SPEAKER: GREG SANDERS

PASSAGE: 1 PETER 1:22

LOVE LIKE JESUS

If you have your Bibles, would you grab them and turn to 1 Peter, chapter 1. Speaking of discipleship, Dr. Jay was with us a few weeks ago, and you know, my friend looks like Mr. Clean, prophetic guy. Some of you don’t know who Mr. Clean was, because you’re that young. Look it up on YouTube. We were talking about the church, because he’s been with us since the day we began, and I said, “Hey, do you have observations and thoughts for me about where Vintage is at? He’s like, “Yeah, I have a couple.” He said, “I don’t know if you’ve really paid attention, but it has become a very discipleship-focused house, like all the teaching is very aimed at discipleship.” And that sounds so churchy and awesome. And I said, “Okay, explain.” He’s like, “I just want you to understand that every time Jesus put a line in the sand, people walked away.” So I want to challenge us as a family to recognize that discipleship calls us to be like Him, but it’s also going to get fought within us. 

How many have ever heard this phrase, requirement brings resistance? But there are times when we’re required, when things are required of us, our natural instinct is to say no, you can’t. How many have ever seen a three-year-old? And when you give them something to do, oftentimes they learn this word early, no, and they just don’t want to do it, because that’s kind of our nature. 

So I want to encourage us and invite us as a family to lean into discipleship. I want to remind you, being a believer is not just a belief system, it truly has always been about being a follower of Christ. And what we’re talking about today is probably, in my opinion, one of the hardest discipleship conversations we’ve ever had. So I want you to prepare for it, look at your neighbor, and say, I can do this. Let’s ask the Holy Spirit to give us grace. 

Holy Spirit, would you come right now as the guide and the teacher? Would you open the eyes of our hearts to see things in scripture, we need to see, open the ears of our hearts to hear what we need to hear, and Lord, I would cry out for this room, and for all of us to, we just have a willingness to be shaped and molded by you. That Lord, any way in us that wants to rebel and say no, you deal with it today, you root it out. We love you. We honor you. Jesus’ name. Amen.  

1 PETER 1:22

All right, verse 22, we’re going to take a look at chapter 1, just one single statement that Peter makes about love. So, just this singular statement is what I want to focus on, and then we’re going to dovetail that into some teachings of Jesus on love, because I’m going to go out on a limb and say most of us talk about love a lot, we hear it talked about a lot, but very few of us have actually studied what Jesus really says about love, because what Jesus says about love is crazy severe. It’s incredibly radical if we look at it.

In verse 22 of chapter 1, Peter will say this, “Since you have purified your souls in obedience to the truth for a sincere love of the brothers and sisters, fervently love one another from the heart.” “Since you have purified your souls in obedience to the truth for a sincere love of the brothers and sisters, fervently love one another from the heart.” 

So this, the first part of this, I want to take a look at just a few thoughts, because I want to ask the question, What does this mean? What does this look like? Because Peter’s writing this from a perspective, assuming that as believers we’ve already made a decision. And that decision is that we, as followers, have purified our souls in obedience to His truth. That we’ve already decided, I’m a follower, I’m going to purify my soul in obedience to the truth. 

So, great, that assumption is something we need to grab onto in our lives and go, that’s the assumption He’s making about us. So, what’s it look like? What’s it mean? What are the implications? What are the ramifications of that decision? 

I want to offer a thought that Peter is declaring this not as a recommended choice, which is often, as Americans, how we hear things in the scripture. Peter’s not doing that. He’s declaring this as a necessary decision for a believer, that every believer has decided to purify their souls by choosing to become obedient to His truth. 

The word “souls” here is a very poor translation. It’s more accurately rendered lives, making the implication that this is an externally visible reality of our actions, not an internalized or existential concept. We’re not just saying I’ve purified my heart, we’re saying I’ve purified my life, my living out, this decision is active and visible. 

Secondly, I would offer that according to Peter, this decision to step into this obedience has an immediate revealing, and that revealing is a sincere love for those around us. Sincere love has to be defined, because we understand this word, but we don’t really understand it. 

The word here in the Greek is Philadelphia. Philadelphia, as a city, is known as the city of brotherly love. The word in the root, in the Greek, is very similar to that, but it carries quite a bit more. It’s used to describe brotherly love, kindness, and affection, but it carries a concept of warmth and kindness between family. 

