Latest / Time with God with John North / Biblical Love Pt. 2

Transcript

Biblical Love Pt. 2 · Time with God with John North

• 0:05
  Speaker 1: Good morning. As you head into your day, don't forget God.
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  Speaker 1: God is there. God loves you. He's involved in your life.
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  Speaker 1: He gave you life, and He wants to shape your
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  Speaker 1: life to be meaningful, to be what He designed it
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  Speaker 1: to be. And when we let God make our lives
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  Speaker 1: what He designed it to be, it's awesome. And when
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  Speaker 1: we hold back from God, it's a mess.
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  Speaker 1: So let's put God first in our lives, and one
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  Speaker 1: of the most awesome ways to put God first in
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  Speaker 1: your life is to take time with Him each day,
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  Speaker 1: relational time. So it's not just you coming with a
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  Speaker 1: big list of prayer requests to God. Here's what I
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  Speaker 1: want you to do in my life. He's the one
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  Speaker 1: at the centre of the universe. It's coming to God
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  Speaker 1: to listen to Him. And then, as He speaks into
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  Speaker 1: your life through the Bible, His word.
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  Speaker 1: You respond to him and you talk to him about
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  Speaker 1: what he's saying, so let's read a bit of the
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  Speaker 1: Bible together now.
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  Speaker 1: We're talking about biblical love this week, and yesterday we
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  Speaker 1: read the first few verses of 1 Corinthians 13, a
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  Speaker 1: great chapter read in weddings because it's all about love,
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  Speaker 1: and there in those first verses,
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  Speaker 1: The apostle Paul writing just says love is so much
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  Speaker 1: more important than these other things in life, more important
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  Speaker 1: than how you talk and more important than the knowledge
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  Speaker 1: you have and even self-sacrifice and helping people in need.
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  Speaker 1: Much more than that is actually having love for the
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  Speaker 1: people in your life. He goes on from there to
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  Speaker 1: describe what love is all about. Starting in verse 4,
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  Speaker 1: he says.
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  Speaker 1: Love is patient.
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  Speaker 1: Love is kind. It's not jealous.
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  Speaker 1: Love does not brag and is not arrogant.
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  Speaker 1: Does not act unbecomingly. It does not seek its own.
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  Speaker 1: Is not provoked.
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  Speaker 1: Does not take into account a wrong suffered.
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  Speaker 1: Does not rejoice in unrighteousness but rejoices with the truth.
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  Speaker 1: Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things,
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  Speaker 1: endures all things. Love never fails.
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  Speaker 1: But if there are gifts of prophecy, they will be
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  Speaker 1: done away. If there are tongues, they will cease. If
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  Speaker 1: there is knowledge, it will be done away, for we
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  Speaker 1: know in part and we prophesy in part. Well, Paul's
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  Speaker 1: telling us what love is like patient, kind, humble, slow
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  Speaker 1: to anger, not focused on yourself.
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  Speaker 1: Really, at its essence, biblical love is unselfish and not
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  Speaker 1: just unselfish, not just putting yourself down, but it's focused
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  Speaker 1: on others.
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  Speaker 1: It
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  Speaker 1: Endures. It lasts. It doesn't come and go with how
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  Speaker 1: someone's treating you. It is thinking of the good of
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  Speaker 1: the other person and especially from God's perspective. What is
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  Speaker 1: going to help this person in their inner life move
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  Speaker 1: to towards what God wants them to be.
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  Speaker 1: It's unnatural often to try and practise biblical love. The
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  Speaker 1: reason for that is because it's foreign to our sinful nature,
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  Speaker 1: our fallen nature. The Bible tells us that when mankind
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  Speaker 1: first chose not to go God's way, but to go
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  Speaker 1: our own way and put ourselves at the centre of
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  Speaker 1: our own lives, that something changed in our basic nature.
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  Speaker 1: And our nature became flawed so that we are constantly
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  Speaker 1: focused on self, self, self. What matters to me, my,
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  Speaker 1: my instant reaction when something happens in my life is
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  Speaker 1: to think about how it impacts on me, how it
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  Speaker 1: affects me if someone treats me a certain way. I'm
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  Speaker 1: focused on.
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  Speaker 1: What it means to me I'm not thinking about what's
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  Speaker 1: going on in that person's life that's making them act
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  Speaker 1: this way. How can God meet them at their point
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  Speaker 1: of need? How can I encourage them? No, I tend
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  Speaker 1: to naturally think about myself and how things impact on me,
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  Speaker 1: but biblical love, God's kind of love, is focused on
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  Speaker 1: the other person after all.
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  Speaker 1: In our own lives without God in our lives, we're
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  Speaker 1: just offending God constantly, aren't we? We're doing things in
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  Speaker 1: our lives, thinking things, saying things that are hurtful that
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  Speaker 1: we know are not pleasing to God. And yet God
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  Speaker 1: still loves us. He still reaches out to us. So
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  Speaker 1: if we want to love other people that way, guess
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  Speaker 1: who we need to turn to? God. He's the only
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  Speaker 1: one who can love through us in that way.
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  Speaker 1: I'm John North.