Love That Abounds

Love grows with knowledge and discernment to prepare us for eternity with Christ.

I want to start off our time this morning talking about a phrase that’s pretty popular today. As soon as I say the phrase, you will immediately associate it with the particular movement that has popularized the phrase. And I don’t want to talk about that movement so much as I want to talk about the phrase and the philosophy behind the phrase. So I went round and round in my mind this week trying to figure out how I could talk about the thing I wanted to talk about without talking about the thing that I didn’t want to talk about. And all I came up with was this random, rambling introduction. How am I doing? Not well, exactly how I thought it was going to go.

The phrase is Love is love. You’ve heard this, right? You’re thinking, Yes, Kyle, we live on planet Earth. We have heard this phrase before. That’s the phrase that many have used in the LGBT movement as a shorthand argument to validate romantic feelings between any two people, regardless of gender or marriage or anything like that. Our Scripture doesn’t take us into the issues of sexuality and gender this morning, but it does take us into the nature and purpose of true love. And for that discussion, this phrase is fascinating. It’s a fascinating phrase. The argument summarized by Love is love goes like this. Love is a feeling between people. If that feeling is there, then it is both unassailable and commendable. It’s unassailable in the sense that no one outside of that love, no third person can argue that it’s not present. And it’s commendable in the sense that all love is morally right and good simply by its nature. In other words, the only people who can identify the presence of love are the people who share it and all love is good by definition. It’s a very popular argument that has served its movement actually very, very well as a catch phrase, even though it doesn’t hold up to any type of scrutiny. If a wife is being abused by her husband but stays with him because she loves him, and he then argues that his behavior isn’t wrong and that he loves his wife. I imagine a lot of the love is love folks would join me in helping this woman see that real love doesn’t look like this. But to do that we would have to speak from outside of that relationship and we would have to condemn those emotions as really not love at all. We’d have to say something to the wife like ‘your feelings of love are misleading you into sinful and dangerous situation’. And suddenly a once memorable catchphrase becomes completely unusable. The fact is true love, whether it’s romantic love or brotherly love or the love that we have for God, is more than a set of feelings. It’s a gift from God given to us to bind us both to each other and to God. But like all good things in creation, it’s been warped.

It’s been warped by sin. Along with all of God’s good gifts, it has been ill defined and misused to the point that we don’t actually love correctly. And so, like with all things, love itself has to be redeemed. It has to be renewed. The renewing of our minds has to include a fresh God-honoring understanding of love. And that is what we get today. We get to have that today. Love grows with knowledge and discernment to prepare us for an eternity with Christ. If you have your Bibles, you can open them to Philippians 1. We’re going to be in v. 9 today. Paul is going to give us a tour of the nature and purpose of love this morning. That mysterious force, that feeling, that power within us that has caused people throughout the centuries to do the bravest and dumbest of things. Right? Love. He’s going to show us not only how love is supposed to grow, but why it exists at all. And he does this with a series of little contingent statements that build on each other. And I’m going to frame our time this morning around four questions answered by these statements. So here here’s the passage. “And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.

So here’s our first question. How does love abound? How does it abound? Paul has already told the Philippians that he prays for them all the time and in fact he prays two things. Now we’re going to see that he prays two things. The first thing earlier he said that he thanks God for them because they are partners with him in the Gospel. That was that weird vertical Christian thankfulness that we talked about a couple of weeks ago. He now tells them that he asks God to do something in them. He’s asking God to do something in the Philippines. He prays that their love will abound more and more. So all the song writers are correct. You can in fact grow in love and deepen love and strengthen love. You can do all of that. In fact, Paul’s hope is that the love this Philippine church has for each other will abound more and more, which implies that there’s no end to the extent that the bond of love between these folks can deepen and strengthen. The capacity you have for love is endless. It’s bottomless. There’s not only room for us to grow in our love for each other. There’s an ability within each of us for it to happen. And we know that it requires a work of God in us because Paul prays for it. Paul’s asking God for it. But the fact that he is praying for it means not only is it possible to abound in love, it is God’s goal for us that we would abound in our love. Remember, up in v. 7, Paul said it was right for him to love the Philippians. His love for them correctly matches his love for Jesus. So he looks at the gospel and he says, My love for you is correct. It matches up perfectly with how the Gospel would have me love you. Here we see that love for others isn’t just a static fact. It’s not just a yes or a no, but it’s an ever broadening and deepening relationship. And that makes sense because it matches up with your love for the Lord. And think about that for a moment. That has certainly changed over time, hasn’t it? As you follow Jesus, if you’ve been following Jesus for a long period of time, you know that your love for the Lord has deepened and strengthened. If you follow Jesus, your love for Him has grown. I certainly love the Lord more now than I did as a 20 year old new Christian. My desire to walk closely with Christ has increased since then. My passion and emotion in worship has become more expressive. My desire for righteousness that pleases God increasingly has become all I want. It crowds out every other thing that there is. And since we are to love others like we love Jesus, our love for others should be getting stronger and deeper as well, because it’s the same kind of love. If it’s healthy, it’ll be growing deeper. It’ll be strengthening. Ok, so far, so good. Who wouldn’t want that? Who doesn’t look at the world and go, Oh, I want more love in the world? So Christians and non-Christians alike would say, yes, bring on abounding love.