So, according to Peter, we, as followers of Jesus, have decided, catch this, we have decided to be warm and friendly and kind to all the people of God that we encounter. He’s talking about brothers and sisters. We’ve decided, I’m going to be warm and friendly and kind to all the family around me. That in and of itself is a bit of a statement. You’re like, whew, that one’s got some teeth to it. You just wait, this is nothing. 

The third thing I would offer is that in order for a believer to make that decision, we as a believer would have to make a step. Our first step, our first decision, is that we would have to do this work called purification of the soul, because that’s what he’s saying here. Well, what is that? The word here for soul is psuché. We get our word psyche from it. It means the seat of emotions and feelings. So we’ve purified our emotions and our feelings. 

How many would agree with me that you have big emotions once in a while? Anybody here have big emotions? Let me put you through a quick quiz. How many sometimes have emotions that are so big you don’t actually know what to do with them? How many have emotions that are so big that you know the only thing you should do with them is get away from everyone? Peter declares here that we purify our psyche. Catch this, we purify our psyche, we purify our emotions and our feelings by living in obedience to the truth.

Have we considered that obedience to Jesus shapes how we feel and how we see things? You see, I think we often reverse this. We believe that once we are healed, and our feelings line up, and we start to want things, then we can live in obedience. 

According to what Peter says, the way you purify those feelings and those emotions is by stepping into active obedience to what the truth says. Because too often, we live in a world that wants the psyche to come online in desire before we step into that obedience. So I want you to catch this phrase, as I choose to obey the truth, I begin to desire to obey. As I choose to obey the truth, I begin to desire to obey. 

I had a friend who would teach it this way: motion creates emotion. I can teach myself to want what Jesus wants by choosing to align my behaviors with what Jesus teaches. In other words, when I find myself not wanting what Jesus wants, the antidote to that is to force myself to do what Jesus says, because by doing that, I’m disciplining myself into his path. 

And I wanted to focus our attention on this verse, because Peter’s presenting this in chapter 1 as the baseline for discipleship. He’s not teaching this as like something extra special, like, whoa, there’s this subset of the church that’s going to really get it, and they’re going to be superstars. He’s teaching this as like this is the no-brainer, obvious choice if you’re a follower of Christ. 

FERVENTLY LOVE ONE ANOTHER

And then he goes on to add another layer to it that I want to look at: “Fervently love one another from the heart.” How many for you, if you’re like me, that phrase from the heart jumps out? Because instantly you’re like, oh, he’s talking about, do it for real. 

The word fervent here is ektenos, it means to stretch or extend; it’s a muscular term. Fervent is the right translation, but it catches a little vague. So, I’m gonna try to explain it a little bit. It’s the idea of a runner in a marathon, extending or stretching to get to the finish line. So it’s this idea of living in a posture that is extended and stretched out in an effort to do something. The interesting thing about this is, unlike a runner who would extend and then the race is over, this word, as Peter teaches it, is to put yourself into this posture and never pull back from it. 

The word love here, not philadelphia, it’s a different word, it’s a plural of agape. It’s in an aorist tense. What’s that mean? Aorist tense means it’s a one-time decision that has extenuating circumstances. It keeps moving forward in your life, but you’re not re-deciding it, it’s a continued imperative. Which, what this imperative concept means, is imperative means it’s not an option, it’s a command. What it reads like is, you all must love, so fervently you all must love. Meaning Peter’s commanding this as a once-and-for-all lifestyle activity for believers. 

Okay, so the root word agape. Love is hard for us to define, because there’s a myriad of definitions. It’s important that we understand this one. The simplest way to understand agape love is to understand it as preferential love, or love that lives for the benefit of another. In other words, it’s about somebody else, it puts them first. It is sacrificial love from the heart. This is where this one gets tough, because that word is cardia. It means the center of will and emotions.

The simple answer is that this is truly a love decision, not a fake choice. You’re not faking it, but I want to explain that for a second. The only way you can love from a place of truth, when you don’t feel it, is to know that the truth is I made a decision before Him to be loving, so when I don’t feel it, that’s actually what’s false. The truth is, I made a decision to be loving, so I’m going to stay in the behavior of being loving, because I want to stay true to the promise I made Him.

