Put on Love

My name is Eric Beerbower. I'm an assistant pastor here at Clearnote Church. It's a joy to have each one of you here this morning. This morning's sermon title is Put on Love, and it comes from Colossians 3:14. The theme of Colossians 3 is putting off and putting on. Paul begins the chapter by saying, if you have been raised up with Christ, keep seeking the things above and not the things of the earth.

Because we've been raised in Christ, Paul commands us to put off the things of the old way of life, things like immorality, impurity, wrath, malice, bitterness, etcetera. That is, since we are a new person in Christ, live like one. To put something off is like getting undressed. Before we ca- became Christians, we were clothed in filthy rags of evil passions and wicked desires. But we are in Christ. We have died to those things, so we must take them off.

Growing up, we had a giant sandbox, which we flooded with water so that we could play in the mud. By the time we were finished, we would be covered from head to toe. Our clothes were filthy. Nobody would ever have thought about putting those clothes back on after taking them off. They needed to be replaced with something clean.

But we do not then walk around stripped of our filthy clothes in some sort of in-between state. We need to be reclothed. We will either be clothed in the old self with its evil ways, or we'll be clothed in the new man. And that's where Paul turns in verse 12. Paul reminds those of us who have been chosen by God, holy and beloved, we are to get dressed.

We are to dress like Jesus, to be clothed in all the virtues that he is clothed in. And the most important virtue of them all, the one that must permeate all other virtues, is love. Love is what bonds all of the virtues together. So this morning, I have three points for us to consider. One, love must be put on intentionally. Two, love must be rooted in God's love. And three, love binds the church together.

Please stand for the reading of God's word. Colossians 3:12 through 14. "So as those who have been chosen of God, holy and beloved, put on a compa- heart of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving each other. Whoever has a complaint against anyone, just as the Lord forgave you, so also should you. Beyond all these things, put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity." This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. You may be seated.

Love must be intentionally put on. As I look out this morning, everyone remembered to put something on, and most of you look like you put thought into what you put on. Getting dressed in the morning takes thought and effort. It doesn't just happen. Similarly, we do not just happen to be clothed with Christian virtues. We must put them on. We must purposefully close our- clothe ourselves in them.

When it comes to being intentional about love, the best example of that is God. Before God made anything, God had purposed to redeem a people for himself through Jesus Christ. The cross was not God's emergency response to Adam's sin. It was part of his plan from all eternity. His love was intentional, not an afterthought or a reaction to sin.

We must be like God and be intentional in our love for others. We are to put it on, which means we need to be like God and prepare to love others. So how do we put on love? We can start by putting off the things that Paul mentions in the beginning of the chapter: pride, bitterness, anxiety, sins that interfere in our ability to love others. One particularly destructive sin that ruins our ability to put on love is bitterness.

When I was painting, I knew a man who had a good job at a company that he was planning to retire from, but that company got bought out and he was unable to retire there, and he started painting. It's understandable how that would be disappointing, but what struck me was how that disappointment turned into bitterness. He was a Christian, but over time, over the course of years, his bitterness caused him to become cynical to a degree that it affected his relationships with others, including his children.

Bitterness does not just affect our relationship to the person we're bitter towards, it poisons other relationships as well. Bitterness and Christ-like love are fundamentally opposed to each other. We cannot nurture bitterness and love at the same time. Bitterness is partly destructive because it keeps a list of wrongs against us, and over time, the list begins to color our view of the world. We start to see the world as a place that's consumed by injustice, and ourselves as the victim, rather than seeing that w- what we are and have received in Christ.

Now, while putting off sin is necessary, it's not enough. Simply putting off bitterness is not the same thing as showing love to someone. We need to stop sinful actions as well as obey. We do not simply stop being bitter, we put on compassion. One way to begin putting on love is by praying for God to soften our hearts and to give us compassion for others. And don't simply pray for compassion. Think of someone you find it hard to love and specifically pray for God to help you love them.

Another way to put on love is by anticipating other people's needs. Before you come to church on Sunday, ask yourself, who needs encouragement? Who needs to be included? And after church, ask yourself, who should you follow up with that week to call and to pray with? This is intentionally putting on love.

Another way is to be hospitable, hospitable. Having people over requires you to be intentional. When someone's coming over for dinner, you don't start planning five minutes after they walked in the door. At least I hope you don't. Even spontaneous hospitality requires preparation.

Further, the Bible teaches that Jesus sets the standard for love, and love is the mark of a Christian. John 13:34 and 35 says, "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."

How did Christ love us? We immediately think of how he came to suffer and die on the cross, bearing the full wrath of God in our place. And that is the pinnacle of his love for us. But it isn't all. He also demonstrated his love for us by willingly going through the everyday experiences of being a man. He demonstrated compassion, humility, and patience with others throughout his years on earth.

He had compassion on the sick and needy. He reached out in love to children when the disciples wanted to exclude them. He was patient with the disciples when they didn't understand him. The standard of love Jesus set for us is not simply a one-time sacrifice. It reaches its apex in that, but it is also shown in his smaller, daily expressions of love.

You may think this is too hard. No man could hope to love as Christ has loved his people. Well, if we're operating in our own strength, that would be true. However, we do not have to manufacture this kind of love in us because our love is rooted in God's. Our love must be rooted in God's love because God is the source of all love. 1 John 4:16 says, "God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him."

