The Power Of Love

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Welcome to the masculine journey today. It's kind of like go-go Power Rangers, right, Andy? I couldn't help but think of that as I was thinking about tonight's topic.

We're Power Rangers, aren't we? And so unfortunately, Sam's a little under the weather, but we're glad to have you there. Sam, you with us? I am. Thank you. I'm hoping that everything's going to be okay over the next few days, but I'm well enough to join you tonight. So I know that you're missing me in person, David. You can make whatever comments you want because I can't say anything.

I mean, why do you got to bring it up? I wasn't even going to say anything. Did you think he sounded a bit like a Power Ranger, the way that that's coming in on the...

It did. It was a little like robotic sound. Yeah, I thought so too. I thought so too. So Andy has the honor of the topic tonight. And so Andy set it up for us, the Power Rangers.

Yep. So my word of the year has been charity. And we talked about the word of the year recently, and it's been on my heart to kind of dig into it. It was kind of a reminder that I needed to dig into my word of the year a little bit more.

I mentioned I went on a vacation with a family to Europe, to England. And in doing so, I just really wanted to prepare my heart to just walk in the love of God wherever I was at and whatever I was doing. And while I was there, I heard a song.

I hadn't heard it in a long time. Had to go to the UK to hear it, but the power of love, I was going to hold that back until we talked about it later. But anyway, just the power of love. Love is truly the most powerful force in the universe. And I had been thinking on 1 Corinthians 13, the love chapter. It was like God was like, there's no other word in the Bible that has a full chapter dedicated to that. I think it's significant. It's an important thing. I mean, the two greatest commandments, to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself.

So it was just something I hadn't really focused on, and I just wanted to be more intentional. And then I got this scripture recently that just came across like a devotion, a daily scripture, that was in the message translation. And I read Philippians 1 before, but this is, it's Philippians 1, 9 to 11. It says, so this is my prayer, that your love will flourish and that you will not only love much, but well, learn to love appropriately.

You need to use your head and test your feelings so that your love is sincere and intelligent, not sentimental gush. Live a lover's life, circumspect, exemplary, a life Jesus will be proud of, bountiful and fruits from the soul, making Jesus Christ attractive to all, getting everyone involved in the glory and praise of God. I thought that was just really powerful. You know, a lot of it talks about loving with the mind and we think, oh, you got to love with your heart. But again, it says love God with all your mind, heart, soul and mind. And so my thought was, this is, God's speaking to me here to be more intentional in walking in love. Now I've done my version of walking in love before, and it was through Andy's love and messed up way of trying to get what Andy wants. But I just think that we really can really press into God and funnel his love to humanity and receive his love.

Obviously, we can't do that unless we've really received his love. Darrell Bock So and I think, personally, the poster child of somebody who doesn't gush, right, I think of Rodney. You got this love thing down, Rodney? Rodney There's no gushing over here. Darrell Bock And so, you know, Rodney, you have a clip that's certainly not gushing? Rodney This is a masculine journey treasure that we bring out all the time.

So it probably for most, it doesn't really even need a setup, but the clip is called It's Not About the Nail. And if you've not listened to us and gone out and actually watched the clip, you need to. It is a very powerful visual clip that basically you have a guy and a woman sitting there talking about things. And she's talking about how she's got troubles.

And you'll hear about that in the clip. And it helps to have the visual, but she's got a nail stuck in her head. And he's wanting to fix it. And she's wanting to talk about her feelings and emotions.

They're on completely different planes and different levels. And that's where I've always felt that I am at is I'm in one place and whoever the other person is I'm talking with, whether it was my spouse or something like this situation is or my kids or friends, it I always feel like I'm in some other dimension trying to figure out what's going on. And I'm not getting it right like this guy.

Go ahead. It's just, there's all this pressure, you know? And sometimes it feels like it's right up on me. And I can just feel it, like literally feel it in my head. And it's relentless. And I don't know if it's going to stop.

I mean, that's the thing that scares me the most is that I don't know if it's ever going to stop. Yeah. Well, you do have a nail in your head. It is not about the nail.