But how does it abound? What causes it to grow. It abounds with knowledge and all discernment. Those are strange ingredients, wouldn’t you say? Knowledge and discernment in love. If you ask the average person today what it would be needed to add to love, to make it more robust, I do not think this is the answer that you would receive. If I’m reading our culture correctly, I think people would say acceptance is what you have to add to love in order for it to grow. I think the argument would be that judgment and disapproval are the limiting factors against love. So accepting all people and all viewpoints as equally true and valid is the way to maximize love for each other. What Paul says here would sound to our culture like factors that would actually cause love to shrink, not to grow. Especially that second ingredient discernment. Well, let’s unpack these words here just a little bit.

Knowledge is true facts that align with reality. So factual data, that’s what knowledge is. Discernment is the right application of that data. What scripture calls wisdom. Now, you don’t necessarily grow to be a more loving person just because you have knowledge and discernment. It doesn’t work the other way too. Just because you have more knowledge and use more discernment, you don’t automatically become more loving. There are plenty of knowledgeable, discerning people in the world who are technically right but who are in fact jerks. Right.

Paul talks about this problem in first Corinthians 13. He says, If I have prophetic powers and understand all mystery and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. But if you have a deep love for Christ, if you have an incredibly deep love for Jesus and for people, the expansion of your knowledge, particularly your knowledge of God’s word and a discerning eye toward applying God’s truth, will cause you to love more, because your love will align both with what is true and with what is wise. Let’s say you have a friend who comes to you and she says to you, I’m leaving my husband. I’m leaving my husband because she feels that they have fallen out of love. They’ve grown apart, they’ve changed. They’re different people now. And by the way, it’ll also be better for the kids if they separate. Now, according to our culture, the only loving response to that friend would be acceptance. To give her support. I’m sorry, I’m sorry to hear this. Sounds like the right thing. You know your relationship better than anyone; you have to live your life too. You have to live for yourself. Correcting that thinking – if you were to correct that thinking or in any way disagree with that decision – that would be considered unloving because it would be judgmental. And the most unloving thing that we can do in our society now is to disagree with someone and accuse them of being wrong on matters of the heart. Anything that we consider to be a personal matter has only one source of knowledge and discernment anymore. And that is me. The individual. The only knowledge to be brought to any matter of the heart is the knowledge that I have, whatever truth I bring, whatever decision I make, that’s discernment. And that holds true for relationships, spiritual matters, even identity has come into play here. The answer to the question Who am I? can only be answered by me. Not my family, not my doctor. Certainly not any God that would disagree with me. By the way, American culture wasn’t always like this. There was a time in American culture when you could tell someone they were wrong about something personal and they would accept it. Back in the 19th century, Ralph Waldo Emerson, no Christian, by the way, a transcendentalist, but Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 19th century wrote, “Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.”

Isn’t that something? Emerson’s vulgar mistake. that’s the norm, now. Everyone who’s contradicted is persecuted. No one can be told that they’re wrong. So let’s return to our illustration, our divorce illustration. What does love really look like there? Really loving this person would require sharing the knowledge that divorce is never better for the children in non-abuse situations. It’ll require helping her discern her own fault in causing the problem. Not just all him, but what did you bring to the table that has caused this problem? And it’ll require sharing God’s design for marriage and His grace that can restore this marriage, even if it’s really, really hard and a very long and difficult process That would be better and right because of truth. That’s what really loving someone in that situation looks like. It requires someone with knowledge and discernment. And if we want our love to abound, Church, we’re going to have to abound in knowledge and discernment in all things, not just a few narrow examples. In every way, growing in knowledge and discernment, the better we understand God’s Word and the world around us, the better we will be at discerning how to think about ourselves and about others so that we can truly love people like we’re supposed to. Because not everything the world calls love is love, and certainly not everything the world affirms should be affirmed. That leads to our next question.

