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Sacrificial love
Text: 1 Corinthians 12:31-13:8, 13
(Honesty)
Christianity is a kingdom of people, a body of believers, and a holy nation. Your individual relationship to God matters far more to you than the big picture of Christianity as it is built on Jesus Christ matters to the Father. (The wood value illustration.)
People are related in a few ways. The most powerful ways are not physical, but spiritual. People are related through trust, respect, and love that we will discuss today. Sacrificial love is how people are related to each other and how people are related to God.
What’s become very clear about sacrificial love is that it is a fundamental principle in a biblical worldview, that thread, as you pull on it, runs clear through the Bible.
Sacrificial love is foundational
- We love because he first loved. If he loved then we also ought to love.
- The underlying principle on which all the law and the prophets are built.
- Reasonable service in Romans 12.
Sacrificial love requires a new life
- Let this mind be in you according to Philippians 2.
- Except a seed fall in the ground and die… save his life will lose it…
- If you give up your life, then you have to have a new life. If you give up your ambitions, there has to be someone else’s ambitions you adopt. This is why you would have to lose your life to gain life.
- Peter would equate this with a spiritual rebirth of new life (1 Peter 1:22-23) not found in you. Because it can’t be in yourself; that self dies and yields to a higher calling.
Sacrificial love in the form of a compromise
- While some might say compromise is of the devil, the ability to set aside your will in a relationship shows that you genuinely care for someone else.
- (I guess the opposite of that would be narcissism: me, my time, my life)
- Not my will, but thine be done.
Sacrificial love in the form of effort
- Measurement – No greater love than a man lay down his life for his friends (John 15:12-17)
- Death of animals versus death of Jesus Christ – Innocent but unwilling death versus innocent and willing death
Sacrificial love is evangelism
- A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. 35 By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.
- People who proclaim to be Christians, especially very self-righteous people, seem to believe that the opposite of this is true. It’s like they’re going to promote Jesus Christ by opposing anything and everyone. Hey, no wonder you’re not convincing.
Sacrificial love is the commandment
- Love one another
- Galatians 5:13 For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another.
- 1 John 3:23 And this is his commandment, That we should believe on the name of his Son Jesus Christ, and love one another, as he gave us commandment… 4:7, 11-12 Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. … 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another. 12 No man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.
