Surprised by the Appearance of Love

Have you ever found yourself trying to avoid certain people, keeping them at arm's length?

It's interesting that these two words often appear side by side. It's possible to be patient with someone without being kind. I might put up with you by staying away from you, avoid you in the hallway, avoid a conflict. But Paul doesn't stop with exercising patience. He has the audacity to tell us that true love demonstrates kindness, and that requires contact. How are you doing when it comes to demonstrating patience? Are your relationships marked by patience, or are you more prone to the opposite? How about kindness?

Do you keep people at arm's length, or do you draw near so that you can show true biblical kindness? Today on Wisdom for the Heart, Stephen Davey continues through his series entitled, True Love. It comes from 1 Corinthians 13 and Stephen's exploring what true biblical love looks like. In today's lesson, we're going to look at two ways that God describes love. Love is patient and love is kind.

Could you use help with either of those today? Stay with us. What if someone was following us around, taking pictures of us throughout the day? What if we were surprised by snapshots that were delivered to us in the mail that had been taken throughout the day? Are our facial expressions close up? Are the captions of our words underneath, are our actions all of it recorded in living color?

Undeniable, irrefutable proof. That was me. I was doing that.

I was saying that. How much of it would bring us embarrassment at the end of the day? How much of it would bring us joy? Would we be surprised by the snapshots of loving actions that those photographs would send us or would they be cataloged images of selfish words and self-centered living? It's as if the Apostle Paul has been roaming through our neighborhood with a divine camera. He's been cataloging, in fact, for some time what love looks like and he has delivered to us copies of the pictures. They are undeniable proofs of love in action. Let's look at a couple of snapshots in 1 Corinthians 13. This will be undeniable evidence of what true love looks like in action.

Look at verse 4. Love is patient. Love is kind. These are the first of 15 verbs. These are two positive statements followed up with eight negative statements.

We'll reserve comment on these eight negative statements for our next session. The first two descriptions are nothing less than two surprising snapshots of love. Surprising in that they reveal love in places where you would not expect to see them. If you wanted to see love, you would not look where Paul is looking. We can translate these first two positive verbs this way.

You might write in the margin of your Bible just so you capture the sense of an action verb. Love exercises patience. And love demonstrates kindness.

First, love exercises patience. This verb from macro means long suffering. In fact, it might be translated that way in some of your translations.

The word macro is used in our own English language as a prefix for something that's large or broad as opposed to micro, which is used for something small like a microchip. Thumeo, the other half of that word, refers to passion. It's used of something literally bursting into flames. In our modern world, we would call this long fused love. Macro thumeo literally could be defined as taking a long time to burst into flames. Long fused patience. This is agape. And by the way, this word chosen by the Spirit of God to describe agape has nothing to do with patience with things. This word is always used in reference to patience with people. I mean, it's one thing to exercise patience over that broken down lawn mower, right?

If you do exercise it. Or that computer that crashes, or that photocopier that keeps on jamming, or that vending machine. You put your 75 cents in there, and the candy bar slides all the way to the edge, but then it doesn't fall. And you push on the machine, and you hit the glass, and you kick it, and you threaten it, and all sorts of things.

It just won't fall. Well, this has to do with exercising patience like that with people. And don't we push and hit and kick and threaten? People that are evidently difficult is what Paul has in mind.

Otherwise, you wouldn't need to exercise long fused patience. These are people you'd like to shake, or push, or threaten. And at that moment, in the middle of a push, a divine snapshot is taken. Look at the photograph. You're in the middle of that scene.

What do the pictures reveal? Our church is blessed with so many teachers. I know there are many here tonight. It is a particular honor to teach teachers. But you know what it's like to exercise patience with that class, don't you?

Maybe you'll understand or identify with this incident submitted by John Bukema from Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. An elementary teacher was helping one of her kindergarten students get his cowboy boots on before leaving for home. He'd asked her for help, and she could see why. Even with her pulling and pushing, the boots just didn't want to fit on all the way.

They seemed too small. But she persisted. And by the time she got the second boot on, she'd worked up a sweat. And she almost cried when the little boy said to her, these are the wrong feet. You know how boots can sometimes be hard to tell.

She looked closely, and sure enough, they were. She tugged and pulled and finally got the boots off. And she managed to keep her cool as together they worked to get the boots back on the right feet. Finally, just as she was finished, he said, you know, these aren't my boots.

She bit her tongue rather than scream. Once again, she struggled to help him pull the ill-fitting boots off his little feet. No sooner had they gotten the boots off, he said, see, they're my brother's boots, but my mom said I could wear them. She didn't know if she'd laugh or cry, but she mustered up what patience she had to wrestle the boots back on his feet one more time, and finally she finished. Helping him into his coat, she asked, now where are your mittens?

And he said, I stuffed them in the toes of my boots. The story says in two years she'll be eligible for parole. I don't blame her. Better have a little agape for scenes like that. It's interesting to me that the first snapshot of love, whether you and I think we've got it or not, he goes right for the soft spot, doesn't he?

