Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:04 Um, there's a scripture we've been looking at in this series compelled and compelling, and this scripture will appear on the screen and it says this, for its Christ's love that compels us because we are convinced that one died for all and therefore all died. And he died for all that. Those who live should no longer live for themselves, but for him who died for them and was raised again, it's Christ's love that compels us. We looked at the very beginning of this series that that is like a sense of so persuasive, so powerful in its persuasion, that we really don't have a choice. We can't come to any other conclusion than being utterly compelled by the amazing overflow of generosity of our God. God has been so kind to us, isn't he? He's been so loving. He's been so gracious time and time and time again.
Speaker 1 00:01:12 And you will never find anyone who loves you like him. You'll never find anybody who cares for you like he does. You'll never find anybody who's able to come alongside your life and help you like the Lord Jesus does. It's his love that absolutely compels us. And we are left with no doubt. We are left with no other appropriate conclusion other than because his love has been so rich and so free and so abounding over our lives that we are utterly, utterly compelled by him. But there's another part of this and that is that his love, because it compels us that it should flow through us and be compelling to other people. And so often people, they look at the church in the UK and they say, I'm not really very at attracted to what church is. I'm not attracted to Christians. And if there's something about your place that you find yourselves in the day, in your work, your college, your school, your community, then God's plan is that your life is utterly compelling to people around you.
Speaker 1 00:02:22 That they look at you and they see Christ in you because the, the love of Christ is so compelling that now you have agreed to not just live for yourself, but to live for him. And so he lives his life through you. And so people see the compelling nature of Christ through your life. Evangelism and mission are two words that often get banded around in Christian circles. And often it's understood to be a way of communicating and answering questions or provoking people with a faith in Jesus. And in a sense that is a watering down of what evangelism a mission really is because it's supposed to be so compelling our relationship with Jesus, that he shines through us. Now, it involves words, but it also involves the love of Christ being demonstrated through the people of Christ. We haven't found someone who adds some faith system into our life.
Speaker 1 00:03:25 We have found someone who has given us the biggest love of all time and his love flows in us. And if his love flows through us, the concept of blessing is such a compelling thing in the scriptures. Jesus spoke a lot about blessing. In fact, we see on the, the attitudes that he keeps saying, Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are those who seek in first after righteousness. And that word blessed could be translated very appropriately as the word happy, happy other people of God. Happy are you. When people say all kinds of false things about you because of me, you can be blessed. You can be happy during those times. And there was a song that became really popular during the early part of the Covid lockdown. And it was the Lord bless you and keep you, make his face shine upon you.
Speaker 1 00:04:26 The Lord loves to bless. And let's look at the verses where that song's taken from. He's taken from numbers chapter six, verse 22. And it says, The Lord spoke to Moses, tell Aaron and his sons, this is how you are to bless the Israelites. You should say to them, May the Lord bless you and protect you. May the Lord make his face to shine upon you, shine upon you and be gracious to you. May the Lord look with favor on you and give you peace in this way. They will pronounce my name over the Israelites and I will bless them who likes to bless people. The scripture says it's more blessed to give than it is to receive. I'd like to bless somebody this morning who likes chocolate. It's a few brave people. Malcolm, you like chocolate when you give Malcolm a cheer. This, this man is just an amazing man. Do you remember when these were, there was lots inside them and they were much bigger. They keep saying reduced calories on stuff, but it's because they keep taking stuff out, isn't it? Not because technology, Malcolm, it's our blessing to you. Enjoy, enjoy.
Speaker 1 00:06:03 But
Speaker 2 00:06:05 There's
Speaker 1 00:06:06 A but there's a but
Speaker 1 00:06:08 There's a but because um, other people, everybody's tried roses, haven't they? Yeah. You, you all know how nice they taste. But imagine that you'd moved from part of the world and you had no idea what those tasted like. Imagine what that's like because that's how the beauty of Jesus is to a lot of people in this world. And so Malcolm tasted so he knows. And if he goes around someone who has got no idea whether they're nice or horrible, and he's trying to give them one of these sweets, he's got no idea. So Malcolm, would you mind opening? And are you okay to taste one this morning? Not got any chocolate allergies or anything of you.
Speaker 4 00:06:57 Its tricky to you.
Speaker 1 00:06:59 There you are. Because the Bible says taste and seed, isn't it? That the Lord is good taste and seed. So which is your favorite? Malcolm?