So, looking at this verse, it simply teaches us that for the disciples of Jesus, which is us, love is to become our native ecosystem. We are to live in, cultivate, and actively pursue an environment of brotherly love towards those around us, and we exercise regular and consistent preferential love towards everyone around us. 

That’s a tall order, correct? Please don’t glaze over and go, Yeah, I can’t do that, because we’re going to study what Jesus says, and He doesn’t give it as an option. For Peter, this is just a baseline core teaching of being a disciple of Christ. For Peter, it’s the natural outworking of being confronted by the love of God, of encountering the love of God. 

MATTHEW 5:43-48

So, as we’ve been studying this passage in Peter, I’ve been directly challenged by the Lord to consider His perspective on love. There’s a few verses that He brought to me in the middle of the night. He’s like, I want you to go study these, and within 20 minutes, I realized, Oh, shoot, I actually don’t know what you’ve ever taught on love. 

Anybody, how many would agree, you’ve heard about the love of God a lot? I had never really personally gone back and looked at the things Jesus taught about what it meant to love. How, I don’t know, I’ve been in church 53 years, and I’m only 53 years old. But somehow the real nuances of what Jesus taught had escaped me, so I began to study it, and I want to forewarn you, what Jesus teaches about love is radical and severe. There is absolutely zero wiggle room for us as believers with what Jesus teaches. 

So I want to go to Matthew chapter 5, verses 43 through 48, if you have your Bibles. Jesus is going to teach what He would call the baseline for the Kingdom. Now it begins with a phrase that means we need to take notice of. Any time you come across this phrase in Scripture when Jesus is speaking and He says something akin to, you’ve heard it said, what He’s getting ready to do is drop a bomb that says, this is how humanity thinks, let me tell you how I think, and let me tell you what it means to follow me. 

So, when we hear that, we have to grab onto and go, okay, Jesus is going to teach me what it looks like to follow Him. He’s going to teach me what he expects from me. We can maybe phrase it this way: He’s saying to me, this is how I want you as my follower to live. 

“You have heard that it was said, ‘you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy’” Yeah, that makes sense. “But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may prove yourselves to be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Even the tax collectors, do they not do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Even the Gentiles, do they not do the same? Therefore, you shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Jesus is going to deal with three people groups, and He has directions for us as followers. Three people groups are these: enemies, those who persecute you, and those who you love. So we’re gonna look at all three. 

The word enemies here, echthros’ in the Greek. The word in its root means to hate. What it is defined as is a person who is hateful or passively odious, love that term, it means they have a stinky personality or are actively hostile. Has anyone ever met someone who has been actively hostile to you, or just kind of stinks as a person? It’s usually a noun, and it means an adversary, someone who’s against us. 

In its use here, Jesus is using it to describe a person who’s hateful towards you, who’s opposed to you, or is hostile to you. And to these people, Jesus says you are to put on agape, preferential love. You decide to live for their benefit, and do whatever it takes to stretch and move into Kingdom obedience, to go the extra mile, is the concept here, for them to put on tangible love towards them. 

How many would agree with me that doesn’t come native? When someone’s coming at you, they’re being hostile, confrontive. What Jesus teaches here is crazy, but it’s what He teaches, and I want to caution us as Americans to not hear this as a cool idea. This isn’t some Instagram bite with somebody with a new supplement, or somebody with a, you know, a new food recipe. This is Jesus saying, if you want to follow me, this is how you’ll live. 

The second word phrase here is those who persecute you. Diṓkō is the word, and it means to come after, to pursue in any way whatever, to harass, to trouble, to molest, to persecute, to be mistreated, to suffer persecution on account of something. And here’s the definition that catches me: it is to cause one to want to run or flee. 

Have you ever been around people that just make you want to get away from them? Have you ever been in a situation where what comes to mind is, I wish I could just get in my car and drive away, I don’t want to be where I’m at. This is that idea. It’s a situation that you want to get away from, the difficulty and the tension makes you want to escape. This word deals with a broad range of conflicts, but the focus is on the emotion the conflict evokes. 

And to these, here’s what Jesus says, Pray for them. I want you to go to your knees and bring them before me and pray for them. How many would agree that’s not your native response usually? Maybe it’d be great to say, I really want to get in my car and go pray for you. 

