Love that Binds
Love that Binds
Scripture: Colossians 3:14
Biblical love is service and sacrifice on behalf of another person because Christ sacrificed himself for us.
She has the deepest empathy and not just extends to me as well. But like to watch her engage our children empathetically and understand, to ask good questions and to even the people around us that, you know, whether it’s our neighbors oror our friends, you know, she just has incredible empathy. I love that you can go into any room and connect with literally any person that’s in there and make them feel heard and loved and valued. Jennifer’s very good about sharing what’s on her mind. And if there’s a problem that we’re having, whether it’s just a small thing or something that’s really bothering her, she’s not afraid to share that with me. That’s something that I’ve really found to draw me closer to her and to find that my love grows for her because she can share that. Yeah, he’s very thoughtful. Like, not just with me, but, like, pretty much everybody in his life. Just like a really thoughtful person in general. One thing that I love that she does is just be herself. Like she doesn’t care. Like, you know, when my wife is in the room because she’s no fly on the wall. And I think that’s what attracted me to her. Like when I first met her that was the scenario. Like just her being her, like, it’s just that’s. Yeah, that’s that’s it for me. I love her cooking. She’s always been a great cook. I love her passion in the joy of marriage. And I love the fact that she gave us two children. I like it when you open the door for me. He opens every door for me. I rarely have to touch door handles. It’s pretty great. He gets mad at me if I actually try and open the door for myself. But I also like that you are very joyful fun to be around. That’s good. You’re a joy. Thanks. I also like it when you shave your face. Yeah, well, Pat is really good about writing, communicating, writing cards of any kind. And like, she’ll write a congratulatory card or a thank you card, and she signs both of our names to it. So I get credit for that. And I’m no good at that at all. So I really appreciate that.
Well, I too get credit for cards I didn’t write or even think to send, so that’s great. I right with Tom on that. It’s a marriage perk I did not anticipate, but fully appreciate. Uh, one of the great things about building a healthy marriage, cultivating a healthy marriage over a long period of time is that you learn to work in harmony with each other. You figure out your spouse’s strengths, and you contour your marriage to play into those strengths. I know we’ve had some fun talking about things like who drives on long car trips and who cleans up the vomit. But even these light examples are indications of a more profound truth. You and your spouse are given to each other, united by God to function as a single unit. And the more you each grow to be like Jesus, the more you will work in harmony together as a team, complementing each other’s gifts and strengths. Now that takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of work to cultivate a team like that. But what motivates that work, even when it’s hard, is the love we receive from Jesus that moves us to sacrificially love each other. And I’m going to show you that here in just a little bit.
Today we’re going to talk about love, specifically the role that love plays in marriage. I want to start by talking directly to a specific group of people here okay. Specific group of people I want to talk to those of you who are not married, but pretty sure you will be someday. Okay. That group, I guess maybe, like down in this region here. I didn’t expect them all to sit in the same spot, but you’re spread throughout. There’s there’s spread throughout the room here too. You’re not married. You’re pretty. You’re pretty sure you’re going to be married sometime? Almost exclusively. Okay. Almost exclusively. When we talk about finding the person that we want to marry, we identify that person by saying, I have fallen in love and that’s totally fine. It’s totally fine. What we usually mean is friendship has turned into attraction, or attraction has turned into friendship. Those two are interchangeable. Often for the ladies, it’s friendship first. And let’s just be honest, usually for the guys it’s attraction first. There’s a reason why the question we ask our folks on the video today is, what’s something that you love about your spouse? Present tense. Not what was the first thing that attracted you to your spouse? You’ve heard the unfiltered details these guys have given in these questions. Can you imagine how not safe for church those answers would have been? However you get there, whether it’s attraction, whether it’s friendship, however you get there, feelings of love create a desire to commit to each other and that’s fine. But, that is an incomplete way of talking about love. If your view of love is only a feeling that you fall into sort of haphazardly or unexpectedly, then you won’t be prepared for what the true biblical love of marriage requires. Biblical love in marriage requires some things, and you won’t be ready if all you’re looking at is the feelings. You’ll mistakenly think that love is something that you fall into passively instead of something you put on actively and as you think about possible future marriage. I’m not telling you to take away the feelings, okay? I’m not saying that feelings don’t matter. Feelings are great, but I want you to expand your view of love to include what Scripture says to create a fuller definition and a correct expectation. For those of you who are married, but you’re struggling, it might be that you’ve forgotten or that you’ve never heard in the first place what biblical love looks like. Perhaps you’re you’re wondering if you’ve fallen out of love. That’s a phrase I’ve heard before. Falling out of love because the feelings aren’t there like they used to be. Today it is my aim to show you what biblical love looks like and what it requires. And if you’re willing to put on this biblical love, I believe you will find yourself moving back toward the feelings of love that you’re missing. See, church, biblical love is service and sacrifice on behalf of another person because Christ sacrificed himself for us. The biblical definition of love is a lot closer to a sense of duty than it is to the feelings of romance. Now the romance is absolutely part of God’s design for marriage. Feelings of attraction are great. There’s a whole book in the Old Testament, the Song of Songs, sometimes called The Song of Solomon, that there’s a whole book that celebrates the intimacy and the sexual attraction in marriage. And someday we’ll probably preach through that book when I’m brave enough. I feel like I need a lot more job security before we actually preach through that book. Sexual attraction, intimacy. Those are gifts. Those are gifts from God to be celebrated in marriage. Feelings of joy and love are essential to a healthy marriage. But if you widen the scope of the biblical view of love between husbands and wives, you find that the feelings of attraction are the result, not the cause, but they are the result of a much broader commitment to service and sacrifice that is rooted in and flows from Christ’s love for us.
