We Ought To Love One Another

So this morning, we're going to be following up on the topic we started last week. Last Sunday, rather, I should say. Last Sunday, we spent our time looking at God's love for us. And I remember as I was preparing that sermon and as I was preaching that sermon, I was thinking, what wondrous love is this? I mean, how can our words give, how can we contain or understand the sort of love that God has for sinners, for us? And I told you that this week we're going to be talking about our response to that love, which is, unsurprisingly, that we should love as well. Our text is going to be the following verses, the verses that follow after our passage last week. Last week we studied 1 John 4, verses 9 and 10. This week we're going to be studying verses 11 through 13. Would you please stand now as we read the word of the Lord? This is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true.

Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another. No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God abides in us, and his love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us his Spirit. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. Now John does something a bit strange here. And the strange thing that he does is he says, Beloved, if God has so loved us, we should then love one another. Now, that may not seem strange to you, but if you think about it in terms of the greatest commandment, what should be the object of our love, it seems that it would make sense that John would say, we should love God. God has so loved us that we should love God. But that's not what John says. John focuses on the second greatest commandment, which is that we should love our neighbor as ourself, but defines neighbor even more clearly or more narrowly by saying we should love one another.

And this is a theme of Scripture, a theme of John's, that we would love each other. It just keeps coming up and coming up and coming up. And you know, some of the commands of God are hard. You look at them and you're like, I don't know if I can do that. Greet one another with a holy kiss? Hmm. Maybe that was cultural. It's a hard command. Not that it's difficult to do, but it's just, you know, it's weird. But when he says you should love one another, you're like, oh, something that's in my wheelhouse. Who wouldn't want to do that? Well, I'm convinced that as often as it shows up in the pages of Scripture, that we're the ones who struggle with loving one another. And that's why the Holy Spirit, through John and other apostles, is always telling us we need to love each other. We need to love each other. You love one another. It's not as easy as we think it is. John says that this is the highlight. This is the pinnacle. This is the top. The greatest expression of our love is that we would love one another. Not that we would love God.

Not that we'd love our neighbors, but they would love one another. And in some ways, you might say, well, I don't know, that doesn't seem quite right. There's a lot of talk nowadays about love, how we ought to love, what love looks like, what it is, what it isn't, what it says, what it doesn't say. John says we ought to love one another, that this is the best demonstration of our love, which is to say, in other words, that our love for one another, for other Christians, for the church, should be a higher priority, if I can say it. You ought to be more attentive to this even than you are to loving your neighbors. Now, you know, like, you can't, don't say that. I'm not saying you shouldn't love your neighbors. I want you to think of it this way, though. If you don't love one another, if we don't love each other, we won't love our neighbors. You can't love your neighbors.

Your ability to love your neighbors, to care for them, and to minister to them is built on your love for one another. And so if you don't get the foundation right, you have a house of cards. You have lots of talk about love, lots of talk about what loving is, but it doesn't withstand the hardships of life. When I think of love, I think of sand on the seashore. You know how you go to the beach and you build things in the sand and it's fun. Kids will go and they'll dig little trenches and then they dig little pits and it fills up with water and they play with it or they build sandcastles. And what do you know will be the case if you go back to the beach tomorrow? It's all gone. It's all gone. Why? Because sand doesn't have any ability to stay. It doesn't stick together. It can't withstand the wind and just the washing of the waves. Just the washing of the waves for a night, the tide coming in or the tide going out. It's gone. Whatever you built is gone.

But there are things that are able to withstand the wind and the waves. You guys know the pictures of the lighthouses that are out there, and there's this big 50-foot wave crashing around it. Why is that so impressive? Just because the thing's standing with all that pressure. It's having all of nature's fury poured out against it, and there it stands, flashing its light. And when the storm's gone, there it stands, flashing its light. And that... That's what the love of God is like. The little sandcastles that we build, that's what the love of the world is like. And so we ought to prioritize or gravitate toward the sort of love that withstands storms and pressure, hardship, difficulty with one another. If we're able to do that, we'll have something to show other people, unbelievers. When we planted this church, Joseph and I, those of you who remember Joseph and Heidi, when we planted this church, we were given this as our directive for our philosophy of ministry for church planting. There's lots and lots of tests and trainings and all kinds of stuff that you can do to plant a church. This is what we got told. Love people. If you love people, really love them, you'll have a church. People will come and they'll join themselves to you.

