|
"WHEN GOD SAYS, I LOVE YOU...'"
Sunday, February 21, 2010
|
|
Hosea 2:14-20, 11:1-4, 8a John 21:15-19
"'Israel, I will make you my wife; I will be true and faithful; I will show you constant love and mercy and make you mine forever. I will keep my promise and make you mine, and you will acknowledge me as LORD.'" (Good News)
I. "I LOVE YOU" IS NOT SOMETHING YOU SAY TO VERY MANY PEOPLE. A. Other than at weddings, it is not a phrase heard in public. 1. Some of us need only one hand to count up the people to whom we have said this. 2. In the first church I served as an interim, one day our church secretary who was a popular member of our church embraced the people in the office, and she said, “I love you,” to each one of them. She then looked at me and said very honestly, “I don’t love you yet, I haven’t known you that long.”
B. The Bible speaks often about love: 1. about THE LOVE OF GOD, 2. about how we should LOVE GOD, 3. about how we should LOVE ONE ANOTHER. 4. Only in a very few passages do we find God saying, "'I LOVE YOU.'" a. I wonder if we may count these passages on one hand. 5. If you recall the series of sermons I preached last year from the First Letter of John, the first one was, “Where Love Starts.” A few of you told me later the sermon really spoke to you.
C.
Hosea is
a book where you will find such romantic language, where God
1. This is one of the most affectionate books in the entire Bible; it describes a love affair between God and his people. 2. Here God is portrayed by Hosea as a LOVER, as a bachelor who comes courting Israel to be his bride, and also as a grieving mother calling to her children, a. both of them with tender, emotionally-charged words. b. Who says God never shows his feelings!
3. Hosea was a prophet living in Northern Israel in the 8th century B.C. He falls madly in love with Gomer, a woman who has been branded as a filthy prostitute. At one point she is stripped naked and condemned to live on the street. But Hosea loves her and to the shock of everyone he marries her! a. After their second child is born–a baby girl–Hosea realizes Gomer has been unfaithful to him. He continues to love and cherish her deeply. b. Following the birth of a third child, Gomer leaves Hosea and returns to her former occupation. She is caught and offered for sale, and Hosea buys her back. 4. He is a passionate man. His love for Gomer is shown in his deep love for his children, and even his special feeling for animals. a. Still, it becomes tragically apparent that Gomer has stopped loving Hosea, which breaks his heart! 5. Hosea sees a parallel between his own marriage and that of God with Israel. He arrives at the startling conclusion that there is in God's heart a love as intense as his own. a. Like this Old Testament prophet, God's heart is broken, b. God's redemptive love yearns to bring his people back once more, c.a second time...to start over again by saying, "I love you." [Pause] 6. Later in his book, Hosea re-names each one of his children as an expression of God’s faithful, unyielding love for his people Israel. 7. A Robert Ludlum mystery novel features a character who wakes up after being injured and shipwrecked and discovers he is called “Jason Bourne.” He has lost his tragic past, which he learns includes his wife and child who were killed. Jason is a fugitive; he is a wanted killer. He runs into a woman named Marie, who helps him recover his identity. In the process the two fall in love. You might say that his discovery of his true name David Webb is a byproduct of the love he now shares with Marie. a. Hosea and Gomer’s third child, their second son, was first named “Not My People,” or “You Are Not Mine.” b. This child is now re-named “My people,” or “You Are Mine,” c. and so he receives a new identity, a new purpose in life. d. How you would feel if you were named, “You Are Not Mine”?!
II. WHAT DO YOU SAY WHEN A VERY SPECIAL PERSON TELLS YOU, "I LOVE YOU,” LIKE PEGGY SAYS TO ME EVERY DAY? A. Are you able to go back to a very special, once-in-a-lifetime moment when that cherished person in your life--your husband, your wife, your precious little child, your mother or father--said, "I love you"? 1. To travel back through the years to courtship, when he/she said, "I love you" for the first time? a. I will never forget what I was doing the first time Peggy said this to me. We were watching a rented video in the house where I was staying in Corsicana, Texas, in August of 2000. We were eating Blue Bell Ice Cream, Moolenium Madness. I asked her what she was thinking about. “I’m just thinking how much I love you.’” 2. Our human response is so similar to our response to God...
B. The way you or I respond to a statement of love in courtship and marriage may be compared directly to the way we react when God says to each of us, "I love you." 1. I believe there are three basic responses we may make: a. "So what?" b. "Yes, I know." c. "I love you, also."