We cannot hope to produce the holy and forgiving love God calls us to unless we are connected to him, the source of love. The command to put on love does not mean that you must scrounge around in yourself to work up feelings of love. Christian love is rooted in God's love for us. It's his love working through us. We cannot dredge up the kind of love God commands through our own strength. Our love must flow out of the love of God. We love because he first loved us.

This isn't the way that the world thinks about love. The world tells us to organize our relationships around our own happiness and our fulfillment. "I love you because you love me. I'll be nice to you because you were nice to me." Or, "I'll forgive you because you're worthy of it." Christian love operates from an entirely different foundation.

We love others not because of what we get from the relationship or because of their love for us, but because God freely loves us. Our love is not in response to others, it is in response to how God has treated us. Some people are easy to love. They're encouraging, and they genuinely care about us. Other people are a lot harder. They're rude, they're unappreciative, and they presume upon kindness, so we want to avoid them.

God didn't love us because we were easy to love. He loved us while we were still sinners. While we were still sinners. Nothing selfish about it. God did not love us because of a lack in himself that we could satisfy. Everything he did was out of pure love, unmotivated by any gain. His love enables us to love others without selfish motives. His love enables us to forgive those who we have legitimate complaints against. God has forgiven us when he had far more and greater charges against us.

Now, if God is the source of our love, where should we expect to see that love most clearly demonstrated? Where do we have the opportunity to practice this kind of patient, sacrificial, forgiving love? The answer is in our relationships with one another, particularly within our families and the church, which brings us to our third point.

Love binds the church together. When we think about how God's love will be shown in us, the primary place that we'll see it expressed is in our families and in the church. These are the schools of love. This is because to really love someone, you have to know them. Love is pretty theoretical when someone is distant and we rarely have to interact with them. If we only see them for a couple hours on a Sunday morning across the sanctuary. It's harder to love someone when we invite them into our homes or when we spend a day working together.

One of the amazing things about the church is how God brings people together who would otherwise never be friends or talk to each other. He brings together rich and poor, the blue collar and the white collar, the intellectual and the simple, men and women, black and white, you name it. God's love working in his people brings all sorts of people together.

And I think in theory that most of us would say this is good and beautiful, but in reality it makes us uncomfortable when we have to love people who are different than us. We begin to realize that putting on love is actually a risk because love requires us to become known and to know others. This is why small groups, prayer times, Bible studies, and hospitality are essential. It is as we live life together that we really have to, we really get to love each other.

When Paul says, "Beyond all these things, put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity," he means that love is the greatest because it ties the outfit together. And it does this in two ways. Love is what binds all the virtues together and what bonds all believers together.

In the first few verses of 1 Corinthians 13, Paul says that the greatest acts someone does, even to the point of martyrdom, are profoundly empty if they're not done in love. And his point here is similar. We are to put on patience and kindness and compassion, but love is the glue that holds all of those together. It is love that makes patience more than merely tolerating or silently judging someone. It is love that makes kindness more than manipulation. It's love that makes humility more than indifference or self-pity. It is love that makes forgiveness more than forgetting.

In other words, all the good things we do are perfected by love, and it makes them more than self-serving actions. These virtues can't be practiced in isolation. They must be exercised in a relationship with one another. God didn't simply save a collection of individuals who independently pursue holiness. He made us members of a body, the church, and it is love that enables us to live together and function as a body.

It is this Christ-like love that enables us as believers to pursue unity through the inevitable conflicts and disappointments that come up while living together. Because the reality is that our church, our church is made up of sinners. We've all sinned against each other, and we will again. So the question is, when we do sin or have some sort of conflict with each other, what will we do?

Lack of love will cause normal everyday offenses to become the causes of division. We'll be easily offended, we'll grow in bitterness and separate from others over things that we should have seen as opportunities to grow in our imitation of Jesus by forgiving and forgetting and seeking reconciliation. Lack of love convinces us that others meant to offend us and that we should not cover that offense in love. We will keep a mental list of past offenses and include every new offense as ammunition for the next round.

True forgiveness, which is only born out of love, comes from God. Because we forgive as God has forgiven us. Remember the woman in Luke chapter 7. She was a known sinner. She washed Jesus's feet with her hair, and everyone was scandalized. But Jesus asks, who loves more, the man who has forgiven much or little? And his conclusion is that he who is forgiven much loves much. He who is forgiven little loves little. The woman knew how much she needed forgiveness, and it was demonstrated by her act of love. Every Christian here has received the same undeserved love and forgiveness from God.

None of us earned our place in his family, and because God has forgiven us, we must extend that same love and forgiveness to each other.

We began this morning thinking about getting dressed. Paul tells us that as those who have been raised up with Christ, we are to put off the old self and its vices, and we are to put on the new self and all its virtues. But above all of these things, we are to put on love.

This morning, we have an opportunity to put this into practice. As we share our all-church meal, make a point of talking to someone you haven't gotten to know. Look for someone that you can encourage. Jesus said, "By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." Let's be a people who put on love. Not occasionally, not when it's convenient and with people who are easy to love, but daily, purposefully put on love for those we interact with because we have been loved by Christ.

Let's pray. Father God, we come before you and we thank you for the love that you have shown us, and we ask that we would live in light of that love, and that we would intentionally and purposefully put on love each day, that we would show that to our wives, our husbands, our children, our church, that we would be known for our love for one another, that we would bring you great honor and glory through it. We pray this in Christ's holy name, amen.