Stretchy Love - Part B
Scripture Reference: 1 Peter 4:7-11
Visit the series page: Exiles: A study in 1 Peter
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Sermon Series: Spiritual Exiles
Message: Stretchy Love
Airdate:10/27 - 10/28/26
Programs: 2387 and 2388
Good morning, Bethel Church. Great to see you all here today, and, greetings to our other campuses, this morning and, especially, Cedar Lake. How great would it be to be the Cedar Lake campus with the, upcoming weeks that they have moving into a new church home and facility and celebrations along that line. It's gonna be, gonna be a fun couple weeks for you. I also need to mention, here at Crown Point, if you look around, we're, like, packed here this morning, and, which is great, but school hasn't started yet.
So we always have this big influx once school begins. And I just put out to, this service that, we have an 08:15 and an 11:15 service that if you wanna get up a little earlier, would be great. You wanna sleep in a little bit, would be great. Might be, something for you to consider to help us, to consider one of those other services that would be a blessing to us, especially coming into the school year. I want to, begin by talking about a, Christian hero.
I think he's a hero by any measure. His name is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and maybe you're familiar with that name. He, was a man from the last century. There's one biography about him that, has as the subtitle, martyr, pastor, prophet, and spy. He sounds intriguing already, doesn't he?
And indeed, he is. Just to tell you a little bit about the guy, he was raised in a famously intellectual family in Germany. His dad was the best known psychiatrist in the whole country. He there was a large family .He had many siblings, and all the siblings were sort of like Renaissance people.
They were academics. They were into culture and art and all of that. To give you an idea of the caliber of, brain that we're talking about, his brother helped Albert Einstein crack the atomic code K? So we're talking about top tier type intellects, and this family embodied that in, in Germany in the first part of the last century.
So Bonhoeffer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, takes that intellectual capacity and points it towards theology. And he goes to school, and by 21, he has his PhD. He begins to be a lecturer at the University of Berlin, which was arguably the most prestigious theological school, at the time. And as the Nazis rose to power, Bonhoeffer became increasingly a critic of Hitler and the socialist philosophy that he was promoting. And the Lutheran church then aligned with Hitler and the Nazis.
And as that happened, Bonhoeffer had a conscientious decision to make. Do I leave the Lutheran church or not? And indeed, he did. He formed essentially his own denomination called the Confessing Church of Germany. And all of this was happening in the days leading up to and after the beginning of World War two.
So, during World War two, he establishes three seminaries, three, covert seminaries, dare I call them exile seminaries, and he was the teacher, he was the headmaster, and the students there, they all kind of live together in kind of a commune sort of setting. And by all accounts, the Christian fellowship and community that those students with Bonhoeffer experienced was very, very special. And this led Bonhoeffer to write a book that is considered a Christian classic called Life Together, and I have a copy of it right here. It's an entire book about healthy Christian community. And it's not very big.
You can see. It's kind of a thin little book, but so much wonderful truth in this book. And I'm going to be kind of featuring Bonhoeffer and quotes from this book in my message today. Just to finish the rest of the story with, Bonhoeffer, though, one of the great ethical dilemmas he wrote a book on ethics. Probably his, signature book was a book on ethics, and his own personal ethical dilemma was whether or not he as a Christian should participate in the assassination of Adolf Hitler, which he ended up believing that he needed to do.
And so he was a part of a vast kind of, network of people that were, you know, disheartened about what had was going on in Germany. And if you saw the movie Valkyrie a few years ago starring Tom Cruise, that is a story of part of the network that Bonhoeffer was associated with. And if you saw the movie or know your history, assassination attempt did not work. And so there were many arrests, and Bonhoeffer was one of them. And he spent time in some of these camps.
You know? And, Himmler and Hitler personally sentenced him to execution, and he was he was he died by hanging. This would have been 04/09/1945 at the age of 39. Dietrich Bonhoeffer died three weeks before Hitler committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin. So if you think about like, if Dietrich Bonhoeffer would have lived all of the wonderful things that he would have been able to write about in a kind of peaceful setting where he could just think and write and be a theologian, but he never had that.