So let me show you that in Scripture this morning, we’re going to begin in Colossians 3:14, the passage that we’ve been exploring throughout this series. And then I’m going to show you what Jesus has to say about love generally, and what Paul has to say about marital love specifically. So here’s our verse. This is Colossians 3:14. And above all, these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. So this is the final piece of clothing in the list that Paul tells us to put on. It says literally above all of these, love. So picture you’re getting dressed in the morning, right? You all got dressed this morning getting ready to come to church, right? You get up, you get dressed for the day ahead. You put on your your whole outfit and everything’s working together. But before you head out the door, you remember, oh, wait a minute, I live in Minnesota. And so you go back and you get your coat, right. You get your coat because it’s October and it’s nice out now, but it could be mid winter by this afternoon. So you get your coat and you take that with you. You throw it on over the top of everything Paul says, above all, over all of the things you’ve put on, put on love. Love is the binder that holds it all together, because the things in the list are not sufficient on their own. The clothing we put on keeps us warm, but it’s not sufficient on its own. So above all, we put on this coat of love and makes the other Christlike virtues and actions work. Paul says it perfects them. Now, this is a bit of an awkward phrase here. The English Standard Version says love binds everything together in perfect harmony. That’s their translation of the phrase bond of perfection. Love is the bond of perfection for the whole list, so it unites everything else together. It makes it all work. I believe this is similar to the argument that Paul makes about love in 1 Corinthians 13. See there he’s talking about spiritual gifts and ministry, and he says that there you can use your spiritual gifts, you can be involved in ministry, but without love, all of that is useless He says, for example, that you can know all the mysteries, you can know all of the mysteries and the knowledge of God, you can have all of that, but without love, he says if he uses that knowledge without love, he is nothing. He’s nothing. Here in Colossians, he’s saying something close to that. You can act with compassion and kindness and humility and gentleness and patience. You can bear with each other. You can tolerate each other. You can forgive each other. You can do all that. You can tolerate each other. You can forgive each other. You can go through all of the motions and you can say all the right things. You can do all of that stuff. But without love, those actions are empty. They’re meaningless. It isn’t God’s goal just to get us to say we’re sorry. He’s not just trying to get us to say we’re sorry. You see this all the time with parents, right? So their kid bites another kid. And so you got to get that kid and the other parents and the other kid together. You get them all together in a room together, and there’s a little parent meeting, and you say, Timmy, what did you do? And Timmy says, well, I bit him, but it’s because he called me names. And you say, that’s no reason to bite someone. Timmy. Say you’re sorry. And then Timmy says he’s sorry so that everybody can move on. Timmy’s not sorry. He’s not sorry. He don’t care. Timmy is going to go ahead and bite somebody else as soon as Mom and Dad aren’t looking again. He’s just not very good at covering his tracks. And he’ll get better next time when he does. Telling someone to say that they’re sorry doesn’t work. You know why it doesn’t work? Because that’s not how sorrow works. You got to know how sorrow works. You can’t force somebody to have sorrow. See, sorrow is a regret that in the heart it comes from a conviction of the Holy Spirit. Real sorrow moves us toward repentance and a desire to reconcile with the person that we’ve wronged or who has wronged us. And it’s the same thing with all of the heart attitudes here. God isn’t just saying act more compassionately, present yourself more humbly. Say the words I forgive you. He’s saying, have the love of Christ. Have the same love that Christ had. It’s love that will turn these other actions and attitudes into something real. We’d like to think that the empty actions and the fake emissaries are just problems for kids, but they’re not.These are real human problems. Adults do this even better than children because we’re better at covering our tracks. We’re very good at going through the motions and saying stuff that we need to say, and doing what we need to do to get along without having love in our hearts for other people. Married couples who do that to each other for a long period of time eventually become very cold toward each other. They operate as a married couple. They say the things they’re supposed to say. They do the things they’re supposed to do to get along, but their actions are not bound together by a love for Christ that produces love for each other.
