Love Defined
Essential Command: Love • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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Mark 12:29–31
“29 Jesus answered, “The most important is Listen, Israel! The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. 31 The second is, Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other command greater than these.”
Mark 12:29–31
“29 Jesus answered, “The most important is Listen, Israel! The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. 31 The second is, Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other command greater than these.”
Love always starts with God.
Love always starts with God.
Worship is the practice through which we love God with our full heart.
Worship is the practice through which we love God with our full heart.
Prayer & Solitude is the practice through which we love God with our soul.
Prayer & Solitude is the practice through which we love God with our soul.
Scripture reading & study is the practice through which we love God with our mind.
Scripture reading & study is the practice through which we love God with our mind.
Obedient submission to God is the practice through which we love God with our strength.
Obedient submission to God is the practice through which we love God with our strength.
Hospitality is the practice through which we love God through loving one another.
Hospitality is the practice through which we love God through loving one another.
Each these practices are love pouring out and love pouring back in…you cannot give without receiving back from God.
Love could be defined as a sacrificial, ongoing, and increasing measure of awareness, attention and affection from one to another.
Love could be defined as a sacrificial, ongoing, and increasing measure of awareness, attention and affection from one to another.
You will not flourish without the essential need of love being met..love from God, for God. love from God’s people and for God’s people.
Love is defined by God.
Love is defined by God.
1 Corinthians 13:4–7 (ESV)
1 Corinthians 13:4–7 (ESV)
4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love is the essential command for the people of God.
Love is the essential command for the people of God.
John 13:33–35
Little children, I am with you a little while longer. You will look for me, and just as I told the Jews, so now I tell you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’ 34 “I give you a new command: Love one another. Just as I have loved you, you are also to love one another. 35 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
John 13:33–35
Little children, I am with you a little while longer. You will look for me, and just as I told the Jews, so now I tell you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’ 34 “I give you a new command: Love one another. Just as I have loved you, you are also to love one another. 35 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
Have you noticed that we live in a cultural moment where people ache for recognition but nobody seems to really notice each other?
Eugene Peterson observed,
[We live] in a society in which we are variously depersonalized, functionalized, and psychologized. The particularity of each life is obscured by reductionizing abstractions. Life leaks out of us as we find ourselves treated as objects, roles, images, economic potential, commodities, consumers.
Depersonalization — this propensity to use others as objects, tools, or functions rather than recognizing them as whole persons — is ingrained in both the human condition and the cultural architecture of the modern world. Mass consumerism, easy everywhere technology, urban and suburban sprawl, and “workism” have conspired to make everyday life feel impersonal, fragmented, and lonely. Increasingly, we begin and end our days scrolling alone.
But, there’s hope!
Though this age of depersonalization leads to deep wounds, the glorious truth is that Jesus can heal us. The good news of Jesus and his Kingdom invites us to reclaim our humanity by loving and being loved by God and his people.
Corpus of Scripture regarding this essential command:
1 John 3:11 — For this is the message you have heard from the beginning: We should love one another,
Rom 13:8 — Do not owe anyone anything, except to love one another, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.
1 Pet 1:22 — Since you have purified yourselves by your obedience to the truth, so that you show sincere brotherly love for each other, from a pure heart love one another constantly,
1 John 3:23 — Now this is his command: that we believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and love one another as he commanded us.
1 John 3:14 — We know that we have passed from death to life because we love our brothers and sisters. The one who does not love remains in death.
John 15:17 — “This is what I command you: Love one another.
1 John 4:11-12 — Dear friends, if God loved us in this way, we also must love one another. No one has ever seen God. If we love one another, God remains in us and his love is made complete in us.
1 Thess 4:9 — About brotherly love: You don’t need me to write you because you yourselves are taught by God to love one another.
John 15:12 — “This is my command: Love one another as I have loved you.
1 John 4:7 — Dear friends, let us love one another, because love is from God, and everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.
2 John 5 — So now I ask you, dear lady—not as if I were writing you a new command, but one we have had from the beginning—that we love one another.
1 Pet 4:8 — Above all, maintain constant love for one another, since love covers a multitude of sins.
Gal 5:13 — For you were called to be free, brothers and sisters; only don’t use this freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but serve one another through love.
Rom 12:10 — Love one another deeply as brothers and sisters. Take the lead in honoring one another.
Heb 13:1 — Let brotherly love continue.
1 Thess 3:12 — And may the Lord cause you to increase and overflow with love for one another and for everyone, just as we do for you.
1 John 3:15-17 — Everyone who hates his brother or sister is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in him. This is how we have come to know love: He laid down his life for us. We should also lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. If anyone has this world’s goods and sees a fellow believer in need but withholds compassion from him—how does God’s love reside in him? Little children, let us not love in word or speech, but in action and in truth.
Rom 13:9 &10 — The commandments, Do not commit adultery; do not murder; do not steal; do not covet; and any other commandment, are summed up by this commandment: Love your neighbor as yourself. Love does no wrong to a neighbor. Love, therefore, is the fulfillment of the law.
1 Pet 1:23-25 — because you have been born again—not of perishable seed but of imperishable—through the living and enduring word of God. For All flesh is like grass, and all its glory like a flower of the grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord endures forever. And this word is the gospel that was proclaimed to you.
Hebrews 10:23–25
“Let us hold on to the confession of our hope without wavering, since he who promised is faithful. 24 And let us consider one another in order to provoke love and good works, 25 not neglecting to gather together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging each other, and all the more as you see the day approaching.”
Hebrews 10:23–25
“Let us hold on to the confession of our hope without wavering, since he who promised is faithful. 24 And let us consider one another in order to provoke love and good works, 25 not neglecting to gather together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging each other, and all the more as you see the day approaching.”
PROVOKED TOWARD LOVE.
PROVOKED TOWARD LOVE.
I want to provoke us in this collection. We ought to be uncomfortable with our hyper privatization and isolation of our faith…which is unbiblical faith. Faith is personal but not private.
Jesus risked by loving us FIRST.
Note: Judas just left to betray Christ….to love like Jesus, is to have people close enough to you, with whom you loved with relentless vulnerability, that they could hurt you with what they know about you. Not all people need to be that close…at least one other beside your spouse.
Becoming people who practice love for others as a way to love God is risky…but it’s righteous.
This is what professor and author Dr. Todd Hall calls the "relational spirituality paradigm." This concept, relational spirituality, sees spiritual formation as a personal, embodied, and relational process. We become whole persons, according to Hall, as we are “loved into loving.”
God created us by love and for love. We become people of love by receiving love from others. While destructive relationships bring us our most painful wounds, God uses redemptive relationships to bring our most significant healing
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Talk it Over (with friends, a spouse, or your Group)
The message was about defining Love as God does. What is one idea from Sunday’s message that impacted you?
Read Mark 12:29-31 What does this passage reveal about God? What are some other things you observe in the text?
How can loving God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength change your daily interactions?
Read 1 Corinthians 13:4-7. What is the most challenging attribute of love for you to live out?
Read John 13:33-35. What is this passage telling us about love?
Reflect on a time when you felt depersonalized or isolated. How can you counteract that experience in your relationships?
How can you create opportunities for deeper connections within your church or group to combat feelings of loneliness?