He his life was lived in tumultuous times, some of the most in all of human history, and he died as a martyr. So I think that gives a little extra power to the words of Bonhoeffer because they're the words of a martyr. And I'm going to be quoting from him because what he talks about in this book ties very closely to the passage that we have in front of us here as we are preaching through first Peter. So let's begin with Peter, and then we'll get to Dietrich. K?
Begin with Peter, and we'll get to Dietrich. And so here we are in chapter four seven verses seven through 11. Last week, we zeroed in on verse 10. This week, I wanna pull back and look at the paragraph as a whole. Now before we get into it, though, notice in verses one through six of chapter four, Peter describes the lifestyles of the pagan world around them, and he does so eloquently.
We'll study this passage in the coming week, but, because we're doing this a little bit out of order. But, in it, he just talks about how the pagan world, they're just they're just off in their immorality. They're off living lives loosely and wantonly. In fact, he calls the the generally, he says, a flood of debauchery. A flood of debauchery.
Now we live in a flood of our own, don't we? You think about the world that is around us. It resembles closely the kinds of things that were going on in the pagan world of the first century. And he Peter says, the people that live around you are shocked that you don't, like, jump in and be a part of the same stuff that they're all about. They're shocked that you're, like, into something different.
And indeed, Christian community ought to be very much different than the kind of activities and priorities and morality that is in the world that does not know Jesus Christ. And so that contrast now, he transitions in verse seven, with these words. He says, “The end of all things is at hand. Therefore, be self controlled and sober minded for the sake of your prayers. Above all, keep loving one another earnestly since love covers a multitude of sins.”
“Show hospitality to one another without grumbling. As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another as good stewards of God's varied grace.” And now he describes two general categories of service. “Whoever speaks as one who speaks oracles of God, whoever serves as one who serves by the strength that God supplies.” And here's his bottom line.
“In order that in everything, God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To him belong glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.” Now you don't have to be a Bible scholar here to see what Peter is getting at. He lays out four qualities, four attributes of healthy Christian community.
Christian community and Christian relationships when the gospel is shaping it and when the Holy Spirit is empowering it? Like, what does that look like? And what should be the things that we as Christians care about? And notice the the the these are easy. You can see them right here.
First of all, a self controlled life of prayer. Secondly, love that overcomes interpersonal offenses. Third, open hearted hospitality. And finally, stewarding giftedness in the direction of serving one another. So that's gonna be our outline today.
And let's just walk through these now. “The end of all things is at hand. Therefore, be self controlled and sober minded for the sake of your prayers.” “The end of all things is at hand.” You might read that and say to yourself, well, Peter certainly got that wrong, didn't he?
I mean, he wrote this in the first century. He says to the people he's writing, hey. The end is almost here. You better get ready. And now two thousand years have passed.
He clearly got something wrong. And chronologically speaking, I would agree with that. But when the Bible talks about time, it does not do so the way that we do with, like, our calendars and our watches and our minutes and our seconds and our hours. When the Bible talks about history and time, it talks about it redemptively. In terms of the things that God is doing in history, these key redemptive moments.
And when Peter says, the end of all things is at hand, what he means is this, redemptively speaking, there is nothing yet that needs to happen. Everything that needs to happen has already happened. God has created. Jesus has man sinned. Jesus has come, died on the cross, resurrected from the dead at the right hand of God.
Now redemptively speaking, the next thing that happens is Jesus comes back, and final consummation of history and final fulfillment of all the things the Bible talks about in terms of what is yet to happen. We are living in the Bible calls it the last days, and it called it the last days two thousand years ago. Because redemptively, we're in the time when the next thing that happens is Jesus comes back. So the end of all things is at hand. The pagans live their lives completely ignorant of redemptively where we are in history and where we are in the story.
So, therefore, they're like, hey, eat, drink, be merry. Let's go out. Let's partake. Let's have a great time. We live without any accountability.
We can do whatever we want. Don't you tell me anything about judgment. Because I'm gonna go out, and I'm gonna make the most of every single moment. I'm living for me. I'm living for pleasure.
