Apostles Church

Incorruptible Love Ephesians 6:21-24: The demands of Jesus and the essence of the Christian faith is that we give our hearts fully to Jesus Christ. To genuinely love the historical person of Jesus, the incarnate, crucified…living Jesus. To love him with a genuine love, devotion, loyalty, that is incorruptible – “not subject to decay, dissolution or interruption.” We invest the totality of our attention, affections and allegiances in Jesus. You are going to love something like this. It is the way you are hardwired. You are born a lover; born with capacity and inclination to give heart to something. Incurable worshippers: “When we cease to worship God, we do not worship nothing, we worship anything.” GK Chesterton.

Whatever you love most will begin to define you and shape you. "We are to a large degree the sum of our loves, and we will of moral necessity grow into the image of what we love most.” Tozer. Our loves give shape to our lives, they will define and direct us. Define us – our identity and meaning and sense of self, our joy and confidence get tied up in what we love most.  We can’t begin to see our lives functioning without these things. We would not know who we were. Direct us - we make our decisions in light of what we love most. What you love most will be the weightiest factor in your decision making. Relationship; Money determines where you work/live instead of a love that is greater. Reordering of our loves. Not destroying them but demoting them. Christ supreme.
    Absolute Surrender. The essence of the Christian faith is that we trust and treasure Jesus above all things so that Jesus defines us and he directs us. If we love him in this way, it will mean a life of absolute surrender. John 14:15. This is the sticking point. To live as a Christian is a loss of freedom. We want to be free to make our own moral choices, let our glands have more say than God; treat sex, money, and power as experiences and goods to be consumed for our own immediate pleasure.  We want to be free. But are we? All loves require a loss of independence. A release of independence to the object loved. Many can attest – sacrificed so much to have your loves. These things are idols and they enslave us. Romans 1:25“…they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.” The highest loves of our lives enslave us in that we have to have them for our identity, significance, joy…Whether it is a successful career, a relationship, a body type…So we sacrifice for them and struggle hard to keep them. We are never really free. The truth about absolute surrender to Jesus. If you love him, you become like him.

Don’t put Jesus’ demand of surrender before his act of surrender. Jesus never requires from us what he has not already done for us. The self-less suffering love of Jesus destroys the mistrust in our hearts. We love because he first loved us. Illus: “I guess I just can’t give up the hope that there is a man out there who would love me enough to come back from the dead for me.”

How to cultivate this love. The Holy Spirit does this in our hearts. Time and Truth. Any relationship requires this. Time: Difference between attraction and affection. Sincere admiration of him, but no sincere devotion to him. We need time to get to know Jesus. Truth: Loving the historical person of Jesus is a response to all he is and all he has won for those who trust and treasure him. Revealed to us in the word, so we read it AND see it lived out in the life of the community as we incarnate him to one another. I have seen Jesus in the lives of people and have found him compelling. (Not what brought you to the city, but certainly what might keep you here – a robust spiritual life and a community with which you share it.)

Closing: Function w/out essence. If we elevate function over essence, we slip into legalism, motivated by law and guilt instead of love and grace, and will lack spiritual vitality and will cease to be a compelling people. For all who live in this way, Grace is poured out on them. Grace = Favor, power, joy, blessing, fullness that creates a spiritual vitality. For those who treasure Christ above all things, God pours out his grace upon them, “In them, God finds a theater where he can display His exceeding kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. With them, God can walk unhindered; toward them he can act like the God He is.” Tozer. God is active among a people like this with life changing grace and power. If you don’t sense God working powerfully in your life, it may be because you have put function before essence. Here is the tragedy: that is what happened to this church. Revelation 2:1-5. Without a deep and vibrant love for Christ, they could offer nothing to their city. A deep and vibrant love for Jesus, absolutely surrendered to him brings uniqueness to us and makes us compelling as a people that bring newness to life around us.