Now here we have to turn to the most important definition of our time this morning. What is biblical love? What is it? We know we have to have it, but what exactly is it? Let’s look at what Jesus says. This is from John 15. This is my commandment that you love one another as I have loved you. So here in John 15, Jesus is speaking to his 12 disciples in the hours right before he’s going to be arrested and tried and murdered on the cross. And as part of a long list of promises and descriptions of what the world will be like for these men and for all of the disciples who will follow Jesus in this world. Jesus tells these guys what the community of disciples should be like, and it all centers on this command. It all centers deep down on this command. Jesus’s commandment love one another as I have loved you. Remove all of your preconceived notions about what love is. Empty your view of love, of all of its content, and refill your view of love with what Jesus says here. Love one another as Jesus has loved us. God is love in his Triunity, in his Trinity, the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit love each other in perfect harmony. And this God designed us to bear his image. So our love should reflect the perfect love of God. And Jesus right here says, if you want to know what love is, you need to look at his love for us to see it. Okay, so now we know where to look. We’re looking at Jesus. What is it, then? Well, Jesus doesn’t leave us hanging. He goes right to the core of the definition. Greater love has no one than this. This is such a helpful phrase. We don’t have to look past what Jesus is about to say to us to find some other, more foundational view of what love actually is. We don’t have to go beyond what Jesus says because he says, look, you’re not going to be able to find a greater example of love than what we have here. We don’t have to ask what really encapsulates love, or try to find an example that will make sense of it. Here is the greatest picture of love that defines everything else that we have to say about love. That someone lay down his life for his friends. Self-sacrifice on behalf of a friend is the greatest example of love. Jesus is saying we cannot have a more pristine example of true love anywhere than in one who sacrifices himself on the behalf of another person, giving his life in exchange for the life of a friend. And Jesus will go on to explain to the disciples after this verse that they are his friends. He says, you are my friends. And then he’s going to go and do this very thing. He’s going to give his life. He’s going to express his love for them by dying for them, giving his life in exchange for theirs, taking their sin on his shoulders. He would be wrongly accused of sin that he didn’t commit, so that he could be killed on a cross bearing the weight of the sins of his friends, the sins of his disciples, including you and me. If we follow him. This is exactly what Jesus has done for us as the greatest friend of all. To throw yourself into harm’s way, to save another person, to. To save someone else by sacrificing yourself up to and including your life. That is the greatest expression of love. And what that means, church, is that there’s no way of defining true love that doesn’t have self-sacrifice at its very core. Love creates feelings, but love is not feelings. Love is an action of self-sacrifice to ensure that the other person is cared for. Love is acting in self sacrificial duty toward the other person. It’s giving up your rights. It’s setting aside your preferences and making sure that the other person has what they need. No matter what it costs you. Now, I am not an expert in cultural analysis. I am just an observer. Just like you’re all just observers. But I’ve noticed something more and more. Maybe you’ve noticed it too. Have you noticed how much more talk there is now about self-care? Have you noticed this? Have you noticed how much discussion there is about self-care? People say the phrase I’m not getting my needs met and they say it about everything. I hear this in so many different sectors. Married couples say it as they’re filing for divorce. I’m not getting my needs met. People say it when they change jobs, when they change schools, even when they change churches. To me, there seems to be a much stronger focus in our culture on personal fulfillment and on arranging the world around you to optimize happiness based on your own felt needs and desires, and that’s considered the right way to do it. That’s considered the right way to live. That’s the best way forward. That’s how you get to mental health and personal well-being. Look, that will destroy your marriage. That way of living, that way of thinking that will destroy your marriage. If you go into your marriage thinking that it’s something from which you will withdraw personal fulfillment and not something which you will have sacrificial investment in your spouse. Your marriage is going to suffer. The love of Christ is self sacrificing. It’s not self fulfilling. God didn’t give you this marriage to make sure that you would have someone