And they'll be committed, and you'll have a church. As opposed to big flashy programs, lots of money being spent on marketing, big events, huge social media presences. If you love people, you'll have a church. And so when we planted this church, that was our goal. Our goal is that if we're going to have a church, and if you know Joseph or you know me, we're not... We aren't and weren't and probably never will be the kind of, you know, if we took church planter tests, we would probably not do well. Joseph took one and he failed it. The test said you shouldn't plant a church because you don't have the charisma to plant a church. And so from the very beginning, our commitment in this church has been to love the word of God and to proclaim all of it and to love his people. And that's it. And as people have come over the year, and as they've left over the years, it's been because of that demonstration of love. I'd say more than anything else. Some people come and they say, we've never seen this before. And some people come and say, you won't say that or you won't be involved in our life that way. And I've said to people in counseling or in conversation, I said, I want you to think for a minute. I know what I'm saying is hard to you. Just consider.

What do I stand to gain personally by saying this to you? I stand to gain nothing. What I stand to lose is you. I stand to have you get angry at me. You can leave the church. You can tell lies about me. You can do all kinds. There's no upside for me in saying hard things. You're just going to make you angry. So think for a minute. Why then would I say these things? Why then would your elders come to you? And they think and they go. I don't know. And I say, it's because we love you. And it's because we want to care for your souls. Even though it's not perfect, it is our desire to care for your souls. And so that does require, love demands that we would say hard things from time to time. That we would require hard things from time to time. Because we love you. And so that is what it means for the elders to love their people. It's to care for them. If a parent were to sit at home,

and their kids were to be rebellious, disrespectful, lazy, wicked, and they never did anything about it, you'd say that child is not loved. Those parents don't love that child. But the child that is loved and cared for and told no and corrected and encouraged and built up and taught, disciplined, that child is loved. And so this is what it means for us, the elders, to love you guys. What's it mean for the congregation? It says you love one another. Well, it has to do with you and each other, but it also has to do with you and the leadership. In Hebrews it says, obey your leaders and submit to them. And then it goes on and says, what? So that, for they keep watch over your souls as those who will give an account. And then it tells you this, let them do this with joy and not with sorrow.

And it's just this thing at the congregation that says, you accept their love and their care and don't make it miserable for them. That's the way you express your love to your pastors and your elders. I've told you, I don't know how many times, it seems like I say it all the time. You trusting the word of God, you living your life in accordance with it, which means changing your life, is the greatest gift you can give to your pastors and elders. It's the best thing you can do for us. It gives us more joy than anything else. That's what we want. That's what we're working for. That's what we're trying to cultivate. That's it. We want you to love. In 1 Timothy, Paul says the goal of our instruction is love from a pure heart. He says that's the whole purpose of what you're doing, pastors, Timothy, church. Your goal is to teach the people to love. That's it. If you can get them to love, you will have done it all.

And so loving each other is not a small thing. It's not an easy thing. It's not one of those things where we're like, oh yeah, we got that. It's this massive thing. And it's noticeable. It's noticeable. Next month will be our 12-year anniversary for Clear Note Church. End of January was our first worship service. So we're about a month away from 12 years. And that's not decades and decades, but that's long enough to have... We've had time to mess things up. We've had time to get angry at each other. We've had time to work through some difficulties. And we have. And that commitment to loving one another is noticeable. To who? I say primarily it's noticeable to people who aren't a part of the church. Which is what Jesus said in the passage I read for our call to confession. Prove to be my disciples. Prove to be my disciples. If you want to minister to people, let them see your love for one another. You might think, oh, they're supposed to see my love for them. And I say, they will see your love for them. And they'll believe that you can love them and do good for them if they see you loving other people, if they see you loving other Christians. Now, am I telling you that what we should do is circle the wagons around each other and only think about the people who are here and only ever pay attention and just sort of hunker down? That's not actually what I'm saying.

I'm not saying that at all. What I am saying is if you want to love your neighbors, if you want to see God's kingdom grow, if you want to be useful in leading people to Christ and seeing them come to faith, you have to love one another. You have to love the church. I remember talking to a guy who worked in parachurch ministry one time. I don't remember if it was Campus Crusade for Christ or Navigators or what it was. But he was coming out of it and he's sort of, you know, having been on the inside of it, he's now coming out of it and he's looking and seeing what the, The problem was, and what we were talking about was that the people that would come to Crewe in college, they stopped going to church. That was the net result, is that they didn't go to church because they had the big group meeting on campus, and then they had the small group Bible studies, and they basically created this thing that was not a church but functioned very similarly to a church on campus, and so the students never went to church. And what he realized was, we're not caring for these people.