Speaker 4 00:07:11 Oh, well, oh, that sounds really, really lovely. Hazel.
Speaker 1 00:07:19 The sun's nice and yeah, go for it. You can eat it. Yeah. I don't know when the last time you had a chocolate publicly with hundreds of people watching you, but why'd you open them? It's happening this morning. I think you just tear it. And, and Malcolm, as you, as you eat this, we'd love you to demonstrate and descriptively tell people about the experience. Don't eat your fingers.
Speaker 2 00:07:54 Malcolm.
Speaker 4 00:07:57 Hmm mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Mm hmm S so wonderful. How wonderful. How glorious is the love of God more than this? And there's a nu oh, there's not in there. I'm partial to not. Oh,
Speaker 1 00:08:14 Is that nice?
Speaker 4 00:08:16 Hmm.
Speaker 1 00:08:17 I've gotta say I'm impressed how long you take to eat it.
Speaker 2 00:08:20 <laugh>,
Speaker 4 00:08:22 I'm probably
Speaker 1 00:08:23 Christmas isn't finished till March in is house <laugh>. <laugh>.
Speaker 4 00:08:29 They really are. I mean, they really are really special. And anybody who loves Jesus this morning could come to me. This might never run dry. <laugh>. Keep, keep praying and you can have a roses. How about that
Speaker 1 00:08:44 Malcolm? Would you like to bless some other people here today?
Speaker 4 00:08:56 Oh, uh, yeah. Yes, yes, yes. Especially the people up there in the balcony. Yay. That's it.
Speaker 1 00:09:04 Let's just think about that. Pause for a moment,
Speaker 3 00:09:07 <laugh>,
Speaker 1 00:09:09 Because that pause feels quite an appropriate description for much of the church. We, we love the Lord, we know he loves us, We're compelled by him. But there's some hesitation about sharing, not because we know he's rationed. He's not, he's never ending. He's abounding in love. But there's some things that stop us from sharing, but it's so blessed to be, to know how wonderful they are and to share those with some others. So Malcolm, just feel free to walk around and distribute some, You can keep a few for yourself, that's fine. Um,
Speaker 4 00:09:59 This is
Speaker 1 00:10:00 Before you preach. No, you can do it now if you want to. All I ask is that you don't make as many noises as he did when you're eating them. Cuz I am gonna continue talking for the next few minutes. Go for it. Go and bless people. Come on, let's give Malcolm a run of applause.
Speaker 1 00:10:21 See, we're called as the people of God to be blessed and to be a blessing. I can't believe some of you're turning them down. Wow. I can't believe that. What a picture of the, this gets better as a picture of, of our witness, doesn't it? But there is a beautiful relationship that the Lord invites us into of being blessed and being a blessing. Let the blessing of God flow through us. And, and we have been looking over the last few weeks at the description of the love of God from one Corinthians 13. Let me read all of these descriptions of verses that many of you be familiar with and then we're gonna look at the last few descriptors in one Corinthians 13. So from verse four it says, Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud. It's not rude. It doesn't demand its own way.
Speaker 1 00:11:25 It's not irritable, It keeps no records of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice, but it rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, love never loses. Faith is always hopeful and endures through every circumstance. Let's look at some of these last few descriptors of love to conclude this series, Verse seven. It says, Love believes all things or it never gives up or loses faith. It believes all things I have found over the years that love is eager to believe the best of others. Where would you and I be if this was not true of the Lord's perspective of us? Where would you be if in the midst of your repeated failures and sins and hardness of heart that the Lord had not looked through it and said, But I can see. I can see my daughter, I can see my son in that.
Speaker 1 00:12:30 I can see they will get through this. Yeah. Where would you and I be if the Lord had not demonstrated his love to us, that even why we were yet sinners, Christ died for us? What would your life and my life be like if, if love didn't believe all things and and actually did give up and lose faith in us? Where would you be if Christ had said That's enough? I've worked it out and you have now done that sin more than 70 times seven. That's it. I'm outta here. Where would you be? I know I wouldn't be still on this stage today. I know that none of us would be able to come and worship with confidence before God. It's because he's never given up on us. He has compelled to continue to believe and hope in our lives. There's a concept in Hebrew hacker at hat.