That's the world that we live in to this day, don't we not? That's the that's the mindset around us. It's all about me, and I have no fear about what's going to come. But the Christian sees the Bible and the story of redemption, and we realize there is something that is coming that is the biggest thing of all. This whole history and life is going somewhere.
Jesus is coming back, and every human being is going to stand before God. In fact, he notes that in verse five, “but they will give an account to him who is ready to judge the living and the dead.” The world around us, no fear of that judgment. We look at this, and what does the reality of what is about to come do for us? We are not silly.
We're not superficial. It makes us sober minded. It causes us to be self controlled about life and to view things through the grid of the priorities that knowing what's about to happen creates. It's like somebody who finds out they have cancer. You've probably had friends or family that they they get the diagnosis of cancer.
What happens instantly? All of a sudden, life becomes more serious, doesn't it? All of a sudden, relationships become more important, and family becomes more important. And they there's a there's a mindset that comes to the cancer patient that they didn't have prior. And spiritually speaking, we realize that there is something big about to happen, and that makes all of this critically important.
It makes relationships critically important. It means the church and what God is doing through the gospel critically important. And there ought to be amongst Christians, we don't take ourselves seriously, but we take the things of God seriously. Communion is not a snack. The church is not just a social club, and these relationships are not just disposable.
Why? Because Jesus is coming back. And someday, we're gonna see that all of these things in the eyes of God critically critically important. Now Peter here focuses on one thing that that ought to do for us. Notice what he says.
“Be self controlled and sober minded for the sake of your prayers.” Now I bet you weren't expecting that. For the sake of your prayers, what's the connection between sober minded and self control and a prayer life? Well, in my opinion, of all the things in the Christian life that requires self control, it would be prayer. What's the first thing that goes on a busy day?
When you're like, man, I can't I don't know if I can get everything done today. Prayers go out the window, don't they? I'll get to that later. Off it goes. And over time, we get in the habit of not praying, and we get in the habit of not getting before God and and and offering ourselves to him on that day and praying over our day and asking for God will to be done on earth as it is in heaven and all of that.
And so we then get, what, dry, and we get sort of superficial. And Peter says, listen, it's what's coming that causes us to realize that prayer is super important, and it makes me self controlled. In fact, if I could ask you Christian this last week, think about a second. Think about your prayer life this last week. And I'll bet last Sunday, you left church thinking, I wanna pray more today or something like that.
I wanna pray more this week. And yet this comes in and that comes in and all that. Are you a little dry today? Because for me, there is nothing more like spiritual battery charging than when I spend a little time in God's word, and I get in prayer and open my heart to God, and I say, Holy Spirit, convict me of anything that is displeasing you. Pray over my day.
Pray for my family. Pray for my church. It just puts energy, doesn't it? And Peter knew that. But it won't happen without controlling other aspects of life to create margin for prayer.
Now in a few weeks, I'm gonna share a new prayer endeavor that we're doing here at our church. And, it'll take some self control to be a part of it. We've never done anything like it. I'm super excited about it. But why are we doing it?
Because prayer is like oxygen in the church. And a community of people that are experiencing genuine Christianity will be a praying group of people and are gonna make priority for that. So self controlled life of prayer. Notice secondly, in this verse, it might be the most famous verse in all of Peter. I don't know.
It's certainly one of them. Maybe it stood out to you as I read it before. Notice what he says. “Above all, keep loving one another earnestly since love covers a multitude of sins.” Now I thought about just doing this this verse, that's it, and forgetting all the others because it's such an important truth here.
And I hope that all of you dial in with me right now because what we're talking about here, I think, is one of the keys, not only to healthy church, but healthy marriage, healthy family relationships, healthy friendships. This verse has a truth that is absolutely critical. In fact, Peter says, above all, keep on loving. Paul said the same thing, faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is agape, is love. So love.
Love in the Christian community. Why is this so important? Of all the qualities that we ought to strive for, why love? Here's one reason. Because love is what God is like.
Love is what God is like. First John four eight says it this way. “God is love.” It doesn't say God is mercy, although he's mercy, and it doesn't say God is kindness, although he certainly is kind and holy and beautiful and many other things. What it says is that “God is love.”