Why must love abound with knowledge and discernment. So that you may approve what is excellent. Sometimes the most loving thing that you can do is to show approval. Sometimes the loving thing to do is to offer correction. Sometimes the loving thing to do is to stand firm in godly knowledge and discernment in the face of tremendous pressure to compromise. Christians sometimes get a reputation for being known for what we’re against rather than what we’re for. Well, I know what you’re against, but what are you for? And that’s, by the way, actually a pretty good critique because like everybody, Christians often only speak up when they disagree with something. And so it begins to sound like you are all just against everything all the time. But the goal of love that abounds with knowledge and discernment is to approve what is excellent. It’s actually the opposite of that. Approving what’s excellent here means approving those things in the world that are morally righteous and good. And we know that because of the follow up statement in verses 10 and 11, pure, blameless and righteous, which we’ll look at here in just a minute. Love that abounds with knowledge and discernment will allow you to sort through the what is broken in the world and identify and then to celebrate those things that are God honoring and good, because there’s a lot of those things. And the right kind of love will help you find them. It’ll give you the ability to show proper love in every situation, and then you can approve those things that are pleasing to God.

And when you use that kind of discernment, when you help, you’re helping people. That’s a gift to people far more than an undiscerning love that just calls everything good. See, I want people in my life, and you should too. I want people in my life who love me enough to discern in me those things that are God honoring and give me guidance when my life doesn’t match up with what pleases God. I counseled a young couple a few years back who were getting married, and when I do premarital counseling with a couple, we always do one of those sessions on finances. And so I asked the couple what they plan to do in the first few years of marriage, and she was a nurse and she was planning to go on to get her master’s degree, which is a fantastic idea. That’s a really great goal. But then I found out that they were planning to take out tens of thousands of dollars in loans in order to make that happen. And so here I thought I wanted to approve what was excellent about this plan, but I also wanted to help them discern what was wise when it came to paying for it. And so I showed them that it was better to save and pay for an education than putting them into a giant financial hole early in their marriage.

Real love does not look like affirming everything. That’s not what real love looks like. Real love requires us to listen critically and to guide wisely. Every parent knows this, by the way. Every parent in this room right now knows that that is exactly what love looks like. To listen carefully and to guide wisely. You’d never just say yes to every harebrained scheme your seven-year-old came up with, right? No, of course not. I asked my son, Sammy, this week if he could think of anything that he used to think was a good idea, but he no longer thinks is a good idea anymore. And so I was sort of waiting for him to come back with something really profound. He took a minute and then he said, I don’t think it’s a good idea to eat dandelion stems anymore. Tell me more. He said Mom pointed out that they’re covered in weed killer. Yes, yes. Don’t do that. So he’s gone clean on the dandelion stems no more. That’s a funny example.

But somehow we think when we become adults, every idea we have or every value we hold magically becomes excellent and wise. And that just isn’t true. I know plenty of adults who are eating dandelion stems, so to speak. You know what I mean? There’s a whole lot of dumb things we do all the time. Truly loving each other means we help each other see the truth better, and we discern things in the world that are actually God-honoring and wise. And we encourage each other in those things. And why is the pursuit of excellence so important? “And so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:10-11). By increasing our love with knowledge and discernment, we’re able to identify and approve things that are excellent. So we become filled with the right things. The increase of our love, if it’s done right, if it’s done in a healthy way, does something inside of us too. It causes us to become increasingly pure and blameless, because by loving this way, we are filled with righteousness that comes from Christ. Now, that sounds like kind of a complicated process, doesn’t it? How does increasing love result in greater blamelessness, purity, and righteousness? Well, it has to do with the kind of love that Paul envisions in a church community. I want you to think about this for a minute. Picture a church community that says our number one goal is to glorify God by loving Jesus and each other the way that we’re supposed to. That’s a pretty good summary of what church is supposed to be: loving each other the way the Lord calls us to. And remember, Jesus said, That’s how people are going to know that we’re his disciples. That’s the mark of a follower of Jesus, that we love one another. And so this church community says, okay, if we’re going to succeed in loving each other the way we’re supposed to, if we’re going to succeed in that, we have to add as much knowledge of God’s word as we can so that we can determine what love looks like in any given situation while we interact with one another. And so if our brother is making great choices and he’s growing in Christ, we can come and we can say we affirm that, we’re excited about that, we can get behind that. If he’s making foolish, sinful choices, love looks like gently correcting. We don’t want to approve sin. But we do want to guide sinners toward Jesus. That’s love. So we carefully pick out what is excellent. We help each other, see what is excellent. And now you can see it, can’t you? You can see it.