Speaker 1 00:13:29 It means gratitude. It's being grateful for what we have. It's about seeing the good even in the midst of difficult dark circumstances. It means that we turn our disappointments into gratitude by trying to see the good. It means that when a relationship has gone sour and somebody has hurt us, someone has let us down. Once again, someone hasn't turned up when they said they were turned up once again and repeatedly time after time. They keep disappointing you and letting you down. And this gratitude says, But I can see and I can continue to believe by faith that there's good in there and I'm gonna spot that I'm gonna be grateful for the good that I see. Love always looks for the best interpretation of any situation. Oh, it's not gullible, but it believes that there's fundamentally good. There was a film came out, I think it was about 2004 of a, of a true story.
Speaker 1 00:14:36 And it captured this story of a young idealistic teacher named Erin Gr. Erin was she, She had an opportunity to go to many schools, but she had a particular sense of convictions in her life that she wanted to work with some of the disadvantaged kids in schools. So she chose her first employment situation in a school that others wouldn't have gone for. So she arrives fresh with her teaching convictions. Her prophetic, if you like, desire to bring around change in the lives of those who were disadvantaged. Many of the pupils that she worked with in the US in this particular state where they were, they would've been lucky to have graduate at the end of their time at school. Some of them would've been even lucky to leave school, having basic reading and writing in competencies. Many of them were in gangs, many of them were illiterate. Many of them had known someone close to them who had been murdered and killed by gang violence. And this class was filled with hatred. She arrives fresh faced, hopeful, excited about her new adventure, feeling like this is her vocation coming to bring her best to help the lives of other people. And instead of being received with great joy, she was greeted with hatred.
Speaker 1 00:16:15 In fact, this hatred ran throughout the class. The Latinos hated the Cambodians. The Cambodians hated the blacks. And there was this, this hatred that run throughout the class of warfare of people that would hurt each other and histories of hurting each other. And so there's only one hatred that united them and that was their hatred for their new teacher. But she kept going at much cost to herself. She'd often buy things out of her own wages to try to help this family, these families. She would try and get alongside 'em, try to understand the circumstances of their life. Her fellow teachers told her that she was mad that she should not keep believing to not keep hoping, but she kept going. And I'm not gonna give you the end of the film cuz you might wanna hire it. It's called Freedom Writers and it's a brilliantly moving film, powerful story.
Speaker 1 00:17:12 And I want to be, I don't wanna give a spoiler cuz it's worth watching for you, but let's just say that her constant, continuous, open-hearted belief and love for these young people made a difference in their lives that meant their futures would never be the same. And it wouldn't have happened if someone hadn't had the love to keep believing. This is what the world needs right now. It needs a people. It needs God's people to be so compelled by God's persistent love to us that we are persistent in our love to others. It needs a church that are rejoicing when they receive the blessings of God, but they're also rejoicing when they're given the blessings of God. Whether people say yes, no, or get lost, God is looking for that nature of a compelled church, compelled with his love. Be the person wherever you go this week who continually tastes God and continually tastes that He sees the best in me and continually sees the best in others. Or that look like if you were the person in your workplace or in your family or in your community, that everyone thought, wow, they always see the good.
Speaker 1 00:18:39 Goes on to say that love hopes all things is always hopeful. Who in this room has disappointed God at some point in their life? Did he ever give up on you? Did he ever stop offering you hope? No. This is what we've tasted. This is what we share together and this is what we have the privilege of sharing with the world around us. Look at the story, The hope found in the Prodigal Son, that story that Beth mentioned earlier on in our encouragement to us. Think about the Father in this story for a moment. We know that the story tells us that he was looking to the horizon and he saw his son coming from a distance. What we don't know is how many days, months, or even years the father had stood looking at that blank horizon. It could have been years staring. And there's no one, there's no movement, there's nothing the size of ant crawling over the horizon.
Speaker 1 00:19:44 It's just an empty horizon. What kept taking him back day after day after day was hope, was hope because he believed his son would return. If you stop looking at the horizon, you stop posturing your heart ready for the miraculous. Don't stop looking at the horizon. Yeah, those around you that feel like their lives are hopeless, don't stop looking at the horizon and saying, I believe a miracle can happen here. Those of you who've got prods in your family, don't stop looking at the horizon. Keep your eyes fixed with hope in your heart. Those of you who've faced time and time again of praying for healing, praying for breakthrough, don't stop looking at the horizon. Keep your eyes set on the possibilities of what God can do. That's what love does. Love is always hopeful. If you want to capture the imagination of your work colleagues, your family, your friends, be a person that's filled with hope. Be the most hope filled person in your workplace. Be infectiously, hope filled. Keep tasting and keep sharing. And finally, love endures all things. It endures through every circumstance. I occasionally play the guitar.