These kids, these students. We're not doing them any good. And so a couple of things happens. One, if they make it through college, they've learned all through college that going to church is not important anymore. They've built a Christian community that's not the church that they meet with and hang out with and spend time with. And what he also realized was when they fell into sin, they had no mechanism in the parachurch to deal with it. So when the students started fornicating, all they could do is be like, well, you shouldn't do that. And many times they wouldn't even say that. And I said, well, how come they don't go to church? Why won't they go to church? He says, well, we tell them to go to church. We tell them, you should go to church. You need to find a local church and you go to church. But there's a world of difference between saying, you should go to church and you should come to church. You should go find a church versus come to church with me. Yeah. There's a world of difference there.

Do you even know what they're supposed to find? Go find a church. Where? What kind of church? What do you want that church to do for them? What would be a church that's good for their soul versus bad for their soul? Go find one. Come to church. Come to church. The problem was that in, I think it was Campus Crusade for Christ crew, is that the crew couldn't be affiliated with a church. The leadership couldn't all be in one church. They couldn't say, you need to come to my church. Because they weren't actually affiliated. And it created this difficulty, this tension, where the people, these kids, these students, in I would say one of the most vulnerable seasons of their life, is they're becoming adults. And their whole life has just changed because they've just left their home and everything that's familiar to them. They lose the church. Because they couldn't say, come to church. I remember before I was a pastor inviting people to church. They'd talk to them and say, you should come to church. And I remember being nervous about it.

I would assume you might get nervous too. I don't know what the pastor's going to say. What are they going to think? What's work going to be like on Monday if they come to church with me on Sunday? What will my reputation be? When someone comes to church, an unbeliever, what should be apparent to them? What should they recognize about the church? What will they recognize? There's a couple of things that usually come up in my experience and from the reading and conversations I've had with other people. They notice two things. They notice preaching. They like it or they don't like it or they say yes. They have some touch point with the preaching. And the other thing they often notice is the love. They're always talking about the fellowship. Did the people love? It's clear that they love each other and did they welcome me into it? Some people, maybe you've had this experience where you go to a church and it's like you're not in the in crowd.

Like, it's clear they love each other, but they haven't gotten to the point where their love for each other is an open door for you to come into that. And that's miserable. That's not what John's talking about here. He's not saying that's what you should do. People should come in and see that you love each other so much that you don't have any place for them. That's not what he's saying. What ideally should happen, what we aim for, is that people will come and say, I can see that you guys know each other and love each other, and that I'm invited into that. I'm welcomed into that.

I'm invited to your small group. I'm invited to your meal. I get a phone call or I get some sort of contact throughout the week by multiple people. This is what it means for you to love one another, for you to love the church. Do you expect God's love to change you, to make everything I've talked about to this point possible? Everything I've said up to this point, we don't produce in ourselves, right? We're not like, oh, just give me the four steps to get to the point where I do these things. Everything I've talked about to this point is the result of God's love for us. Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another. It's contingent. It's contingent upon God's love changing us. His love has to change us. It has to change us. It has to change our whole life. That's what it does. What did God, what did his love pluck you out of? What did he save you from?

What did he protect you from falling into? Maybe you didn't grow up in the church, and so you can say, I can see what God pulled me away from, pulled me out of. I know where I was headed and what I was doing, and then God intervened and pulled me out of it. Some of you have a different experience. You grew up in the church, and you maybe don't have a time where you're like, I never was the prodigal son. Where do you get any clue about what God has saved you from? I say you get your clue from the Bible. when you read of all of the sins and all the struggles and all the hardships that people fall into and that are recorded for us in the scripture, that's what God saved you from. That's what he saved you from. That's what he kept you out of. It's what you would have done, some of it anyway, if you were left to yourself. And so his love changes us, whether we grew up in the church or whether we didn't. These are the works of God in our life. It's very easy to get upset about certain burdens and hardships when we experience them right now.

