Session 7 / Loving People

Hey guys, welcome to Session 7, and this is one of our final, fundamental essentials to following Jesus. I wanted to end with this topic and this conversation around loving people. You know, the Bible says in John chapter 13, verse 34, this is Jesus talking, he says, Now this is such a powerful statement here, that Jesus is saying, listen, if people are going to know you're my disciple, one of the biggest and most powerful things they're going to see and recognize is that you have love, that you love people, you love each other. This is going to be one of those hallmarks, those, you know, DNA points of your relationship with God. And one of the reasons why that's so important is because the Bible, I don't know if you've heard this verse before, but in 1 John 4, it says that God is love. So God isn't just loving people. He doesn't just do love or show love or have love in his heart. God actually is the embodiment of love. He is literally the centerpiece of it. All love flows in and through and out of the very nature of God. And so when he created us and he created us in love and when we get our lives saved and transformed by the love of God through what Jesus did on the cross, something changes on the inside of us and we get to receive the full, powerful love of God in our life. And as I then take that love and begin to live a life of love, begin to live in a way that loves others, I begin to see an absolute change and transformation in the world that's around me. You know, it's interesting that Jesus said, as I have loved you, so you must love each other. This is such an important reminder and a command to us because we've been given so much. We've been forgiven of our sin. Literally, God has taken upon himself, Jesus took upon himself all of our sin, all of our pain, all of our shame, all of our debt, and he completely eliminated it at the cross. And now it says, just like I loved you, just like I gave you everything, God, literally like we read already, John 3, 16, God so loved the world that he gave.

God gave us his absolute best, he gave us everything, and now he calls upon us to live in that same way. Because when you and me love other people, when you and me show love, we literally display the heart of God here on earth. We become the echo of heaven, we become literally a billboard for the very presence of God. You know, we were talking on the last session about sharing our faith, about telling people about how good God is. One of our most effective and powerful ways that we actually share our faith, guess with our words, and it's so important that you share your faith, you tell people about Jesus, but one of the most important ways is actually with our life. When I love people well, when I live a life of love, when I live a life in a way that honors God and honors people, I actually display the goodness of God in a way that's more powerful than any words that I could ever say. I'm going to show love. Before I say I love you, I want to show people that I love them. It's a little bit like, you know, with my wife. I love to remind my wife all the time how much I love her, and that's great that I say it and I say it, but at some point I've got to show it. What am I doing that actually shows that I love? I can't just say it, but then not spend time. I can't just say it, but not, you know, lavish it with, you know, gifts and love. I can't just say I love and not back it up with action. Same thing with our lives. When I say I love God, but if I actually love God and if I love people, I'm going to back it up by actually living a life that displays that love for people. One of the biggest things that shows that love is actually in this topic in this area of forgiveness. This can be a really difficult topic because the truth is that many watching this right now, you've gone through very difficult things. You've faced challenges.

People have wronged you. People have hurt you. Maybe there's even been abuse or maybe it's just people saying things about you that have been frustrating. It could be from minimal to massive levels, maybe of persecution or things you've walked through. But when somebody hurts you and somebody does something to you and And now you're in a situation where, man, you've been forgiven by God and God now calls upon you to forgive others. This can be something that's so difficult, but it's one of the most powerful things that we do. There's a story in Matthew chapter 18 of a king who has a couple servants. One of the servants owes the king so much money that there's no way that he could ever pay it back. Literally, he's gonna go and kind of sort of have this work release program where he literally works every day for the rest of his life to attempt to get out of debt, and he will never do it. And what does he do? He goes to the king, he begs for mercy, says, come on king, have mercy on me. I just, there's no way I'll ever be able to pay it. You know, I need your help. I need your grace. You know what the king does? He has mercy. The king chooses to say, okay, listen, I'm gonna cancel your debt, and I'm gonna show grace towards you. Well, here's the deal. That same individual then goes out, and he'd just been forgiven an amount of debt that he would never be able to pay back in a lifetime. And just, it was massive. And here he is then. He's free to go. He'd been shown grace. His debt was canceled. Now he goes out, and he finds somebody else in his world that owes him a bit of money, and it's small in comparison, like massively small. And that friend of his kind of drops his knees, begs for grace, begs for mercy on paying it back. And instead of saying, you know what? I was shown grace. I'm gonna show grace. He just decides, nope. He throws him in prison until he pays off his debt. Well, as you can imagine, the king ends up finding out about this. In Matthew chapter 18, verse 32, it says this. He says, I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn't you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had had on you? And man, I'm telling you what. This is such a good challenge for every single one of us. Because here you find that this person who had

