to take us over and get us all a skew wait pray and then plug back in to the power source that is our Lord and savior I call this unplug pause pray talk to God about what's going on here and then proceed as God encourages you and instructs you to do so we are looking at Paul's letter to

the Church of Corinth because the Church of Corinth is in many ways so much like the Church of today and so we can learn many things from them this particular chapter First Corinthians 13 I have to say probably not probably has been a part of every single wedding I have ever done in my entire time in Ministry and rightly so it is a beautiful Treatise on love the Apostle Paul just really lays out for us what love is and what love is not and which of us could not learn something more about this very important

concept of love and yes this last Friday was Valentine's Day so you may be thinking that's why the pastor chose this particular scripture for today and you're partly right but partly wrong in that this particular scripture was not really intended to talk to the Corinthian people about their romantic life it wasn't about a Valentine's Day card and chocolates and even though many of us may have enjoyed those cards and chocolate covered strawberries this weekend and the the wonderful relationships that we were

celebrating but what was going on here if you look back at chapter 12 you find that Paul has just told the church at Corinth the people you have everything you need all the gifts to bring about God's purposes at this church to be the church but they were tearing each other up in their need to put themselves forward as some self-proclaimed expert in their area they were tearing each other up they were dividing themselves into factions we read it before in the earlier chapters of First Corinthians

where some said well I was baptized by Paul PA and I was baptized by Apollos and I belong to Christ and Paul says I don't remember baptizing you maybe one family but you're missing the point you are not to be tearing yourselves up and dividing yourselves into factions was Christ divided we are to be one so here they are now talking about spiritual gifts and what once again they're starting to do that very same thing as Paul learned from letters written to him about you've got to do something they would say well I have the

gifts of speaking in tongues well I have the gifts of Prophecy and that is so much greater because that's dealing with knowledge well I have given more through my charity than any of you and I would give myself to be burned if it was necessary I have so much faith and so they were each other up and Paul comes to them and says I want to tell you about a greater way and he begins he says although it is wonderful to have these spiritual gifts there is a greater love if I have the gifts of speaking in

tongues I'm no better than a clanging symbol or a Gong if I do not have love if I have that gift of Prophecy and all the knowledge in the world but don't practice that with love what good is that if I offer my body to be burned but don't have love involved I am nothing Paul was talking to them about a particular kind of love that was so much greater now this is where we english- speaking people have some difficulties because we have one word L which was used a lot for this last Valentine's Day but in this case in the Greek language

there were numerous words for love now the kind of love that we were celebrating in this country for Valentine's Day would have been Aeros romantic erotic kind of love but there was also fileo Brotherly Love think Philadelphia There's filio which is talking about about family kind of love but the love that Paul was talking about here was agape love love that is referring to the self sacrificing the the gracious love of almighty God the the love that is described in first John when he says we love because God first loved us we are

to love one another you they will know we belong to God because because of our love agape love because God is agape God is gracious love God is forgiving love God is agape which is an action kind of love that has come into this world and we have been given the privilege of practicing that particular Agape Love Now the interesting thing is is that agape is a word that was not used any place else but in our Bible and in our holy Scriptures it is used 137 times to talk about the love of God now I like toys I have two

granddaughters and two well three children and um we love to get them toys we love to see their faces when they receive those gifts but it is interesting to read the analysis of the toy industry in that it has been written that the toy industry takes note of when the divorce rate in this country goes up because they get excited because that means it will equate in the number of toys that are sold because when you have a divorced family you have then four parents and then you have eight most likely grandparents which means you have

that many more opportunities for people to be out there buying toys for the children who are caught in that situation when really really what those children long for more than a toy is just to know that they are loved the Apostle Paul Begins by telling us that love is preeminent love is is essential to every single thing to have any meaning in this world or in our lives think about your life without love first of all you'd have to get rid of Apple music and most every other music station because just

about every song revolves around love love that is pending love that is there for you or requited love that you missed love is everywhere around us our family units revolve around love and it is I have to say not just the Aeros kind of love it is also that Agape kind of love as the Apostle Paul is talking about the first quality of love he begins by saying love is essential it is essential to all of life he says that if I speak in the the tongues of Mortals and Angels but don't have love I am a noisy gong or

a clanging symbol he goes on and on and says that love is the most important thing because you gain nothing it is worthless without love the group that Paul was writing they were arguing over with over everything there was the group that spoke in tongues there was the group that prophesied the group that had this astounding Faith expression and I think is this anything like people today do we divide ourselves up into factions and not see that we have been called to truly love one another think about the the way we