Where is God? Where is he? Why this? Why that? What I would say back to you, if you'll hear it, is where would you be if he hadn't been kind to you before? How would you be bearing this burden currently if he hadn't been so good to you in the past? You know, I mean, honestly, who were you? And what were you like? And how well would you handle this burden if it had come to you without his past mercies to you? I don't know that any of us would say, I'd handle it well. We'd be depressed. We'd be angry. We give ourselves to all kinds of sin. And while we may have burdens and trials in this life, God's love does change us such that we're able to bear them. When I think of where I'd gotten to in life by the time I was 21, and where I would have gotten to by the time I was 30, if God hadn't snatched me out of the things, I wouldn't be here. And so his love changes our lives. His love remakes us. It changes the way we see everything in our lives.

Where we used to be proud of ourselves and brag, now we see our pride. How we're taking glory away from him when we speak this way. Where we used to feel entitled to things. I deserve it. While at the same time taking for granted everything we already have. I deserve more. When God changes us and remakes us, we become thankful for the things that we have. We're humbled. And he gives us gratitude. Even if we don't have the things that we want. Where we used to get disgusted and frustrated and angry with other people's weaknesses and sins. We despise them and we look down on them. Now we have mercy for sinners and we understand how easy it is to fall into their sins. What else could we say? How else has God changed his people's perspectives? How has he changed your perspective? How did you used to think? How did you used to feel? How did you used to respond? And how has he changed you? If you say, I have no experience of that.

then I don't know that you're a Christian. Somewhere, somehow, as you think about your life and where was God in it, if you don't see him having been merciful to you and pouring out his love on you, I don't think you're a Christian. I don't want you to say, we have Abraham as our father. His love remakes us. It changes us. It replaces our hearts. And everything in our lives, while the circumstances of much of our lives may not change, our perspective on it does. How could we be recipients of his love and not be changed by it? Even though the change isn't perfect or quick, when God loves somebody, he changes them. And there's nothing, there's nothing in this life after that point that can make them dead to his love. They will always be aware of it. They ought always to be aware of it. Paul says in Romans, I'm convinced that neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities nor things present nor things to come,

nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing will be able to separate us from what? From the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. And so it ought to be true that when John tells us to love one another, that we understand something of what we're being called to. And we also understand that that's something that God put into us. That love for one another wasn't in us by nature. It wasn't in us because our parents trained us how to love each other. It's in us. because God put it in us. It's the only way we can get it. And so God's love for us makes us love one another. I'm going to tell a story about Dan George and about his love. When we first started our church, Dan and his family were coming to the church, and we're seeing if this was where they wanted to go, which I appreciated, because they were counting out the costs. They had young children. Joseph and I were 28.

and he had high schoolers, and he was like, I don't know if this is where we should be. And so Dan had a complaint toward the beginning of church, and his complaint was that church was at 1030. Remember? You don't remember this? You came to us, and you were frustrated that church was at 1030 because it was in the middle of the day, and you're like, can't we just have church at 7 a.m. so I can go on? I work hard all week and your Sundays are kind of taking a lot of my day. You have church at 10.30 and then you have a small group in the evenings. It's almost like you want the whole day. And Dan said, can we just have church earlier? I don't know, maybe you were really asking, but I took it as just a complaint. This is what it's going to be. That was not love that was motivating Dan. But many of you now, This was 10, 11 years ago, right? 11 years ago. Very beginning of our church. How many of us are surprised that Dan would ever say that? I bet many of you are like, Dan said that? Yeah, Dan said that. Why are you surprised by it? Are you surprised? Because he repented of that. And he gave himself and led his whole family to give themselves to love of the brethren. Love of you and me. And so his house.

for years and years became this hub of love and of life in our church. How many men in our church lived with Dan? How many of you stayed at his house until midnight on Sunday nights talking and playing games and playing pool and doing whatever you did because you didn't, you know, maybe you didn't have work in the morning? How many of you have eaten at his table? Shot guns in his backyard? Fixed your car in his barn? Why would Dan do all of that? Why does he let you use his stuff and break his stuff, if we're honest? It's because he loves God and because he loves this church and because he loves God's people. Now, is Dan's love perfect? Dan, I know you're sitting back there going, I don't know. Dan would be the first to tell you his love's not perfect. But I've watched it for years. He loves us. How many of you have had Dan say hard things to you or his wife, Wendy? They love us. His son mumbled. Levi's like, I'm their son. Yeah.

