Forest Park Church

I saw a picture of an old burned-out mountain shack some time ago. All that remained was the chimney...the charred debris of what had been that family's sole possession. In front of this destroyed home stood an old, grandfatherly-looking man dressed only in his underclothes with a small boy clutching a pair of patched overalls. It was evident that the child was crying. Beneath the picture were the words which the artist felt the old man was speaking to the boy. They were simple words, yet they presented a profound theology and philosophy of life. Those words were, "Hush child, God ain't dead!"

 In this season, we remember Christ's resurrection, but we are also reminded of his suffering. Peter’s first letter calls its readers to a living hope, encouraging them to steward their suffering and orient their lives around future glory.

When 67-year-old carpenter Russell Herman died in 1994, his will included a staggering set of bequests. Included in his plan for distribution was more than two billion dollars for the City of East St. Louis, another billion and a half for the State of Illinois, two and a half billion for the national forest system, and to top off the list, Herman left six trillion dollars to the government to help pay off the national debt. That sounds amazingly generous, but there was a small problem—Herman’s only asset when he died was a 1983 Oldsmobile.  

  As Paul continues in the Biblical description of love, he points out that we can’t give to others what we don’t have, and one of the greatest thieves of love is our own pride. I Corinthians 13’s list of things love “is not’” challenges all of us to take a good look inside and ask if there is room for love in me.

  It has been said that “Love is that thing which, if a church has it, it doesn’t really need much else, and if it doesn’t have it, whatever else it has doesn’t really matter very much.”  

  We have seen that love is at the center of everything in scripture.  John said it well in his epistle when he said, “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Anyone who does not love does not know God because God is love.”  The Bible teaches us that God's essence is love. This means that love defines who God is, and God defines what Love looks like. 

  The Greeks understood that love has different meanings in different contexts. They even used different words to capture some of those meanings. They used the word “philos” to speak about friendship and mutual affection. They used the word “eros” to describe romantic love with all of its passion and desire. And they had another word for love which they hardly used– the word “agape.” It was the word Agape that Paul defined when he outlined the qualities of love in I Cor 13; in this lesson, we will break down how love expresses itself in the life of a Christian. 

  I’ve noticed over the years that after coming to Christ, we often begin to distance ourselves from former friends. We have less time for the hurting and struggling. We’ve found the thing that meets the needs in our lives, but we keep our distance from those who need the very thing we’ve found. I don’t think this separation is always intentional, and sometimes we must separate from our former crowd for a while to start fresh, but it's important to remember that Jesus lived differently.

  One of the common criticisms Jesus faced was that he spent too much time with sinners. How many of us could be accused of spending too much time with the unwelcomed and unappreciated?  It wasn’t that Jesus was unaware of what Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians: “Bad company corrupts good morals.” No one better understood the importance of Godly influences, spiritual maturity, biblical knowledge, and a robust prayer life than Jesus. However, he understood that these tools were not just given for our personal benefit but for the benefit of the lost world as well. When he sent out the twelve in Matthew 10, he said to them, “Freely you have received; freely give.”

  The Christian life is not about safety and comfort but rather about finding ourselves in a dangerous place of vulnerable compassion. We have been given a commission to go into the world with the message of salvation! Without this information, we are all lost for eternity.  For many of us, the desire to avoid the risk is tempting, but this morning, we will explore what Jesus meant when he said to “love our neighbor as ourselves.” 

About 200 years ago, an encyclopedia wrote an article on love; it took 5 pages. That same encyclopedia attempted to describe the atom, and they took about four lines. Recently, in a recent addition to that encyclopedia, they left love out altogether and took five pages to explain the atom.

  Love is difficult to explain, but it’s very hard to express; when you think about what should define the local church, what comes to mind? Good friends, dynamic preaching, people in your stage of life, children’s programming, great leadership, growing in size, focus on the underserved and overlooked in the community, or maybe even a focus on deep teaching?

These are all good things, and many are integral parts of the Gospel mission, but what was it that Jesus said would define His people? 

John records Jesus' answer to this question in John 13:35: “By this, all people will know that you are my disciples if you have a love for one another.”  

  Christ calls us to have the kind of love that rises above human indifference to serve others in need. A love that looks at other people through the eyes and with the heart of God. 

Near Tiberious on the shore of the sea of Galilee, there is a valley called the Arbel. Two thousand years ago there was a road through this valley that led from Nazareth to Capernaum. No doubt Jesus walked that road many times. Because it is lined on both sides by steep mountains, the Arbel is sometimes called the wind tunnel. Any storm coming from the west would blow through that valley and hit the Sea of Galilee with enormous force. Thus the lake (that’s really what the Sea of Galilee is, a large lake) might be peaceful and then a storm would suddenly arise, with driving rain and gale-force winds. Any boat on the Sea of Galilee would be in peril when that happened. The many boats at the bottom of the Sea of Galilee bear testimony to the power of a raging storm in the middle of the night, when a boat is tossed helplessly by the wind and the waves and there is no one who can rescue you, and nothing you can do to save yourself.  That’s what makes the text of  Mark 4 so powerful;  On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, “Let us go across to the other side.” And leaving the crowd, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. And other boats were with him. And a great windstorm arose, and the waves were breaking into the boat, so that the boat was already filling. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion. 

  The key to understanding this story lies in one important question. If you know the answer to this question, then you know what this story is about. 

Whose idea was it to get in the boat in the first place?