There’s the third category of people, which is those who love you. This is the word agape. It’s those who are living in preferential love towards you. This is really interesting, because I want to highlight some things that I think are important. Because to these, Jesus still says that we are to live in reciprocal preferential love, but He adds this thing, like we get no special credit for doing that. He says it’s normal, it’s the natural human response. Catch that. He says, Don’t the tax collectors and the pagans do that? What He says is that natural response should come out of us as a person, like we don’t get any credit for being loving to people that are loving. 

Time out. How many have been around some people, and know some people that have trouble being loving, no matter how much you love them. How many have ever been in that condition? I want to offer a thought, and I think it might be tough to hear. If you are not responding to those who love you with this same love that Jesus talks out, it needs to be a major red flag that you need emotional help and coaching, because something within you is driving an abnormal response. 

You’ve got to hear that. If I have people in my life that are loving and I can’t figure out how to be loving to them, something’s wrong inside of me, because there’s an abnormal response pattern. Because Jesus says that’s the normal human response when people love you. You’re like, I can’t believe you said that. Time out. What if we just all admit we all need help at some point? Let’s get help, and let’s get fixed. Let’s get healthy, so we can reveal Jesus correctly. 

But as the Lord has been challenging this, I definitely realize that what has been throwing me off throughout the years is this word enemy. It throws me off the trail of understanding what Jesus is talking about, because when I hear the word enemy, I instantly want to apply it to a person who’s outside of my life, who’s afar from me, who’s not connected to me, as in a person I don’t know, or someone who would randomly confront me. Anybody notice that it feels like it’s distant? It’s just this person that we would connect with, maybe not very often. 

But as I’ve studied this, none of the terms Jesus uses deal with strangers or those outside of my world directly. In fact, here’s the part that I think is awful, they’re all terms that in the context of application, make way more sense if I apply them to the people I’m in relationship with. 

To validate that point, just a few phrases later, Jesus says, Those who treat you well, you don’t get special credit for. And then, before this, He starts with this phrase, He says, “You’ve heard it said, an eye for an eye,” and He goes on to give a different teaching. He’s building all of this love teaching by refuting the concept of giving an eye for an eye. An eye for an eye is what I would call tit for tat, or reciprocal value. It means I’m going to do to you what you did to me. 

Jesus starts all of this teaching and says, You’ve heard this be the concept, we’re going to kill that, and I’m going to teach you what real love looks like. He’s giving direction about how we are to treat anyone who treats us wrongly, anyone. Whether they’re at work, whether they’re in our home, whether they’re in the grocery store, whether they are a total stranger, anyone. What He’s directly dealing with, and we have to grab onto this, He’s dealing with the tendency in our humanity to respond out of this eye-for-an-eye thing. 

REQUIREMENT OF THE KINGDOM

What Jesus is dealing with is your and my willingness to put on love when it isn’t easy. And what He teaches is that this is the way of the Kingdom, He says, “so you might prove yourself to be sons of your Father in heaven.” “So you might prove yourself,” in the Greek it means, so that you would be children of your Father. He creates this incredibly airtight case. This is a requirement in the Kingdom. Maybe we listen to it this way, we hear Jesus say it this way, If you want me as your King, this is how you’re going to live. 

Often, the human rebuttal is connected to this question of whether or not we feel love or we sense love towards others. I don’t feel it. I just don’t have it. We want to wait for that condition before we step into love. Church, that’s the wrong perspective. All of what Jesus teaches is centered on a choice and a decision to love. 

Listen to how C. S. Lewis says it, “do not waste time bothering whether you quote unquote love your neighbor, act as if you did. As soon as we do this, we find one of the great secrets: when you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love them.” You see, the teachings of Jesus on love could I offer they’re where the rubber meets the road for disciples. And no one loves this way unless they’ve chosen to look like Him, unless they’ve chosen to follow His way. 