Are you sure? Because I mean, I'll bet if we got that out of there, stop trying to fix it. No, I'm not trying to fix it. I'm just pointing out that maybe the nail is causing you always do this. You always try to fix things when what I really need is for you to just listen. See, I don't think that is what you need. I think what you need is to get the nail. Okay, fine. I will listen fine. It's just sometimes it's like, there's this achy. I don't know what it is. And I'm not sleeping very well at all.

And all my sweaters are snagged. I mean, all of them. That sounds really hard. It is. Thank you. Oh, come on.

If you would just don't. Yeah. As soon as they start to get a little sentimental there and, oh, thank you for caring about me. They go to kiss and then she, of course, the nail hits the other guy on the head and that's just it all off again, right? And that's what happens is we go and we try to be intentional in love and then what happens? Satan or you're just your fleshly nature gets in the way again and you're right back in that same place. How many times have we talked about where we've tried to enter into a situation where we think, oh, I'm doing the right thing and we find ourselves back to where it's like, oh, am I loving in this situation again? Do I really care more about my loved one, the person across me, my neighbor, whatever you want to call somebody else and are you really putting them ahead of yourself like Jesus would have done and being sacrificial with your love?

I know that for me, I live most of my life not being sacrificial. It was more, and we said earlier tonight about sometimes just, well, what am I getting out of it? Yeah, I'm doing something for somebody, but yet there's still this little hint of, yeah, but what am I getting? And it's just, as you're going through that, it's just so easy.

I love what you said when we were in the pre-show or whatever. You had said, and I do this myself, like, can we just fix this so I don't have to go through all this, right? That, you know, can we just get down and get on the other side of this problem? And when you think about Jesus, right, he asked the guy, he was paralytic as he could be, he's trying to crawl into the water, like, do you want to be well? In other words, he's inviting the conversation, not just the fix, right? And, you know, we can all kind of find ourselves there as what, when I thought about what you were explaining, is that the power of his love transformed yours. Yeah, so if you're going to actually, like today, I am much easier to actually want to listen, not just because I'm supposed to, but actually listen from the beginning and want to know what somebody's story is, you know, somebody you work with, and just, it's different on this side of Christ when you actually talk to people and— Yeah, I care about what the—it's a beautiful thing.

So, Sam, you've got a clip from us for, if you wouldn't mind setting that up. Yeah, it's from a movie called Love Actually. It's a Christmas movie from England, but this was at the very beginning, and the whole movie is about love and how the world really revolves around love.

And so, I'm going to go ahead and play the clip, and what you hear at the intro is Hugh Grant talking about his observations on love, and then when we come back, I'll kind of share why that means something to me. Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow airport. General opinions starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don't see that. Seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it's not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it's always there. Fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends.

When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know, none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge. They were all messages of love. If you look for it, I've got a sneaky feeling you'll find that love actually is all around.

Sam? Yeah, for me, I tend to focus on the negative in my daily routine, you know, the person driving in front of me or attempting to drive in front of me, as I would describe it. It's just, I get very frustrated easily, and God has to remind me that really the focus is on love, and when you think about it, love is all around, but love drives what we do most times. Love dictates how we treat one another. Jesus, when he left us for the time being, from his physical presence walking on the earth, he's always with us, but he gave us a command to love one another, and so I try to really implement that in my life.

I started that several years ago. An example would be, you know, my kids making decisions that I necessarily wouldn't agree with, instead of chastising them, loving them through those choices, loving them through the situation. If they need advice, I'll give them advice, but it's more about loving them. Another example would be, you know, I'm doing some training with a person right now who is about my age, and so his parents and his in-laws, you know, are getting up there, and they're dealing with a health issue in their family that's really got the family divided, and before we ever step into any type of training, I tend to ask him, what's going on with that situation, and how can we pray, and how can we talk about it some more, and focus it on the love aspect instead of the agenda.

Yeah, that's so cool. In the 119th Psalm, it says the whole earth is full of thy chesed, which, you know, Jim knows is love, right? And my life word. And one of those ways that we can love on you, we would love to, is for you to come to the boot camp coming up the weekend before Thanksgiving and the entrenchment. One of my favorite things about boot camp, well, the favorite thing about boot camp is every time I go, I encounter God, and as anyone that has encountered God knows, generally speaking, it's nothing we expect. Real encounter with God out of the blue. He knew what I needed.

