What's Love Got to do with It? - Sermon

What’s Love got to do with it?

4 Sept 2011

Romans 13:8-14

I love the things people say; they make me think, make me ask questions.

A friend was telling me that they used to belong to a church that did regular alter calls, and they always felt they wanted to respond because what was promised sounded so good; and then they think “hang on I already did that….”

The implication of course was that having responded, the reality of life after the response, after the honeymoon period was not as good as it sounded at the time of the alter call.

This is very sad because it seems to me that the reality should be better than what is imagined or even expected

Expectations are funny things, sometimes our expectations of ourselves or others, including God, are not very realistic and then life is certainly disappointing.

At other times our expectations are based on what we think others want or need from us or false hopes given by someone else, and sometimes they are based on our inner voice which ultimately comes from our own hopes, dreams or values.

Sometimes our expectations are considered normal for our culture and society and yet we find for us they are not fulfilled. For example what if you expected to be married, but you are not, be healthy but you are not, be financially well off but are not. Such unfulfilled expectations can be very painful.

Yet despite having unfulfilled expectations we need expectations; they fuel our motivations, they give us hope, they provide life experiences without which we would be very shallow shadows of who we are now.

In our Romans reading, God seems to have expectations of us; that we will love others, that we will not act in the ways of the prevailing culture. Don't sleep with another person's spouse, don't take someone's life, don't take what isn't yours, don't always be wanting what you don't have, don’t squander life in frivolity and indulgence, in sleeping around and dissipation, in bickering and grabbing everything in sight. 

The problem is if we turn these expectations into rigid rule following is it makes people miserable and is enough to put most people off us, God and Christians in general.

Surely loving God and others, living God’s way should bring joy and peace and good relationships.

So when I looked at this reading, I kept coming back to the idea of love, loving God and loving others as we love ourselves; I could see that if you really love God then you wouldn’t want to do something that upset him. This seems a good enough reason in itself yet I knew there was something a little dysfunctional in this.  I knew that children who were always good so they didn’t upset their parents were very unhappy and fearful. Their good behaviour was not really because of love, but because of fear and I knew God doesn’t want us to live in fear.

God is quite amazing He has a way of sneaking up behind us and putting something under our noses and then as we go round saying I can smell something but don’t see it he stops us and points it out, not always in the most comfortable way. He did this with me. 

I remembered that some years back I kept meeting people who did not love themselves; that is they did not honour or respect themselves. Like me they had been told to love yourself was somehow selfish, self centred and of course very unchristian as we should think of others rather than ourselves.

What I began to see in others and in myself was that because we do not love ourselves we are not very good at really loving anyone else including God and it makes it hard to recognise that we are loved fully by others or by God.

What I began to discover was that because we don’t love ourselves we get into situations where we feel disrespected or unappreciated or used.

A couple of weeks ago I used one Julian of Norwich revelations where God showed her that

 “God judges us by our true inner nature, which is always kept whole in him; safe and sound. And this judgement comes from his rightfulness, whereas we judge by the outward changeable nature… In His judgement I saw Him assign no whit of blame to us.”

We judge ourselves by this changeable nature; which means we do not love ourselves. This false changeable nature either clamours for attention and stuff, anything to make us feel better or makes us feel guilty at taking care of ourselves.

I have begun to wonder if we truly love ourselves, would we be able to hold our expectation for our lives more lightly so that when they are not fulfilled it would not cause us such angst, pain and bitterness.  In loving ourselves would we be able to see that having these expectations met or unmet does not change the true quality of our lives, because our lives are not dependant on them. I don’t have an answer, …. Yet. 

But I do think I am on to something, because as I read about those who hold all things lightly, they seem able to be truly present in the moment and truly loving to themselves and others.

When at last it dawned on me that God loves me and every human being no matter what and that my not loving myself was disrespectful to Him as He had created me I finally saw that holiness, that is living God’s way and life itself is indeed about love. It is about loving myself so I can love God & others; so I can naturally do the right thing, not from fear or obligation or rule following, but from true love.

Paul puts it so well in Romans as Peterson translates it

“The law code——finally adds up to this: Love other people as well as you do yourself.”

Do you see that Love others as you love yourself.

Hmm, so if I don’t love myself very well, it must surely follow that I don’t love others very well

Hmm

We have become very confused about what loving ourselves looks like; our media and tv shows give us, lust, self centeredness, self obsession and putting our wants above others as examples.

But this is not what loving our-self should look like.

Because we are made in God’s image we are naturally drawn to loving others and to love one another unconditionally. We do this to the best of our ability; so some do it better than others.

Because we are made in God’s image we are also drawn to love ourselves. This might seem strange but Jesus said if a kingdom or a house is divided against itself it cannot stand; the same principle applies to us. If we do not love ourselves we can’t remain whole.

The problem we face is we have forgotten we are made in God’s image, we are often confused by what that means; as our media shows we have become confused as to how to love others, how to love ourselves fully in healthy ways.

We end up going to unhealthy extremes; perverting what should be good into selfish obsession and narcissism. We expect another frail human to meet all our needs rather than seeing the only true healing is in God’s restorative love. It is in Christ’s death and through His resurrection that we can be restored to our true full loving humanity.

Godly love of our self is about taking care of ourselves, physically, mentally, spiritually, emotionally. It’s about respecting and honouring our needs, desires and rational preferences, not so we become self obsessed but so we are able to be truly ourselves.

Godly love for ourselves is recognising God created us in His image, and in loving ourselves we also love Him and His amazing work of creation.

From this place of loving ourselves we can more fully love others. We can also accept and cherish the love shown and given to us by God and others.  

If we don’t love ourselves we can end up chasing after love, where we fall in love and then out of love, because we can rarely see that someone else loves us and we struggle with loving them.  If we don’t love ourselves we can end up chasing status, money, possessions – anything that will make us feel better for a minute.

The bare truth is that we cannot truly love others well if we do not know how to love ourself.  Let’s face it, if you love yourself you are not going to sleep around, get drunk, kill someone, steal, quarrel or be jealous. It is when we don’t honour and respect ourselves that we do these things and in doing those things we show we are unable to love others because we do not honour or respect them either.

If we love ourselves we won’t get so caught up in daily business that we wear our selves out and become oblivious to God. If we love ourselves we won’t get so caught up in making a living we don’t have time to live, so busy we don’t have time to spend with those we love.

Loving ourselves opens our hearts to allowing God’s love to flow in our lives, opens us to knowing how to love others, to being able to be loved by others. Such love gives us lives that are filled with joy and peace rather than regret for our actions and unfulfilled expectations.

Please take a moment and honestly ask your self

Do I love myself?

Do I know how to love myself?

PAUSE

Today as we come to the table and partake of the bread and juice, the body and blood of Jesus our Messiah, remembering that God showed his immense love for us through the gift of His Son and that Jesus showed His uncompromising love for us in His death and resurrection let us allow Holy Spirit to show us how to love ourselves and how we may in turn love others fully.