And that doesn't mean that love is God, but it does mean that if you're going to pick one quality of God that is central to all that He is in His being, it is love. Now our definition of love around here is that love is self giving for the good and joy of another. You've heard that a thousand times. I say it because I love you again and again and again. Self giving for the good and joy of another.
That is the kind of love that is being described here. That is the kind of love that God has within the Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, eternally loving and giving and communicating and sharing for the good and joy of the other member of the Trinity. This is what God is like. So, Christian relationships then and this is really the focus of the text here is horizontal relationships. Christian relationships ought to and will reflect that quality of God because the Christian is being shaped into the likeness of God himself in terms of our attitudes and actions.
I can say that better. How about Romans eight? What is God doing? He is conforming us to the likeness of his Son. And who embodies love more than Jesus?
Who embodied love for us more than Jesus? Who loved us while we were yet sinners? Christ died for us. Love is what God is like. So, as children of God, having now by through salvation the very nature of God, we are called then to reflect that love in our relationships with one another.
This is what God is like. This is what a godly Christian and a godly church will embody. Now one thing I love about this verse is it is it's so honest and real. And this is what if I had a whole message on it, I would focus on. I'm just gonna touch on it here.
It's so honest and real to what relationships end up being like. Notice again what it says. Keep loving one another. Does not the word keep infer the fact that this is not easy to do, to keep on loving somebody? Now we all can do the splash and dash love, can't we?
Like a one off. I'm gonna show love to them one time, and then I don't have to do it anymore. And I feel good about it. Oh, I love that person. Are you kidding me?
Ten years ago, we showed up at his house or something like that. You know, one time, I did this one thing. I'm good. I'm love. I I I showed my love.
Keep on loving. The only reason he has to command that is because naturally, we don't wanna keep on loving. We may start with love, but we end somewhere else. I love the book title by John Ortberg, Everyone is Normal Until You Get to Know Them Because to be in relationships with other Christians is to be forced into loving people that inevitably you discover are annoying, right?
That disappoint you, that aren't what you hoped they would be. And I say that because I am one of them. Everyone's normal until you get to know them. And so what happens then in churches is that these differences and these annoyances over time wear on you. And you begin thinking to yourself, you know what?
Maybe in a different small group, there would be people that aren't annoying. The problem with my group is all the other people in this group. And so you hop to another small group. Or over time in the church, these people I don't have enough people that are like me and think like me and believe all the things that I believe. And maybe there's a group of people, there's a church out there that is exactly like me, and I can be there, and there'll be everything's wonderful.
And so we hop churches hoping that the next church will not have annoying people in them. And yet, what do you find at that other church? They're often more annoying than even the people at Bethel Church. I joke with that. Although, if you're visiting here today, I'm warning you.
Take that as a warning. And this is where I think this little phrase here has such a wonderful help to us. Because no matter what long term relationship you're in, it's not just church. This is friendship. This is family.
This is marriage. Over time, you discover in everybody aspects about their character, their preferences, their beliefs that easily rub you the wrong way or become over time increasingly difficult to sort of like swallow. The kind of love that God births in us through the gospel is elastic. In fact, the Greek word there for cover, it means this. It means at full stretch, At full stretch.
That love stretches over a multitude of sins. Now by that, I don't think Peter is denying other passages where it talks about the church disciplining the rebellious sinner out of the church. It doesn't mean we don't speak the truth in love, as Paul says in Ephesians four. It doesn't mean that if we're somewhere and we know that there's an offense, we leave the gift at the altar, as Jesus said, and go and make that right. All of those things apply.
I think what Peter is getting at here is not overlooking sin in other people's life. He's talking about the inevitable interpersonal slights and offenses and little things that in community with other people easily could divide us if we make that thing a big thing. In those cases, what does love do? Agape love stretches to cover them and to remain united within that what I'm calling stretchy love, okay? Love is elastic, stretchy.
Now, to illustrate it, I got it. Here we go. And this is so simple. Okay? This is not profound, but sometimes these make the best illustrations.
I have a rubber band here. And can I just walk us through what typically happens in any relationship? K? So here's the rubber band. We meet somebody.