from whom you could get everything that you want. What he gave you is someone to serve in the most sacrificial way that you will serve anybody else on this planet. That’s who God gave you in marriage. You can’t treat your marriage like hungry, hungry hippos. Intrigued? Okay, Kyle. Go on. You can’t do it. You remember? Hungry Hungry Hippos. You remember that game? Remember that? I used to love that game. The game where you’re a plastic hippo and the only goal is to hit the lever fast enough than everyone else so that your hippo gets the most marbles, and then you win. Remember that game? It’s not exactly chess, right? It’s a good game, but it’s not great. Listen to me. You can’t approach your marriage like a pool of resources from which you hope to consume the most, so that you’re fulfilled. Your goal cannot be to take. Now, you might say, well, I don’t think of my marriage like that, Kyle. My goal isn’t to take from my spouse. Well, you might be surprised if you really think about it how often that is precisely your goal. Think about the last time that you were upset with your spouse, because he or she didn’t do what you thought they should do. Now, let me ask you, were you upset because they violated God’s instructions? Or were you upset because you didn’t get your way? Let’s be honest. What were you upset about? Were they in violation of God’s word or were they in violation of your expectations? It’s remarkable how often we get upset with our spouses, because whatever they did didn’t serve our purposes and create the world that we want to live in. And arguing is just banging on that lever trying to get the most marbles. We’re hungry, hungry spouses. This is my commandment that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. Why do you think Jesus needed to command this? Why do you think he made this into a commandment? Why did he have to command us to love like this? It’s because sin causes us to turn love into something selfish instead of self-sacrificial. You say, what does sin do to love? Sin turns it into selfishness. That’s what it does. That’s how it invades love. Friends, if we want to have healthy marriages that are growing in love, we need to constantly return to this commandment from Jesus and be honest about whether what we are calling love actually looks like what Jesus said it looks like. Now, you might be hesitant here and say, well, okay, but maybe Jesus is talking about a different kind of love. Maybe he’s talking about salvific love, you know, saving love. Or maybe he’s talking about the love of the church. Well, let’s turn to marriage specifically. This is Paul from Ephesians 5. He starts a passage off like this. Therefore be imitators of God as beloved children, and walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. This is how Paul starts off a whole section of his letter that talks about different types of relationships. And there’s our command. Walk in love. It’s a parallel with what Jesus said in his commandment to love one another. Okay, so they’re in agreement. They’re saying the same thing. Paul is simply handing on what Jesus taught as the central commandment for the church. And you’ll notice that the quality of love that Paul draws on here is exactly the same. He points to Jesus sacrifice, and he says, that’s what your love should look like, just like Jesus did. So Paul agrees with Jesus. The central component to love is sacrifice on behalf of the other person. Jesus gave himself up for us. So our walk in love means that we are to give ourselves up for each other. That’s what walking in love is. But then Paul goes into specific relationships, and in verses 22 to 33 of chapter 5. Paul goes into the specific sacrificial love dynamic of marriage. In my opinion, it’s the most helpful passage of Scripture on marriage, on the internal workings of marriage that you’ll find in all of Scripture. So I would encourage you to read it and to reread it. If you’re married or if you’re thinking of getting married. Paul explains that the relationship dynamic between a husband and wife is marked by sacrificial service. Now, we can’t go into all the details of this passage, but it does inform how we apply what Paul says in Colossians 3:14. He says, first wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord. So walking in love, remember he’s drawing this out. Walking in love for a wife is to come alongside her husband and help him as he leads the home. It’s looking to him for spiritual guidance and helping him to succeed in everything that he’s called to do, because his success is her success. Now, this doesn’t just mean keeping your mouth shut and doing everything he says. That is an abuse of the godly design of marriage. You’re a team. You’re given to each other as a team, and your role on the team is to help your husband, the pastor, and shepherd of your home to accomplish what he’s called to do for your family. And that takes sacrifice. It takes sacrifice. You have to set aside your inner sinful desire to control him, to control your family, and instead love your husband with God’s design for your marriage.
