Episode 1. A World Without Love
Imagine, just imagine a world without love. What would that look like? Well sadly you and I don’t have to do too much imagining, we don’t have to look too far from home to see what a …
Imagine, just imagine a world without love. What would that look like? Well sadly you and I don’t have to do too much imagining, we don’t have to look too far from home to see what a loveless world really looks like.
Love is something that we take for granted, it just is. It just exists, it’s always been here, always will be, love. When I was younger by far the majority of pop songs were in fact about that very thing, love. These days, believe it or not, 92% of pop songs feature sex.
Well it seems that sex sells, but as much as love is something that’s always been there, something that we take for granted, it’s the lack of love or the failure of people to love each other that causes the most pain in this world. And not just on a geo-political scale, it’s the absence of love or the failure of love that causes most of the pain in our lives at an individual level. Can I be even more specific? In your life and my life.
Think about the things that’s causing you pain right at the moment. Okay maybe they’re health issues or financial issues, but most of the pain in our lives is caused by relationship issues, anger, resentment, arguments, feeling ignored and passed over. People who try to bully you, people who always want to get their own way.
Just think about your relationships at the moment, where do they fall short, what are the things causing you hurt at the moment? Think. Isn’t it all about people failing to love one another the way that they should? Absolutely.
Now my dictionary tells me that love is a strong feeling of affection. That’s it. Well, I don’t know about you, but I think that … that’s a wholly unsatisfactory definition of love. My feelings, your feelings, the next person’s feelings, they go up and down depending on how we feel physically and emotionally, depending on what’s happening around us.
Anyone who has been married for any length of time will tell you there are times in your marriage that your wife or your husband drives you completely bonkers. You thought you knew them, then they do THAT. No, if love is going to have any meaning at all it has to be much more than a strong feeling or emotion.
So what exactly is love? Come on, what actually is it? If you had to get up and give the rest of us your definition of love in twenty-five words or less what would you say? How would you put it? Well that’s what I want to explore with you on the program this week and in fact next week. Let’s take a journey together to discover what love actually is because if in our heart of hearts we can work that out, then at the very least you and I will have a better sense of how to love other people and that has to be a good thing, right?
So we’re going to spend some time together in 1 Corinthians chapter 13. I guess that’s a really familiar passage to many written by the Apostle Paul to the Church in Corinth. It seems that the Church which he was involved in planting in the first century AD was having some significant problems, arguments, dissension.
So Paul, who’s off somewhere else at the time, writes this letter to them. These days that letter is the seventh Book of the New Testament and the reason why chapter 13 is so well known is that it’s almost always the chapter that gets spoken about at weddings, well Christian weddings at least. And it kicks off talking about love in rather an odd way, it starts off by describing a world without love. Let’s have a listen, 1 Corinthians chapter 13 verses 1 to 3:
If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels but I don’t have love I’m just a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal 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 do not have love I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions and if I hand over my body so that I may boast but do not have love I gain nothing.
So what God’s saying here through Paul is that it doesn’t matter how clever or gifted you are, it doesn’t matter how much your life is a life of sacrifice, it doesn’t matter how generous you are, how much faith you have, if you aren’t motivated by love it’s all completely useless. You know something, I think He’s absolutely right.
We all know people who are incredibly bright or gifted or talented and yet they’re not the sort of people you want to hang around because there’s no love, there’s no kindness or gentleness. For them it’s all about them. Blow you, blow me, they’re only interested in advancing themselves and we just don’t like being around those sort of people. It’s those sorts of people that ruin relationships, it’s those sorts of people who start wars.
If I don’t have love then I gain nothing. If I don’t do everything out of love, motivated by love for God and for others then what’s the point? And the love that Paul’s talking about here, well it’s not some vague feeling of affection like in my dictionary. The original Greek word that he uses there is ‘agape’ and agape is a selfless, sacrificial, unconditional love. The four types of love spoken about in the Bible, it’s the highest form of love, it’s the love that God showed to you and to me by sending Jesus to the cross to die for us.
When Jesus said:
No greater love has any man than to lay down his life for his friends.
That’s exactly the sort of love that He was talking about, rock solid, unconditional love. Love that endures all the ups and downs, love that never wavers or fails even when the object of that love doesn’t deserve it. Without that sort of love all the gifts, all the abilities in the world mean nothing. Would you agree?
So how are you living your life? Is your life mostly about you or about the love that you have for the people around you? Because when you and I are dead and gone the only thing we’ll leave behind is the love, or not, that we deposited in the hearts of the people who really mattered to us.
I was fascinated recently to read what Mahatma Ghandi thought about Christianity. Ghandi was a Hindu but he’d read the whole New Testament and strikingly he had a lot of time for Jesus. This is what he said:
I like your Christ but I do not like Christians, your Christians are so unlike your Christ.
Hey that is sad but it’s true.
You and I are never going to be perfect but so often we Christians and the Church at large are not principally an expression of God’s love. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of Christians are doing great things, I mean amazing things, look back at Mother Theresa and okay, we all know about her, but there are countless Christians today living lives of sacrificial unconditional love, serving people, loving them in the most difficult of circumstances.
The problem is that there are also countless Christians who are doing the exact opposite, fighting, arguments in Churches, power struggles, pride, dissension, all the stuff that was going on in the Corinthian Church. And out there in the world, the place where we get to use our gifts to express the love of Christ in a practical way, so many so called Christians are using their talents just for their own self advancement.
How are you living your life? If God is indeed the God of love as the Bible says He is, if God is indeed the one who sent Jesus Christ, His Son, to suffer terribly, to die on that cross to pay for your sins, if all that is true how are you living your life? Is yours the life of sacrificial, selfless, unconditional, agape love or are you one of the many Christians that Mahatma Ghandi was talking about?
I know, they’re hard questions but they’re questions that you and I need to be asking ourselves. They’re questions that we really need to look in the mirror and say ‘God, truly show me, how am I living my life? Am I using my gifts and abilities for me selfishly or am I using my gifts and abilities to love other people the way that you love me?’
Come on, what’s the truth in your life?
Comments