Right? We meet somebody, and and love doesn't have to stretch much because we think that person's wonderful. They think like I think. I enjoy their personality. We're aligned politically.
We're aligned theologically. They're they're good folk. And so we're like, hey. We're in relationship. It's all comfy and all that.
But what happens inevitably? Like, the third time you're at their house, all of a sudden you realize that they believe, what? And all of a sudden now, k? We still like them, but it's a little uncomfortable. Right?
Because, the rubber band right now is going, ow. Love stretches a little bit. Well, then guess what happens? All of a sudden, you discover something really wacky. It's not this.
It's like it's like out here somewhere. Right? And now you're asking yourself, is this relationship worth the effort? Because they got this, like, crazy thing out here going on. And now I'm describing most of our marriages.
Right? When we are sort of like, oh, wow. Okay. And over time, because we're all broken and fallen and we all say the wrong thing, do stupid things, all of that, over time, you have all of these things that pop up. And so, like, you could describe our most of our relationships with people like this.
Right? So what is Peter saying? Peter is saying this, that the Christian who understands that God loving me was the ultimate stretch. Understands the gospel. Now, in relationship with other Christians, when that stretchiness is required and that preference that that person has or that time they forgot to call me when I was in the hospital or that unkind word about whatever happens in Christian community.
You've been in church, this is what it's like right here. It stretches. Gospel love stretches. Now, the person that doesn't get the gospel, maybe you've had rubber bands before or, like, you know, socks when the elasticity is gone. What happens?
You just, like, pull it a little bit, and there's just, like, nothing. Right? Or it just snaps. But gospel love stretches because I realized the ultimate stretch was God loving me and Jesus. And if he did that much for me, well, then I can kinda stretch this far to love my fellow believer.
Now I asked first service if that was good, I should use it, and they thought it was. But I don't have to use it third service. Was that helpful? Okay. Love covers some ultra stretches.
Alright. Some of you stretched just to clap there. I thank you for that. He needs affirmation. He's one of those kinds.
Yes. I do. Here's what Bonhoeffer says. And he he he's talking about Christians who have sort of this, like, ideal for what the church ought to be like. Like, it ought to be this way.
And if I was in charge, it would be this way, and everybody would be awesome like this. He calls it the the the wish dream of Christian community. Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community, even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest, and sacrificial. God hates this wishful dreaming because it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. Those who dream of this idealized community demand that it be fulfilled by God, by others, and by themselves.
They enter the community of Christians with their demands, set up their own law, and judge one another and even God accordingly. Therefore, will not the very moment of great disillusionment with my brother or sister be incomparably wholesome for me because it is so thoroughly it so thoroughly teaches us that both of us can never live by our own words and deeds, but only by that one word indeed that really binds us together, the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ. The bright day of Christian community dawns wherever the early morning mists of dreamy visions are lifting. Now he wrote that in German, but it sounded awesome in English, didn't it? That is eloquent writing.
It is precisely when we get to that kind of stretchy point that we can actually be authentic with one another, and real God empowered Holy Spirit uniting community can happen. I just think of so many people at that very moment when the small group might actually be real with one another, they run or the church or the marriage or the whatever. That moment is the moment when all of a sudden the gospel is as real as it can be. Don't run. Stretch and apply gospel love.
The next quality that Peter talks about here is hospitality. Notice what he says. “Show hospitality to one another without grumbling.” “Show hospitality to one another without grumbling.” Now whenever we talk about hospitality, I think many people think it it's like when your friends come over and you have nice silverware.
K? That is not hospitality biblically. That is not silverware is fine, but it's that's like trifling. What he's talking about here is much bigger and much broader. The word is a compound word.
Literally, it means it's this, stranger, love. Stranger, love. So this is not about you having, the right meal when your friends come over to watch the Bears game or something. This is loving somebody different than me, outside my circle. This is stranger love.
This is good Samaritan type love. And, of course, in that, Jesus answering the question, who is my neighbor? He tells the story of the good Samaritan. I won't tell it again, but that good Samaritan loves somebody who is ethnically different than him, religiously different than him, inconvenient for him, yet he loves and meets his needs. That is Christian hospitality.