Now, I’m sure I have divided the room on this to some degree. I get it, you were with me until we started talking about submission, I get it. It’s not popular. Not a popular thing to talk about. But if you’re squirming at the words on the screen, the words from the Bible that are on the screen, let me ask you, when you fail in your marriage, to put on compassion and kindness and humility and gentleness and patience toward your husband when you don’t want to tolerate him or you have a complaint against him, are you thinking in that moment, how do I help him and respectfully submit to his leadership? Or are you thinking you want your way because you know better than him and you know what’s best? What are you thinking, really? See the fights are coming because you failed to put on biblical love the way God has designed it, and that’s what Scripture has to say to us. That’s the way it’s described here in the Bible. For husbands, Paul says, husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. How did Jesus love his church? He died for it. Exactly what Jesus said he would do in John chapter 15. Walking in love for the husband is being a sacrificial servant leader to his wife, making sure that every need that she has is his own need because her success is his success. Husbands, loving your wife means taking the lead as the guy who gives up everything to make sure that she is growing into the woman that God has called her to be. You are called to sacrifice everything. She doesn’t have a need that does not instantly become your need. She doesn’t have a need that doesn’t instantly get shared by you as you swoop in. If your wife is thriving and she is well cared for. Great. Keep it up. If she’s not, that’s on you. That’s on you. I talked to guys sometimes who will describe the problems in their marriage in 50 over 50 terms. Like they’re chipping in for a pizza. Uh oh. I’ve done my part. I did everything I could do. I’ve done it all. I can only do my part. And now she has to do her part. Are you dead? Are you dead? Are you still breathing? Are we having this conversation? Because if that’s true, you have not done everything that you’ve been called to do. Have you? Your job isn’t to get to a certain point and decide you’ve done your part. Guys, that is not your job. It’s not your job to get to a place and go, well, hey, you know, I did my part. Hands off! You know what? It’s up to her now. It’s not your job. Your part is nothing short of tireless service to shepherd her to Christ, sacrificing everything necessary to ensure that it happens. I don’t want to hear about your preferences. I don’t want to hear about your preferences. Jesus preferred not to go to the cross. He told us this in Scripture. We have it in the garden. He prayed it in the garden to God. I prefer not to go to the cross, but he bent to the father’s will because he would stop at nothing to carry out the father’s plan. The father’s plan for your marriage is that you pour yourself out for the rest of your life to ensure that your wife sees, knows, loves, and becomes like Jesus. That’s what you’re called to. And above all, these put on love which binds everything together in perfect harmony. You want a harmonious marriage? I have not met a married couple yet that would not love to have a harmonious marriage. So back to my pre married folks. You want to fall in love? Great. That’s fine. That’s perfectly normal. That’s perfectly acceptable. But understand, you are not called to fall in love. You are called to put on love. When you’re looking for a spouse, you’re looking for a teammate who understands this dynamic of sacrificial service and wants that as much as you do. You’re committing to a lifetime of Christ like sacrificial service to each other, and that’s going to include, compassion and humility and patience and all of the rest. Attraction is great. I hope you have it. Attraction is fantastic, but spiritual teamwork is far more important. Far more. And to those of you who are struggling because you say, Kyle, our marriage doesn’t look like this at all. Our marriage doesn’t look like we got that hungry, Hungry Hippos marriage you were talking about before. We’re trying to get our needs from this marriage. We’re trying to pull out of this marriage what we can get from it. Listen. Listen to me. Your marriage can be fantastic. Your marriage can be fantastic. For 20 years, I have watched God by His spirit turn marriages from empty, hopeless shells into gospel testimonies of his grace. Because that’s what the grace of Christ does. And the method for it is this you got to get your eyes off of yourself, and you need to get them onto the Savior who served you by dying for you. You need to study that grace. You need to walk in that love. And then you commit your marriage to function in the design that God has for it. I’m going to make a deal with you this morning. I’m a little nervous to make this deal because there’s 700 plus people in this church, and it could become overwhelming. But I want to make a deal with you this morning. If you and your spouse together want to sit down and talk with someone about this, talk with someone about how we get Grace into the center of a marriage. I’m going to invite you to go ahead and shoot me an email, and I will commit to meeting with you at least once, probably more. I have open office hours on Wednesday evenings, and I would be happy to meet with you. If I get totally swamped with emails, I may need to bring in a few of our other pastors, but so be it. I’m volunteering them right now. This is the first they’re hearing of it, so it’s all right. Friends, we are committed. We are committed here at Calvary to seeing the love of Christ transform and shine out of the marriages of our church community. We want the world to see the grace of Jesus in us. Would you pray with me?