Speaker 1 00:21:24 I'm not particularly very good, but there's a hazard of playing the guitar occasionally. And that is when you play guitar, your fingers are effectively holding the equivalent of a cheese slicer. And if you've never played guitar before and you sit down with a guitar with metal strings for an hour and you're playing those strings, you'll feel it on your fingers. And what happens is, if you are an occasional guitar player, your fingers never really, the skin on the end of your fingers never hardens enough. So I might pick the guitar up occasionally and when I pick it up afterwards, I feel it. I feel like singing a wet, wet, wet song there, Feel it in my fingers. <laugh>, If you feel it in your toes after playing guitar, you're doing it very wrong, <laugh>. But when someone plays guitar frequently and regularly there, the skin on the end of their fingers goes hard and they condition their fingers to be able to cope with holding those strings.
Speaker 1 00:22:37 I feel there's something like that, that if we are occasional experiences of anything, then it hurts us a bit more than when we posture our lives for the regularity of something. I think as the church in the West, we are occasional endures of persecution. Not much. We have it really light here and there's all sorts of thoughts about what the future could look like. But it's not bad. I could put a post on social media and I might get inundated with people who are horrible and say nasty things, uh, who don't like my perspective of Jesus. But that is hardly getting my house broken into and getting stoned. It's just some horrible keyboard warrior comments. It's not really persecution like our brothers and sisters in Iran right now, or in China or in other parts of the world that are standing up for Jesus. And our fingers are soft. And when, when we get a little bit of kickback, when we offer someone a chocolate and they say no thanks, it's like, Oh, are you rejecting me? What's wrong with me? And that stops us because it hurts. And the only way I can tell you to get through this is you gotta face it regularly.
Speaker 5 00:24:17 Yes
Speaker 1 00:24:19 Church. God wants our fingers to toughen up. Let me tell you, I know this because love is not soft to a bit of criticism. We don't give up when somebody says something we don't like. But love pushes back continually. It keeps pressing forward. That's what love does. It's like the church in the west has been silenced from sharing the sweetness of what we've experienced. It's like we see our friends in a boat partying a way in their boat and we can see there's a hole in the hole and the water is creeping into the boat and we know the boat is gonna sink. And we say, Hey, the boat is sinking. And they say, Leave us alone in our party. We don't want you to interrupt our party. Go away. And we walk away feeling so rejected and we still see the water coming to the boat. Love keeps saying, Hey, your boat is filling. Hey, I'm trying to bless you here. See the church. We've got a rescue mission. But I wonder how many of you have stopped? I wonder how often I've stopped because of that feeling of rejection that comes when we seek to carry a message of hope. Love endures. It never gives up. Stay near the boat. Have the life jackets ready for the moment that they're ready to accept your help. Don't walk away. Keep watching for their needs. But they rejected me. You said they hated me. Well Jesus. Jesus told you that would happen.
Speaker 1 00:26:04 Blessed are you when you persecuted and people say all sorts of things around you. Blessed, happy. God's pouring a blessing on us when we're persecuted. I, I don't see many people getting very convinced about this this morning cuz we know that this is such a gear change in our life. But this is the realities. People need this compelling love of God in their life and the church, surely we're not meant to just keep it for ourselves. We've been compelled by his love. Let's be compelling with his love church. Let's maintain a soft heart. But let's have Teflon skin. Yeah, let's, let's allow those things that people say, Let's allow them to wash over us because love never gives up. Love keeps going, love persists. Love stays next to the sinking boat. Love keeps looking to the horizon. Love never. Let's go church. Keep using those guitar fingers, toughen up. Keep enduring with his love. Let's pray together. Oh Lord Jesus, we are utterly compelled with your kindness and with your love. We've never met anyone in our lives who's kept loving us like you do, who's kept believing through a failure, a rebellion, a resistance that's kept looking to the horizon for our return.
Speaker 1 00:28:00 And we are absolutely amazed by you. Lord, I pray in the conclusion to this series two things. I pray we would live our lives in such a way that's compelled in everything we do by your love. And second prayer, I pray we would live our lives and be utterly compelling to those around us. In Jesus near my pray. Amen. Amen.