I knew what I wanted, and those two were rarely the same thing. Register today at masculinejourney.org. One of the things that's been a true joy to me is having my sons go with me to boot camps and watching them get an understanding that I wished I would have had at their age. It took me several years, and I'm still probably learning it a little bit as we go, but watching them get a good foothold into manhood and understanding what's important, what their role is, and how to stay away from the enemy, to receive healing and restoration in the way that you love on others.

Register today at masculinejourney.org. Got to say it, a power of love. Power ranger.

Listen, that's the wrong stage of life for most of us. But Andy, that really spoke to you while you were in Scotland. I was in a TK Maxx. Anybody know what that is?

That's what they had to rename them in the UK, was TK Maxx because they had a TJ Hughes, and they didn't want it confused. So I think that's where I was at if I remember right. But it really did. It spoke to me. I'm like, because that song was very popular in my day or growing up.

And it's back to the future, man. You can help but think it. And really there is power in love. I mean, I don't know how scripturally accurate some of the lyrics are in that, but there is power in love. And it's power that will actually change things.

If you have somebody who doesn't know God and you express love to that person, they get a glimpse of God. And that is powerful. And that's the way it's intended to be. That's the way it was set up.

We're supposed to love our brother and sister in Christ, but also the loss of the world. And there is power in that. So that's all I got.

No, it's not. So you were in an interesting situation, right? Because you're there with your estranged wife and you're trying to... Well, I mean, yeah, we were there.

We were there both wanting to support our daughter who had to go over to England too. Right. But I mean, you're trying to love her well through it. Absolutely.

Yeah, both of them. And there was a lot of stuff going on or a lot of stuff that you had an opportunity, but it was also very stressful. And I feel like I didn't always love well through that week, but I did the majority of the time. And I had such an attitude. My heart was whole in trying to love.

And I think it's Danny's phrase, the halt kind of gets in the way, the hungry, angry, lonely, tired. I went back to that many times because a lot of times you fall back into bad habits that aren't necessarily loving. But all in all, it was really a great trip. And I had the opportunity to not only love them.

I mean, there was this fun and funny situation. We were in this town called Coventry and we were walking to the store and this lady had been over and she had dropped her cane and she was elderly and kind of needed some help. And I reached over and just picked that up.

It was just what was in my heart to do. And she said, thank you, love. And I walked over to my wife and my daughter and I'm like, she loves me.

Did you hear that? She loves me. But it was just like God was there. It was just a cool situation. So this example of Peter or Paul, excuse me. I was one of those that married. Don't bring up Mary. You've got a clip.

Yeah, I do. So, you know, I was trying to think whenever God had put this on my heart, I went through a lot of clips and this one just really spoke to me. First of all, 1 Corinthians 13 has been central to my heart during this whole time.

It really defines love. And who wrote 1 Corinthians 13? Of course, it's Paul. Paul's not in this clip. They're talking about Paul.

I think he's in jail. And they're just talking about what's going on in the early church whenever there was all this persecution. And it really just focuses. You'll hear it. You'll hear all these different sides. Luke is Jim Caviezel.

If you know his voice is speaking in here and he's crying, he's trying to encourage people to do what Paul would do and what Jesus would do. So. We must retaliate for this brutal act. Many of us have only a short time left in this city. We must hold strong now.

Hold strong? So we're like diseased dogs then. We do nothing to defend ourselves.

While we are chased from the city just to be hunted down and killed. Cassius, we understand your anger. Tachwin was like a son to us. You should never have let him go. Why do you blame yourselves and not the ones who have murdered him?

And who else have they taken from you? This woman has come to you covered in the blood of her child. And what would you do Cassius? Tell me.

What would you do? We do what they do to us. You murder them in the cover of darkness.

Set fire and burn them in their homes while they sleep. You speak as if your ears have never heard the words of Christ. You never walked with Christ. How can you say he would say these things in the face of such an evil like Nero? Quiet.

Be still. None of us here have walked with Christ. But Paul has followed him longer than us all. I have watched him be beaten. I have watched him be stoned and flocked.