Boy, he touches the nerve immediately. As we're going to talk about and describe love, let me tell you that love is long fused. This is love acting toward unloving acts. I found it interesting that the Pharisees in the days of Paul held to the theory of recompense or compensation. That is, you return to others what they deliver to you. That's why Jesus Christ's teaching was so radical. It was no longer an eye for an eye and tooth for tooth, which was in fact the basis for justice and remuneration.

Now it is self defacing, self defrauding, self emptying love toward another. How unlike the world who lives by the motto, don't get mad, get even. Do unto others before they do unto you.

That's the law of the jungle. Jesus Christ said, here's a new motto, endure suffering without retaliation. Paul writes to the Romans, do not repay evil with evil, Romans 12, 17. Chrysostom, the church leader said that this word for patience describes a man who has been wronged, who has the power to avenge himself and who will not do it. Paul writes to the Thessalonians using the same word for patience. He says, we urge you brethren, admonish the unruly, encourage the faint hearted, that is those prone to worry and discouragement, help the weak, that is a reference to the morally unstable who seem to constantly need encouragement to do the right thing. The kind of people need to say finally, just leave me alone, just go do what you know to do. And Paul then closes though by adding after that description, be patient with them all.

Same word here. Belong fused with them. See anybody can love the lovable, right? Anybody can exercise patience with the considerate. Anybody can put up with the neat, the orderly, the strong, the refined, the polite. This is not the patience of agape. This is not the snapshot of love.

Anybody can do that. This photograph of this kind of agape catches us when we exercise patience with those who can't seem to get their boots on. They need help and a lot of it. Why go through the sweat of it all?

Why bother? Because the physician has attributed to his patient inerrant worth and value. Therefore, he has chosen to serve him even though the outlook is bleak and this person can take nothing from him but his time and his energy. Listen, this is the agape of God. Even though we were sinners, Christ died for us. Romans 5.8. This is true, genuine, God-like, Christ imitating, sacrificial, surprising love that is patient toward the irritable, the unexpressive, the disappointing, the unlovely. This is the surprising snapshot of agape.

Have you been caught? Have I been caught in a photograph with this kind of love lately? Love expresses patience.

Let's move on. Agape does not stop with being patient with the unloving. Paul writes further that this love is also kind. Being kind is the counterpart of being patient. In other words, while patience will put up with anything from anybody, kindness will give away anything to another. It's possible, think about it, it's possible to be patient without being kind, isn't it?

It's interesting that these two words often appear side by side. It's possible to be patient with someone without being kind. I might put up with you by staying away from you, right?

Avoid you in the hallway. Avoid a conflict. But Paul doesn't stop with exercising patience. He has the audacity to tell us that true love demonstrates kindness, and that requires contact. This is Jesus Christ telling his disciples to love their enemies. He doesn't simply tell them to feel kindly about them. He says literally, be kind to them.

He is the model we follow, for agape is truly the expression of the attributes and character of God. This is the kindness of God that leads us to what? Repentance. Same word, kindness. We're to demonstrate to others what God leads us toward. Peter writes, we have tasted the kindness of the Lord, 1 Peter 2, 2, and 3.

Same word. We're being called to demonstrate the kindness toward the world that God demonstrated toward us. You remember Paul's injunction to feed your enemy when he's hungry, and if he's thirsty, give him water to drink, and in so doing, you're going to heap coals of fire upon his head and you say, yeah, I like that part, coals of fire.

I can do that. That's a love for me. Paul is describing a deed from his culture that we could easily misunderstand. Nobody in Paul's day had matches in the pantry. If you didn't keep your fire going, those coals went cold, you were desperate. It didn't matter if you were away on a trip or you'd gotten ill and doubled over in pain for several days, you were unable to tend the fire and the coals turned to dust.

The only thing you could do is go to a neighbor. You'd take along that basin, you'd balance on your head. I've seen them do it in third world countries, balancing supplies on crude basins. Now you'd go to your neighbor and you'd have your basin and you'd ask for some coals. Now if your neighbor gave you, oh, let's just say a handful of them, that could be a problem because if you lived at some distance by the time you got home, those coals would be cold. But if he was kind to you, he would heap coals of fire upon your head.

He would load your basin down so that by the time you got home you had hot coals whereby you could immediately cook and eat or be warm. This is nothing for a friend to do to a friend, right? Or maybe even to do to a stranger, but an enemy. This is one of the kinds of photographs that continue to surprise the world. World Magazine, which I subscribe to, carried in their spring edition 2006 an article written by an atheist. He was, he was actually disturbed by his atheist friends because they never, they never did anything good for anybody. He didn't quite connect the dots. He was, he had watched the Salvation Army and other faith based ministries respond with all the hundreds and hundreds of churches to Hurricane Katrina. And he lamented in a newspaper column, let me read it for you and I quote, notable by their absence were teams helping who'd come from rationalist societies, free thinkers clubs and atheist associations, the sort of people who scoff at religion's intellectual absurdity. He said it was the Christian who was the most likely to take the risk and make the sacrifices involved in helping others. Isn't that interesting that he noticed? He went on to say that that other things like drug addiction and AIDS offends Christians, but they are the ones willing to change the fetid bandages and clean them up, bathe them.