One commentator translated it open heartedness. That's a pretty good word picture, isn't it? My heart is open to people, and I'm ready to show love, express love, open heartedly. And Peter adds that we are to do this without grumbling. Apparently, human nature hasn't changed a lot in two thousand years because what do we oftentimes think when God brings some person with some need or whatever in our path?
We instantly think about, a, our schedule. This is inconvenient for me. I had plans today, and this was not what I was planning on doing. Or it is expensive. This guy's gonna eat us out of the house and home.
Have you seen the way he puts it away? We don't want him over. Let's buy him a gift card and minimize the expense. Here's what Bonhoeffer says. We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God.
God will constantly, cross our will be constantly crossing our paths and canceling our plans by sending us people with claims and petitions. If we pass them by, we pass by the visible sign of the cross raised in our path to show us that not our way, but God's way must be done. It is part of the discipline of humility that we must not spare our hand where it can perform a service and that we do not assume that our schedule is ours our own to manage, but allow it to be arranged by God. Who here is not convicted by that quote right there? That is so convicting, isn't it?
How often we overlook little opportunities that we have to help people, to minister to people, to pray with people, to give them a kind word, to give them like, just to listen to them, to spend time listening to them. We're off on our thing. I know this well myself. And yet God is constantly bringing people across our path. And those are moments that call us to love them and to seek to be knee meeting their needs.
So I wonder if you see how this all connects. K? The Christian is someone who looks at history and looks at the future, not like the pagan who says, hey. We can do what we want, but sees that there is something really big coming, and there is a judgment day, and I'm gonna stand before God myself at the judgment seat of Christ. And because of all of that and eternity in heaven and hell, there is a sort of serious and sober mindedness about today.
Everything is precious, and people are valuable, and life is precious, which calls me then to apply gospel love to people and all of the sort of stretchy, uncomfortable things that people create. Even strangers, I'm willing to love them as best I can. And the Christian commits that our unity is not based on performance. It is not based on you being enough like me that I can love you. It is in fact, we don't we don't make Christian unity, do we?
The Spirit has unified us. We seek to reflect that in the way that we care for one another and are of one mind and of one heart. And this allows us to be stretchy, stretchy love, stranger love because God's been stretchy love, stranger love towards us. And notice it goes one step further. Look at verse 10.
This is what it calls us to. “As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another as good stewards of God's varied grace” Whoever speaks is one who speaks oracles of God. Whoever serves is one who serves by the strength that God supplies in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. Now we looked at verse 10 last week.
I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on this other than for you to see the progression here. Let me do it again. I look ahead as a Christian, and I see what is coming, and that makes me serious about my life. I'm not silly. I'm not superficial.
I'm like, everything's important now. This calls me then to apply the gospel love that I have received from God and to stretch it over all of the little things that otherwise could divide me with my other Christians. I open my heart to people that come across my path. I give them stranger love. And the final step is that I actually view my life as being an opportunity to serve other people.
How do you know when somebody understands the gospel? Not when they've got their doctrine right, not when they can answer the questions right. It is when I am willing to take up the basin and the towel and actually wash the feet of other people and to serve them. What did Jesus say in that same passage? I believe in Mark.
“Even the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.” So in Christian community then, where people are getting the gospel and Jesus is the hero and we want to be like him, we don't look at that service as being something that is beneath me. I look at it as being something that is Christ like. And you say, I'm gonna be a servant. Well, guess what?
Who are we called to serve? One another, the text says. Other Christians. Indeed, the people that are sitting right around you right now with a servant heart in this. Using gifts, we talked about this last week.
The Holy Spirit has given us enablements and empowerments. Everybody here that's a Christian, you have something special that you can do that is joy to you and joy to God and joy to others. But I I view myself as a servant. And we see then in this that what Peter is saying is that this horizontal thing and the unity and love covering and stranger love and stretchy love, these are not add ons to the gospel. This is not add ons to Christianity.
This is part and parcel of what real Christianity is all about, and it shows who gets it. A lot of people, I think, view the gospel this way. They say, I believe in Jesus. When I die, I go to heaven. That's all that I need.