been canceled all their debt, and that's what happened when Jesus died on the cross for you and me, and we put our faith in Him, all of our debt, all the debt of our sin, the sin that we could never have paid back, not in a million lifetimes, was completely wiped away, completely canceled. So now Jesus calls upon you and me to live with that same kind of love, to make the same kind of decision, to now instead of holding grudges, holding things against everybody, being mad, you know, kind of, you know, living in an agitated state in different reasons, in different situations, holding grudges towards people we know or even people we don't know. Living in that kind of way is living as if we've forgotten what Jesus did in my life. You know, yes, that thing that somebody did to me, maybe it frustrated me, frustrated me, hurt me, annoyed me, all kinds of things that have happened in my life by different people over the years. But I have been forgiven so much that there's nothing that anyone could do in this lifetime that would be greater than the debt that I owed because of my sin towards God. And if Jesus forgave everything for me, now I'm gonna turn around and do the same and choose to forgive. Now, is that easy? No. Is that always easy to forgive and to show grace? No, it can be tough. It can be a process. It can be a daily decision to keep having to forgive. But I want to encourage you, forgive. Forgive because actually unforgiveness is a poison to your literal physical and mental state. It literally will destroy your life. So I want you to forgive because of that, but also forgive because you've been forgiven. Anytime you feel like holding a grudge or, man, you don't know what they did to me or any of that kind of stuff. They cheated me. They wronged me. They did whatever. Anytime you do that, you've actually forgotten how much you and me have been forgiven. And we can't lose sight of this. The grace of God has been shown to us in such a massive way. So forgive. Maybe even right now, you got one, maybe a few names in your mind of people that you're holding some stuff against them. You're holding things in your heart still. Some bitterness is starting to build up. Maybe you've got that resentment. Maybe you moved to a place where you're angry about it. You know what? You don't have to live with that anymore. Forgive. Choose to forgive today. And you know what? You're gonna wake up tomorrow. Guess what? You might have to choose to forgive again tomorrow. And it's gonna be a process and it's gonna be a journey and it's gonna be something that you're gonna walk out.

But I want to encourage you. Keep forgiving. Keep releasing that grace. Keep releasing that forgiveness that was showed to you. Now, in addition to grace and forgiveness as an expression of this love that you and me live out, we have to think of the broader question. Love, I feel like, is not just a feeling. For the purpose of this conversation, I want us to think of love Love is sacrifice. If I'm gonna love people, and I'm truly gonna display the heart of God, what was one of the things that we see right there in John 3, 16, right? For God so loved the world that he gave. Man, that was a mass inconvenience. That was a massive sacrifice. For Jesus to take on human flesh, to come and confine himself to the reality of humanity, the weakness of humanity, the issues of humanity that he had to deal with, and he took on all that for me. That was a massive sacrifice. It was a massive kind of burden that he took on for me and for you. And oftentimes in our life, love is gonna look like sacrifice. Love is gonna look like inconvenience. So I would maybe ask all of us to consider, where in my world have I been withholding love because of it being inconvenienced? Maybe in my family, maybe with friends, maybe in relationships, maybe in a school, in our college settings. Maybe there's somebody you know, man,

they need somebody to inconvenience themselves enough to extend a hand of grace, to extend love, to help and to serve. Maybe it's in a situation literally of those who are hurting and broken in our community, homeless, the hungry, those who are really going through a difficult time, those who in our society are facing insurmountable odds. What does love look like? Love looks like action. Love looks like inconvenience. Love looks like going, you know what? If I'm gonna love people like Jesus, it's not for me to sit around and go, well, you know what? At least my family's good. At least I'm all right. I can't be bothered about that situation. Man, if I've got the love of Jesus in my life, when I look around at the world around me, the injustices, the struggles, the pains, the poverty, you know what? I can't fix everything tomorrow. I can't make it all perfect. I wish I could do that. But you know what? I can do my part while I'm here on this earth. I've got an opportunity. I've got a purpose to extend the love of God. And that might mean donating time.

That might mean donating money. That might mean donating my resources and my energy. But every single one of us could say, but if the church globally, if every single one of us as a believer looked around in our world and said to God, God, how can I love people differently? How could I love people better? How could I extend your love to the world that's around us? We would see such a revival, such a shift, such a transformation in the world that's around us. Instead of extending frustration and anger and bitterness, we start extending love and grace and mercy. Instead of saying, listen, I ain't got time to deal with your issues and your brokenness because I got my own stuff. We say, you know what? I'm going to inconvenience my life and I'm going to give and I'm going to serve and I'm going to train and I'm going to develop. You know, extending love always looks like action. It always moves beyond words. Jesus moved beyond words to coming down and giving his life for us. You and me love, if we're going to love people well, it's going to move beyond words to action. I would just pray that God would give us a heart, give us a burden, give us a desire to say, God, I want to love people. I want to love my city well.

I want to love my family well. I want to love my friends well. I don't want to be selfish. I don't want to be self-focused. God, help me to be selfless. This is the journey of transformation that happens as a follower of Christ, is that I move from being self-centered and self-focused to actually a transformation where now I begin to say, Jesus, I'm going to love like you. I'm going to extend your grace to people around me. And as I do that, as I begin to live that life of love, I'm going to be an absolute billboard for the goodness of God, an absolute billboard for the grace of God. So come on, church. Come on, follower of Jesus. Let's love people. Come on, let's inconvenience ourselves enough. Like the Good Samaritan story, to cross kind of that street, to step into the uncomfortable, to do what only a loving follower of Jesus would be stirred enough to do, and that's to go beyond words and to step out into action. Love is action. Love is inconvenience. And when we live that way, we're going to see an absolute transformation

in the world that's around us. All right, so this has been the seven essentials, the seven key things. I'm going to have one more chapter where I'm going to call you to move beyond this moment. Now you've gotten the basics of your relationship with God. And now I'm going to, this final session that you're going to get into is going to be called, It's Your Turn. Because the life of Christ. The life of following Christ is beyond just being a consumer of the goodness of God to now turning and actually making disciples and reaching people and transforming the world that's around you and that's gonna be the final session and I'm excited to jump into that together. You