Now listen to his conclusion. The only possible conclusion I can draw is that Christians have moral imperatives that make them morally superior to atheists like me. And so it should be. It goes all the way back to the early church in the second century. In fact, the pagans were so startled by the kindness of the believer for those they didn't even know that according to Tertullian, they were nicknamed by the changing of one Greek letter from Christiani, which meant follower of Christ to Christiani made up of kindness. Can you imagine the church of the 21st century earning the nickname made up of kindness? Well let's practice tonight, even in the way you leave the parking lot, okay?

Put a gap aid to work. Would we surprise anybody by our kindness? There are two demands that these verbs, difficult demands that they make, these verbs of love. First, they demand that we develop this kind of love through a relationship with the Holy Spirit. I mentioned earlier these are the fruits of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness. Yours might say long-suffering goodness. Same words.

There they are side by side again. Don't just take it from people. Give back to people. These are the results of surrender to the Spirit of God. So, you don't say I'm going to drum it up. Okay, I'm going to leave here and I'm going to be kind. You know, your kids saying, leave me alone, I'm trying to be patient, you know. No, you pursue the Spirit of God and these things seep into our character. Neither patience nor kindness can be developed apart from the Spirit. Secondly, neither patience nor kindness can be demonstrated apart from suffering. These two action verbs invite difficulty. Patience demands what?

Irritating people to be exercised. So, you ask God for more patience, He sends you somebody really irritating. He answers your prayer.

This word relates to being long-fused as it relates to people. Oh, Stephen, you want to be patient? Here you go. Exhibit A.

And there's the picture. He may send you suffering which allows you to act in kindness because kindness demands unloving conditions to be practiced. Patience demands irritating people to be exercised. Kindness demands unloving conditions to be practiced. You don't practice these in private. You got to go public with these and not just any kind of public. Linsky, a Greek scholar, wrote, these two actions are not revealed in surroundings of friendship and affection where each individual embraces and kisses the other.

These are actions in a bad and self-centered world. Maybe that's why these photographs are so rare, so hard to find. In 1975, a child by the name of Raymond Dunn was born in New York State. The Associated Press reported that at his birth, a skull fracture and oxygen deprivation caused severe retardation. As Raymond grew, the family discovered further impairments. His twisted body suffered up to 20 seizures per day. He was found to be blind, mute, and virtually immobile. He had severe allergies that limited him to only one food found after numerous attempts to find something he could easily digest. It was a meat-based formula by Gerber Foods. But in 1985, Gerber stopped making the formula that Raymond thrived on. Carol Dunn, his mother, scoured the countryside, purchased case after case of it, accumulating all she could. But by 1990, her supply was running out. In desperation, she appealed to Gerber for help.

Would they help her and her son? The employees of the company were given the news. This article read, they not only listened, but they responded. In an unprecedented action, volunteers donated hundreds of hours to bring out old equipment, set up a production line, obtained special approval from the USDA, and produced the formula all for one boy.

In January of 1995, Raymond Dunn Jr., known as the Gerber Boy, passed away. This article ended by saying that during his brief lifetime, he had called forth a surprising thing called kindness. What a rare photograph. Can we as people of God be any less than this? Would the world be surprised by the appearances of love in our lives? Paul says, let me show you a more excellent way to live. Let me show you a way to live by agape, okay?

Let's hear it. Be patient with the irritating. Be kind to the unloving. Paul, can you give me anything different than that? No, you know what he's giving?

He isn't giving the Corinthians or the North Carolinians a different way to feel. He's giving us a different way to live, and it is radically different. So, with the outset of these first two verbs, surrender to the Spirit and invite suffering so that we can demonstrate to our watching world who, by the way, has their cameras ready.

Oh, that they may take pictures of the patience of agape and the kindness of agape which become amazing, irrefutable, undeniable evidences of this God-like, Christ-honoring, genuine love. I hope this time in God's Word has helped you today. You've tuned in to Wisdom for the Heart with Stephen Davey. If you joined us late and want to go back and hear what you missed, we've posted this lesson to our website. You'll find us online at wisdomonline.org.

In fact, that's something you can do anytime you miss our daily broadcast. We post each day's lesson to that website so you can go back and get caught up. Stephen's currently working his way through a series entitled, True Love.

It comes from 1 Corinthians 13, where God describes what real, biblical love looks like. You can go back and hear the previous lessons in the series, and I hope you'll join us in the days ahead as we continue working through it. We have a monthly magazine that we send as a gift to our Wisdom partners. We call it Heart to Heart magazine. Each issue features articles from Stephen on a relevant topic. There's also a daily devotional that takes you deep into God's Word on a daily basis. As I said, it's a gift that we send to all of our Wisdom partners, but if you don't receive it, we'd be delighted to send you the next three issues. You can sign up online, or you can call us today at 866-48-BIBLE. That's 866-482-4253. Thanks for listening, and join us next time for more wisdom for the hearts. God bless!