That's what it means to love one another. It's to have your life and the things that you used to do. Dan used to love fishing and hunting and just go, go, going. But he's given up all of that because now he loves God and he loves God's people. And so he doesn't fish tournaments on Sundays anymore. He doesn't go hunting on Sundays anymore. Even when he was able, he didn't do those things. Instead, he'd take people out on Saturdays and say, why don't you come fishing with me? That's what it means to love one another. To have your whole life changed. The way you used to do things, the things you used to love, the things you want to love, it just gets pushed aside because now you have these people. You have the mercy of God given to you and you go, look what he's done for me and what's he require of me but that I would love other people the same way I've been loved. I'm happy to do it. That's what it means to love one another. To give your life for it. How many things, how are people's lives changed? Let me ask it this way. How many people's lives are changed? What kinds of things in their lives are changed?

Because they love the church. Because they love people. Where they live. What they spend their time on. What they spend their money on. What they do for work. If I take that job, I'm going to have to move away from these people. I would say, if I had to describe why I went into the ministry, it was simply because the church loved me. I didn't know what I wanted to do before that. I used to climb trees for a living. When I got out of high school, that's what I did. I was a certified arborist. I lived with chainsaws and logs all day. I enjoyed getting way up in trees. It was a lot of fun. It's been, you know, 1920. That's a blast. I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. But when God's love came into my life, through the church, through the people that he brought into my life, it changed the course of things. I moved. I used to live in Chicago. I moved to Bloomington.

And Vanessa and I weren't dating at the time. And so I moved to a different state to go to the church that my ex-girlfriend went to. And the church was maybe twice the size of our church at the time. Maybe 250 people. It was not a big, massive, get lost in it kind of place. Why did I move down there? Because people loved me. But I'd never experienced it before. Why did I go into ministry? Because I'd experienced the love of God and I wanted to be able to give it to other people. Save them some of the troubles. that I'd experienced. How's the love of God changed your life? Do you love one another? Do you love the people in this room? Do you love the church? You know, it's easy to mislead ourselves into thinking that we love one another when we don't. And I think the reason that John gives us the commands to love one another instead of love God, he says later, he says, you know, no one at any time has seen God.

Why does he tell us that no one has seen God? Well, because it's very easy to convince ourselves that we love people we never have to interact with. It's much harder to love people that we have to spend time with. Just a few verses later in this same chapter, in verse 20, he says, if someone says, I love God, but hates his brother, you know, that other, he is a liar. For the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he hasn't seen. And so our love for one another, for the church, is the primary way you will demonstrate your love for God. That's it. That's it. Your life will be changed, and you'll say, I want to do this thing, but it required me to move away from the people who have loved me and cared for me, and I can't do it. I have to figure something else out. Why is it so important that we love each other? Well, first, and maybe this is obvious to you, but it wasn't to me, it's that we ought to love what God loves. God doesn't just love you.

He loves all of his people. And if he loves all of them and not just me individually, then we ought to love all of them. Why else does he emphasize our love for one another? Because our love for one another ought to give us hope and comfort that we are his children. If you want to know if you're a Christian, you remember I said earlier, none of this stirs your heart if you're just like, I said you're not a Christian. Well, the opposite is true as well. If you love God's people and you say, I don't do it perfectly and I've got, you know, It's easy to look at all of our failures, but I'm setting aside perfection and saying, is there in your heart a principle of love for God's people? And does it have some expression in your life? If that is true of you, then you should be assured that God loves you and that you're one of his children. Because that's the work of the Spirit inside of you. By this we know that we abide in him and he in us because he's given us his Spirit. And by his Spirit, we love each other.

But if you're indifferent to the church or to God's people, we ought to take warning. And I want to end by giving a couple of examples of what loving each other actually looks like in the church, okay? The first, and this is really simple stuff and it's super important, be here. How can you love people you never spend time with? You have to be here. You have to live your life among the people of God. and especially you have to worship with them. You have to hear the same things and sing the same things and eat the same food, whether that food's at the communion table or whether that food's over in the gym. You've got to be with them. What else? Helping and serving one another. When you see needs, you help. You step in and you say, I can help you with that. Do you need help with that? I don't get to work with my hands much anymore, and I miss it.

I'm not nearly as good at it as I used to be. I just had someone ask me about their trees. It was Abram. He's asking about his trees in his backyard and I'm looking at him and I'm daydreaming about how I'd cut those trees down, how I could do it. And I remember the last time I climbed a tree for someone I loved and I can't climb trees anymore because I don't do it every day. And I said, Abram, you're going to have to call somebody to do it. I miss it. You know, when Aaron bought his new house and he had to refinish all of his wood floors and he's over there struggling away at it.