divide ourselves up we tend to gravitate to people who agree with us the way we like to dress the way we we like to be entertained the political party that we belong to our opinions if people are like me then come on you're part of my group not their group and we go at it and divide ourselves up even as the body of Christ this last couple Summers especially during the pandemic I think I've shared before I really got into trying to learn how to C it's better than I have in the past and one of the

things that I discovered in all of my YouTube Ventures was I found out about a guy Chef that is one of the most decorated chefs in the United States his name is Thomas Keller maybe some of you know of him the more I learned about Thomas Keller the more enthralled I became about him it turns out that his restaurant The French Laundry located in Napa Valley California that is truly one of those restaurants where they have a garden right outside of the restaurant and everything that is served in their

restaurant comes from that Garden so it is truly one of those Garden totable kinds of events his restaurant The French Laundry received one of the first Michelin stars of that high award for any restaurant but in the United States he's got the first and now sits with three Michelin stars and has had that and held that position for a long time in fact of he opened other restaurants and now has seven Michelin stars for all of his restaurants he has written six cookbooks one that I have I'm so thankful not that I'm ever going to be

able to attempt what he has in there but to just have it on my bookshelf it reminds me of Thomas Keller's approach to life this man is very humble he started with nothing and he saw how grateful he was to the help of others that helped his restaurant to come about and flourish but the one thing that really struck me about him was in an interview he said that the Michelin stars are wonderful and his staff is fabulous he loves working with them to put together these New Creations but the Great greatest joy he

gets every single time he goes to work is by taking an order to a table and seeing the Joy on the face of the people who are enjoying the food he has prepared he said he does what he does out of love I truly believe that he's on the right track it is truly love that makes what we do in our life worthwhile and if we get a Michelin star in the process great but that's the satisfaction that is where the true Joy comes from that seeing the love that other people had for his creation as well as the love

that he had for them bringing it to them the second part of Paul's explanation of Love is something that we need to take note of he starts talking about what love is I want you to pay attention to the to be word there love is love is patient it's not love is all about patience no it is patient love is kind it's not love is all about kindness no love is kind you see it is the action of being patient it is the action of being kind to one another and certainly we all have experienced people who are not patient or who are not very

kind and what an awful experience that can be but we are to be patient we are to be kind to be kind and what it is not it is not envious it is not boastful or arrogant or rude think do we do we treat others with love or do we measure whether they are deserving of love because of what we expect how do we go about sharing the love of God in our lives is it truly an unconditional or is it if they treat me well enough maybe then I will give them kindness and love it's not what God is saying here through Paul he says it is agape it is

unconditional it is like the Lord who knowing the Sinners that we are forgave us sent his only son to pay the price for your sin for my sin it is that gracious kind of forgiving love that we are to have for one another especially in our families right it's always such a an amazement to me when I see a family tearing each other up being critical of one another being boastful and rude as the Apostle Paul describes here that is not a sign that the holy spirit is in their life because that agape love is patient and

kind not rejoicing in wrongdoing but rejoicing in the truth and love believes all things hopes all things and endures all things meaning that you hang in there because you love them I have an example of of an amazing kind of love with a friend of mine he and his wife have a daughter that has teral paly she's had it since birth when I got to know them as a couple she was 21 years years old and I asked him I said what is life like for you all with your daughter and they said well in the morning we get her up we brush her teeth

we comb her hair and help her to get dressed and then we go down and we get breakfast for her and help her eat and then we talk about what we're going to do with our day and we go about our day and I said wow I said that's that's an amazing kind of love that you have he said well of course wouldn't you I think about any parent wouldn't you do anything for your child that you love you go to the ends of the Earth for them right if they call you'll be there because you love them they love their daughter with this amazing kind of self

sacrificing kind of love but if you ask them I am certain they would say it's not a sacrifice we get more love back than we give ourselves the Apostle Paul finishes talking about this kind of agape love he says this kind of love doesn't have an ending now you may say I've had it I've reached the end of my rope can't take it anymore this is it this is the Line This is that red line God must look at you and think but I gave everything for you and I love you still and I believe and hope in you we too need to realize that this

kind of love doesn't have a red line this kind of love doesn't have an end of your rope this kind of love is eternal because this kind of love comes from God.