And then you read passages like this, and we realize, wait a second. The gospel that saves us is a gospel that changes us. And that change changes the way that we view other people. And the way that I know that I am a disciple of Jesus is that I love one another. It's not an add on.
It's not a if you want to or if you get to it. It is what Christianity is because this is who Christ was. Again, Bonhoeffer, when God had mercy on us, when God revealed Jesus Christ to us as our brother, when God won our hearts by God's own love, our instruction in Christian love began at the same time. When God was merciful to us, we learned to be merciful with one another. When we receive forgiveness instead of judgment, we too were made ready to forgive each other.
What God did to us, we then owed to others. The more we received, the more we were able to give, and the more more meager our love for one another, the less we were willing we were living by God's mercy and love. Thus, God taught us to encounter one another as God encountered us in Christ. That's like church. That's what this should be like.
And yet, it even in saying that, it is always imperfect. Don't get the wish dream thing going. That's right. And if this church got it, they'd be a lot more that way, and the other people would be that way towards me. That's the wish dream that Bonhoeffer also talked about.
It is when we imperfectly love imperfect people but do so for Jesus' sake that we are showing that we understand that God loved us while we were sinners. Amen. We get the gospel. So how are you doing with that? Husband and wife.
Let me just go to the to me, the pinnacle. Stretchy love requirement in that very intimate relationship. How many couples right here in this room, your marriage is calling you to stretch and to love a husband or wife who has preferences and idiosyncrasies that are driving you crazy. He's a believer. You're a believer.
Is the gospel shaping the way that you relate, love, and forgive that spouse? And if not, might there be a little confessing that is needed, That your marriage might come under that agape love and the blessing that comes with it. Christian in the church, sitting here right now hoping that some other person maybe is hearing this because they're the one that offended you. Is there any relationship in the church that has been unglorifying to God, and you've allowed a preference or a moment where they disappointed you or whatever to create conflict that is unresolved. “Love covers a multitude of sins.”
Think of all this applies to family relationships, so many of those strained, so many things. That's the beauty of this passage, I think, is that it applies in so many ways, and nobody gets away from this message without feeling conviction. None of us do. So I think this is one of these passages that particularly challenges people that simply attend the church. And can I just say in pastoral love, truly, to you that the sum of your Christian expression is the fact that you come here to church?
Do you see in this and in the words of Bonhoeffer, there is so much more that God wants for you to experience and for you to be blessed and to be a blessing and might the Holy Spirit allow this message to spur you.
Here's we step into kind of a new season of ministry around here. School's beginning. It's a great time for a fresh start. Might God be calling you to take that step, and maybe that step is into a small group. Maybe that step is into membership of the church.
Maybe that step is into some area of ministry. To that end, let me just go back through our list, practically speaking. Number one, what did he say? Prayer. And I told you, I got some things to share about prayer in the coming weeks.
Stay tuned. Stretchy love. Stretchy love assumes that you are in relationship with other Christians. As I just got done saying, maybe God would be calling you to take a step. Why not join a small group as a practical step to being in relationship with other Christians?
Stranger love. Stranger love. This is the inconvenient service moment. And one of the things I've observed over the years is it seems like whenever God brings us to a particular passage in the body life of our church, all of a sudden, there are things that God sort of, like, brings into our path. And I'm just wondering, light of talking about this, in our church, how many of us are going to have a stranger love moment this coming week when maybe this passage will come to your mind and you will do something different than you otherwise would.
I think it's gonna happen. I'm so confident that's gonna happen that I asked our, IT department to make an email address. So here it is, strangerlove@bethelweb.org I would love to hear your story of stranger love from this coming week, and, perhaps we'll have a chance to share that and encourage others. And finally, Servi love.
K? Servi love. It's a little it's not a word, but you get the idea. Right? Servi love.
We have opportunities that we're making available to you, and, I'm gonna talk about those in just a moment. And remember, why all of this? “So that in everything, God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To him belong glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.”
* This transcript was generated using AI transcription technology and reviewed for accuracy but may contain errors. Please refer to the original audio for precise wording.