The result of that careful, loving discernment and guidance is twofold. Not only do I help my brother become more pure in righteousness, I myself become more pure and righteous because I’m dwelling on that scripture too. And I’m applying that scripture too, and we’re sharpening one another. We are both filled with righteousness that comes from Jesus, specifically from the Holy Spirit, who is at work in us when we are doing what the Bible calls loving each other. Love, rightly applied, is a tool for growing in Christ likeness. Your love for your spouse is meant to be a tool for becoming more pure and righteous in God’s sight. It’s not just feelings. It’s not just so you feel happy. There’s more to it than that. There’s a greater purpose in it. Your love for your children is meant to prepare them to be more like Christ. It’s not just so that you can enjoy your family. I hope you do. But that’s not what the love is for. There’s a reason for it. I can’t think of a group of people that need your knowledge and discerning love more than your own family. And by the way, you need theirs in your life as well. Your love for this church needs to abound to the point that you can help each other discern and approve what is excellent. Loving other people in the church isn’t just about hanging out and doing Bible study. I hope you have friends. I hope you hang out. I hope you fellowship. Right. That’s the word we use here in Christendom. Right? I hope you have time together. Right? But it’s not just about that. There’s an intimacy necessary to help each other knowledgeably discern what God would have us do. I may not know what is excellent in any given situation. I could have feelings and perspectives that are more shaped by the world than they are by the Gospel and the church family member who really knows me, who knows my weaknesses, who knows me better than sometimes I even know myself, who also knows the Gospel really well, can give me insight that I can’t see because I’m blinded by my impure thoughts or by my emotions.

Church, that is love. That’s love. And what is it all for? To the glory and praise of God. The ultimate purpose of loving anyone or anything is to show the glory of God whose very being is love. That’s the purpose of love. When we love correctly, our love models His love. Every expression of our love is meant to reflect His. That’s why our love can’t give approval to sin. It can’t because God’s love couldn’t give approval to sin. So our love can’t give approval to sin. By the way, it’s also why our love can’t abandon a sinner or condemn an enemy. Because God’s love is redemptive love. God’s love comes into our role to save us. God’s love takes broken, unholy people, lifts them up out of the pit of their sin and righteousness, and makes them pure and blameless before Him. And when our love looks like this, when it’s patient and kind, when it endures wrong and it endures suffering together. When it overcomes evil with good, that love magnifies the glory of God on Earth. Our love isn’t ultimately about us. It’s not ultimately even for us. Just as we were made to glorify God and enjoy him forever, our love was made to declare and demonstrate the love of God. And this is why that initial philosophy of love is love isn’t just shallow, it’s incorrect. The only true love in the world is love that accurately depicts the sacrificial, redeeming love of God, as expressed in Jesus Christ. Anything that that doesn’t accurately depict God’s love isn’t actually love at all. Twisted emotions and self-serving relationships are not love. Affirming someone in their sin is actually a way of hating that person. Even if you call it love. It’s a way of hating that person. If you steer them away from the truth of the gospel and from the blessings of the Lord, you are hurting them, even if you call it love. The only way to truly love someone is to glorify the Lord by modeling Christ-like love to them.

Let me close our time this morning looking at some words from Jesus that will put Paul’s prayer for the Philippians in perspective. Now, this passage is a little bit a little bit unconventional and difficult, but it gives the right perspective for everything that Paul has said here today about love. It’s from Matthew 10:34-39:

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And the person’s enemies will be those of his own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever does not take his take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

Seriously, Kyle, you’re going to end on that? I know it seems weird to turn here and there’s a lot to unpack. But I want you to see just how difficult Jesus knew loving each other was going to be in this broken world. He knew it was going to be really, really difficult to love each other properly. He knew there was going to be a great desire in each one of us to compromise and elevate our close relationships over our relationship with him. That we would take these human relationships and we make them more important than our relationship with Jesus. He also knew that remaining faithful to our love for Him would cause division, even with the people that we love the most. And what He says here in this, and this is where it aligns so well with Paul, is this: Make sure your first love is Jesus. Make sure your first love is Jesus. Set the anchor of your love in Jesus, because if your first love is Jesus, all of your second loves will be aligned correctly. You will know the right way to love everyone else if you love Jesus more than everyone and everything else. Would you pray with me?