And never once did he raise his finger against his oppressors. Let peace be with you for we live in the world but we do not wage war as the world does. Peace begins with you Cassius. Love is the only way. And love truly is the only way. I mean when you listen to that we have a quite easy life here. I mean to Sam's point I run into it all the time.

Somebody who really offends me I'm ready to do all those bad things like draw blood when somebody cuts me off in traffic you know. That's the rough life that we live in. Just kidding but really just the fact that love does cause us not to do the things that we want to do by default in our flesh and respond in anger even though it makes every bit of sense to do it. So you know just looking at 1 Corinthians 13 there's a lot of stuff that it says to be you know kind and patient to not be boastful to love righteousness. You know it says love rejoices in truth. But it says love at all times except when somebody zipper merges. But I just wanted to go to Harold because you know when I think of the power of love you know I've known Harold for a number of years anyway and I've watched.

Right? You don't have the power of love. Your bride has been on you. About this whole situation. You want to speak to that?

Yeah I'm different. She has encouraged me greatly to get rid of the anger that I used to carry around with me all the time. I'm no longer that angry man that you know I'm not that angry.

I'm not that angry. I'm not that I'm I'm no longer that angry man that that used to scream and yell and bitch a fit about inconsequential things. And I can thank my sweetheart and the Holy Spirit for that change. Yeah can you take us actually into that a bit Harold because I have seen the change. I mean not just in the way you drive but actually in your hold to me.

I don't mean that you were you know anything before that was but I'm just saying there is a change there and and what do you think you know it was that brought it about? I mean I know the Holy Spirit in your wife but can you give us more specific like. Well partially it's my love for her because the way I was acting was hurting her and I didn't want to hurt her. I would lay down on the floor and die for her and she knows it and so. So when that guy cuts you off you do kind of got to lay down on the floor and die don't you? I think I think they may be stupid for doing it because they're risking both of us to have an accident but I no longer scream or yell or call them an idiot. I just recognize it and go on. And we're all idiots from time to time. Oh I get it I get it but I just think it's neat and it's and it's and it's you know going on in everybody's life. I know if you're listening right now you've had some experience like I used to be this way but after Christ came in you know it it changed me. I know I used to be afraid of the dark. Many have heard that story. I used to be a lot of things right but over a period of time as we become more wholehearted and we we come after him that you know there's there's this phenomenal thing that you didn't think was possible that actually changed within you right Jim?

I would say that you have to want to change in order to change because I went for a long time making all kind of excuses that I was right and they were wrong and I was justified in my actions and truly I was not but until I really decided that I wanted to change I couldn't. Right right. Harold you're sort of illustrating a point I was thinking of earlier. So often we think of love as being an emotional thing and it can be very emotional but the most important part and you made it it's a decision you decided to love those drivers that were irritating you and I'd identify with that because I think the one place I'm still most likely to get a little irritated and less loving is driving but then I realize you know that and what and it is a decision you know where it used to take me off when somebody got in front of me. Can I say that on the radio? Too late. Now it's a okay you might have a reason to need to get there quicker than I do and there aren't too many that get there quicker than I do. Well the biggest thing is I no longer wish I could run them off the road and get away with it.

I just hope they get where they're going. So Jim go ahead and what you think set your clip up? Set your clip up?

What I think or set my clip up? Well when I was thinking about love and God has graced me with a bigger dose of being able to love I think than some people have and I thank him for that but it isn't mine and you know we're talking about love being power. Well the power comes from the only place that any power comes from and that's from God so this clip is Jesus loving on Nicodemus. I have come to do more than speak words Nicodemus. More miracles.

Yes but even more than that. Do you remember when the children of Israel complained against God and against Moses in the wilderness of Paran? Yes they wanted to return to Egypt and they cursed the manna that God sent them and then they were bitten by serpents and they were dying but but God made a way for them to be healed.

Moses lifted the bronze serpent in the desert and people only needed to look at it. This is Jesus loving on us and I think when he said that we will do greater things it's us sharing the love that he's given us. Right and you can come join us for that at the next boot camp coming up the week before Thanksgiving. The entrenchment's coming up the end of September through the first of October. We'll hope to see you there. Go to masculinejourney.org and register today. This is the Truth Network.