So let me ask some questions out of these passages. Have you and I made a decision to follow and obey the truth of Scripture, to be lovingly affectionate and kind to all those we’re in family relationship with? Hearing that it’s not,  if I feel like it, it’s a requirement of the Kingdom. Have you and I made the determination to follow and obey Jesus’s calling to live in preferential love towards all those around us, regardless of what they do to us? Have you and I decided to lay down our rights and follow and obey the teachings of Jesus to the point that we respond in love, grace, kindness, and mercy to those who have wounded us, hurt us, disappointed us, offended us, to those who make us want to run away?

You see, the bottom line fundamental truth of this teaching of Jesus is that following His way and being His disciple means we love at all times, and that love is given to all people. There are no exceptions. I want us to hear this: our lack of love, your lack of love, my lack of love, at any moment is a discipleship issue. It means I’m not submitted to His way. 

I had a Bible college professor who used to describe discipleship as this: being a learner under discipline. I’m learning His way by disciplining myself. But what happens if I find myself saying, Well, what about me? This isn’t fair. When’s it my turn? It’s not going to be the happiest statement you’ve ever heard, but that question is the anti-cry of carrying the nature of Christ, because He came to serve, not to be served. He came to give his life away. 

More than that, that cry is rooted in a deep distrust in His leadership, because it means we don’t trust Him enough to live like He said. We don’t trust Him to care for us by living the way He said, and so we find ourselves wanting to rebel and justify our lack of love by saying, I’m not feeling it, what about me? 

And church, all of those are traps of the enemy to keep you from walking in love. I would offer that the sooner we see them for what they are, call them for what they are, the sooner we can genuinely repent and find grace, healing, and mercy. 

When you hear this last statement of Jesus out of John 15, “this is my commandment: love one another as I’ve loved you.” He didn’t give it as an option. He didn’t give it as a suggestion. I do understand that we live in a day and a time where, when it doesn’t feel good or sound good, it’s easy to walk away from it, but I would challenge us to remember what the scriptures say, to not be people that look into the mirror, see our reflection, and walk away, but to be people instead that allow the spirit of God to search our hearts, to know us, to find ourselves as people who would say, Lord, I just want to be like you, and you know what, I don’t see a lot of love in me, forgive me for my lack of love, I’m going to make a decision to put on love. 

If you don’t know what love is and looks like, 1 Corinthians 13 gives an incredible teaching on what love is. If you do any kind of word study, you start to recognize what those words mean, and then you apply it to your life and ask yourself the question, Am I living this way? 

I have an easier solution, and that is to go sit with the Lord and say, I’m asking you with total honesty to assess how I love. What’s going on, is the way I love pleasing to you? And then prepare for Him to be honest. And then when you hear it, just say I’m sorry, you’re right, and go back to the people you were unloving to and say, I need you to forgive me, I wasn’t carrying the nature of Christ towards you, that’s wrong. 

Stand with me, please. Told you it was a doozy. I don’t know about you, but I’m way less concerned with what people think about me, and way more concerned about standing before Him someday and having Him say, Good job. I want to live for a moment where He says, Hey, son, I’m proud of you. You took the hard road, not the easy road. 

And what’s it look like? One of our gentlemen in our first gathering came to me at the end of the gathering. He says, “You know the scriptures say all of creation groans and waits for the sons of God to be revealed.” He said, “What happens if this is what it looks like for the sons of God to be revealed? That a proverbial army rises up in love and actually shows the world what the Kingdom looks like, instead of talking about.”

I think it’s Assisi who says, or might be Brother Lawrence, I can’t remember which one it is. He says, “Preach the gospel at all times, if necessary, use words.” I’d love to offer that the way we treat each other in our homes, the way we treat each other in the marketplace, says more about the Kingdom than anything we could ever put together as a teaching. 

Holy Spirit, thanks for today. It’s a challenge and a half, and yet you teach it like it’s just a baseline. And we would say, as a people, we want to be changed in your image. We want to be transformed by you. We’d also say that there’s a lot that rises up in us selfishly and wants to fight it. So Holy Spirit, would you search our hearts, bring revelation, bring change, bring conviction. And Lord, we promise that we’re going to do our best to be easy to lead, to just be compliant before you, to put on love towards the world around us. May your face shine upon us this week. I know we’re going to get tested in this. So, Holy Spirit, as we do, we would just ask for you to whisper something akin to, Hey, relax, choose love. That we could push pause long enough to just give you room to lead us. So, we love you, and we honor you, Jesus’ name. Amen.