Friday, June 9, 2006

"Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things" (1 Corinthians 13:4-7).

IDEA: God’s love for us is a very special kind of love.

PURPOSE: To show that the love of which the Bible speaks is supernatural.

Do you know that the Inuits do not have a single word for snow? They have at least 17 different words for snow. Why do you think that is?

Americans and Canadians have one or two words for snow. On the other hand, we do not have a single word for a bread product made from wheat. We have many different words.

In other cultures of the world, they have just one word for bread products made from wheat.

Language is not only a way to communicate; it’s a way to think.

I. What do we mean by our word love? How we answer that will reveal what we think about when we talk about love.

Let me give you some situations:

In every game in the tennis match, his opponent could not get beyond “love.”

Someone says, “I just love strawberries, but they give me a rash.”

A young man takes a young woman out to a restaurant that’s a little too expensive for him. Then they go walking on a warm summer night by the lake. They sit looking at the moonlight on the water, and he says to her, “I love you.” What does he mean?

A husband and his wife were in a hotel room “making love.”

“Give my love to your father when you see him.”

One thing about Beatrice, she really loves her children.

God so loved the world that He gave His only Son.

From all of those, how would you determine what we mean by love?

Are these examples helpful or confusing?

II.  The Greeks had at least four words that helped them to think about love more precisely.

They spoke about human love with a different word.

They had a word for the love of a parent for a child (storge).

They also had a word for the love of friends (phileo). That would be nice to have in English. At least as a man, it’s hard to say to another man, “I really love you,” but “I like you” doesn’t do it.

There was another word for erotic love (eros).

The New Testament uses a special word that refers to God’s love for us (agape).

This word was seldom found in literature outside the Bible.  It is used only four times in classical Greek literature. Outside the Bible it is a weak, anemic word like our expression, “good will.”

In the New Testament, agape is the major word that the biblical writers use for God’s love for us and our love for others. The writers seemed to have chosen that word and filled it full of new meaning to talk about God’s love for us and the kind of love we’re to have for each other.