This is going to take me three months to... See, I had the wrong sander. I came over, and I had no greater joy than being able to come over and just get covered in dust for a few hours and sand your floors. He needed help. You needed help. And it was my joy to be able to go over and do that. James, how many people in our church have you painted in their house? And how many more are going to ask you to do it now that I've mentioned it? Or Luis forking on your cars? I mean, seriously. We just use them as excuses to spend time with you, Luis. This is how you love each other. When you see someone who has need and you actually have the knowledge or the skills, you go to them and you help them. When we had to replace our HVAC unit, hey, Aaron, he knows HVAC. Hey, Aaron, tell me what to put in and I'll buy it. And I buy it. Aaron, I'll come over and install it for you. Thank you.

I can't do that. He can do that. And so he comes over and gives of himself. That's what it means to love one another. Standing alongside those who suffer. It's really hard to get around people that are going through a rough time. You don't know what to say to them. Maybe someone passed away. Maybe there's some sickness. There's some conflict. Some worry. And it's like, I don't know what to say. So I'll just go to them. Stand with them. Pray with them. Hug them. Just bear with them. How else do you love each other? Forgiveness. You get close enough to people that are outside of your nuclear family, you'll realize that you have the same problems with them that you do with your nuclear family, which is that you sin against each other and you get angry at them. That's normal. That's the sign of a healthy church, is that they're close enough to each other that they have to work through their sins against each other. That's a good thing. So long as they do it. Ask for forgiveness.

offer forgiveness without bitterness, without manipulation, without keeping a tally card of the past. What else does loving one another look like? Encouraging and admonishing one another? When I was coming to faith, I remember going to a pastor and asking him a question. He didn't love me. I knew it needed to be said, and he didn't say it. And I moved to Bloomington, to that church, because they did say it. And that's not just the pastor's and elder's work. That's your work. Encouraging and admonishing one another. You're realizing that there's sort of this theme of like if you were to go through the New Testament and all the one another passages, we could just pluck all those things out and say this is what it means to love one another. I'll give you one more final one. Providing accountability for one another. The elders and I and the deacons can't do it all. In part because we don't know it all. Our church isn't even that big. It's not huge. But there's stuff that goes on that I don't know about.

we don't know about, but you know about, provide accountability for one another. You say the hard things. If someone's caught in a sin, you go to them. That's what Matthew 18 teaches us, right? That's love. And if they won't listen and are just stubborn, then you work your way up to telling the elders and stuff, but you go to them. This is how we love one another. And what I'll tell you is if we do these things, that will be noticeable to the world. They'll say, oh, you haven't. You guys relate. I've not seen that before. I want that, need that. This is our response to God's love, that we would love one another. Start in your homes with your spouses and with your children, with your parents, and love them because God loved you. Love the people in the church. Love the church. Have a principle about it. You know, there are markers in a family for like what will produce, you know, keep people out of trouble. And they say that

Having dinner together as a family is one of the most important things. Like in your child growing up, they don't have to be fancy meals. They don't have to be this big, like, great conversation all the time. Like, you know, it's not Instagram dinners. It's just your family eats together, and it will produce good things in you. Some of you have grown up without it, and you've gone, I don't know, you know. Some of you have had it, and you've got a leg up on the rest of us in that regard. There's a corollary with regard to your soul. You know what will do you the best, your soul the best good? Love a church and be committed to it for your life, for your whole life. That's it. Moving around and keeping your distance, you open yourself up to all kinds of hardships, trials, temptations. Now sometimes you have to move, sometimes you have to change, and I'm not going to understand that. But it shouldn't be done lightly.

You should count the cost of what you're giving up. I remember saying to a couple that moved away a while ago, we were talking about churches in their new town, and I said, I think you should go to this church. But I've never been there myself. I know the pastor. I said, the thing is, it'll take you a few years to realize if you're missing some of the spiritual nutrients that you need. But if you're going to go up there, give yourself to that church. give yourself to those people. Even if you don't agree with them theologically about everything. You know, the church I was recommending, I don't agree with them about everything theologically. But I believe that the pastor is faithful. And so I say, go there. Go there. Give yourself to those people. And stay there for the next 25 years. Raise your kids there. And it'll be the best thing you can do for your soul. Because you'll have opportunity to love and to be loved by the church.

This has to be a priority to us. It just has to be. If it's not, we leave ourselves open to all kinds of temptations and hardships. And so this is what it means to love one another. This is what it means to love God, is to love his bride, his people, as imperfect as we are. Love one another. Let's pray.