C. First, "So what?" 1. Very cruel, vicious, it kills something within you. The ending is often tragic. a. Bela Bartok was a Hungarian composer who lived in the first half of the 20th century. His love was rejected by a certain young lady, and it gave occasion for the composition of his only symphony, for which Bartok was acclaimed as a creative genius! b. In the final movement of the composition the rejected hero kills his his intended lover, is taken to the gallows to be hanged. After his death, he sees the one he loved join a coven of witches! 2. Too many of us have experienced this "So what" reaction in a personal love relationship. a. In personal, intimate relationships shared one on one, when he or she finally turns to you and says, “I can never love you,” or even worse, “I don’t love you any more.” b. I have seen members to whom I have given my time, my help, and my caring support, walk away one day from this church I love with a "So what" attitude. Each time it hurts deeply. (page 2) c. Think about all the broken homes and marriages--lives which are destroyed inch by inch, day by day! 3. Try to visualize Hosea's love for Gomer and how she deserted him and dragged his love through the streets of the market place. a. What can be more painful than a marriage or family where love still burns but all hope has died! b. There is a poignant line in a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta, “HMS Pinafore,” where the singer Josephine contemplates such a life:
Sorry her lot who loves too well, Heavy the heart that hopes but vainly, Heavy the sorrow that bows the head When love is alive and hope is dead! When love is alive and hope is dead! Sad is the hour when sets the sun — Dark is the night to earth's poor daughters…”
4. Visualize God's passionate love for you and me, and how we become very much like a faithless lover.
a. I said one night, “God, do you love me?” “Yes, my child, I love you very much.” “How much do you love me?” I asked God. “Very much,” God replied, “more than you will ever know.” “Well, show me how much.” And God stretched out his arms until I saw the nail holes from the Cross, and he said, “This much, my child.” 5. How does God feel, do you think, when God tells us every day of our lives in so many special ways, "I love you.” And so many of us, by the way we live are in effect saying right back to God: "So what? Who cares?!" a. God is the rejected female lover or mother, the father and husband--we have wounded our heavenly parent so grievously! b. Any Christian who practices their faith in all seriousness, in the words of Henri Nouwen, is truly "The Wounded Healer." 6. How many times do you go back, find the courage to forgive and to say once more, “I love you," after such a vicious treatment? once? twice? i. God, like Hosea, keeps coming back--the true measure of self-giving love: a. "'How can I give you up, Israel?... My heart will not let me do it! My love for you is too strong.'"
C. The second response we might make is, "YES, I KNOW." 1. Very often, even before you tell your sweetheart that you love her, she already knows it. 2. So often everyone around you knows it also, to your surprise. 3. Her response to you, her confession is a quiet, simple, "Yes, I know." 4. It is God who says it first. We are taught by God how to say, “I love you.” 5. It may surprise you, I had to learn how to say it to my parents. My sister and I did not hear my mother and dad say it to one another as we were growing up in Tabriz, Iran. We seldom saw our parents kiss each other. So I had to learn how to say it to them when I became an adult. I had to teach myself to say it. It did not come easy. 6. In both the Gospel and the First Letter of John, we are told that “we love because He first loved us.” (page 3) a. Therefore, worship must always begins with a pronouncement of God’s love for us. Only then do you and I respond in worship. b. So, then, says 1 John 3:11, “this is the message which you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another...” c. For whoever loves or says, “Yes, I know God loves me,” in that person God’s own love is perfected for others! (i) But how do you teach a child of God to say this who has only seen a distorted love in his/her family? 7. Surely, Gomer knew Hosea loved her.How then could she have acted the way she did? How could Hosea have continued to love her and let her choose the life she did? a. How are you able to allow your children to do the same? b. It is called “tough love.” It takes courage and risk. c. The only true freedom we have in God or Christ is to accept or reject his love, the freedom to say “Yes” or “No.” d. That is God’s tough love–on the Cross.
D. The third response must follow the second response: “I love you also.” 1. Saying, “I love you,” and also saying, “I forgive you,” may never be taken for granted. These words must be said again and again. a. That infamous line from “Love Story,” is absolutely false. “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” Just the opposite! b. Hosea lived out that forgiving, sacrificial love of God with Gomer. 2 How often did Gomer hear Hosea say these endearing words to her? Even better, if Hosea had told her how much God loved her, just as God loved their 3 children... if she could really believe that! But she did not. 3. One Sunday morning in the First Presbyterian Church in Alamogordo, New Mexico, after I had been there 6 or 7 years, our lay leader surprised me by asking me to come and stand beside him in the pulpit. He told me, “We have something to say to you.” At his signal, everyone in the congregation said, “Dave, we love you.” That blew me away! 4. We are taught in interim pastor school not to get close to church people, not to begin to love them. Folks, I cannot do that; I am just not made that way. You have truly been my church family. I will leave here loving you. a. In the past couple of weeks, realizing that you were about to call a new pastor, many of you have told me of the place you have for me in your hearts, some of you have left a touching note. You have said how glad you are Peggy is coming here to visit at last. 5. You will need to say to your new pastor, and say it often, “Brian, Maggie, we love you.” It will make a world of difference in their ministry here. They will need to hear these words spoken to them often. a. But first you will need some time to learn to love one another, to discover the love your God has for you both. 6. So when you respond to God’s protestation of love with, “Yes, Lord, I love you also,” how do you imagine God responds or feels? a. Marriage counselors say couples need to feed their love by going on dates regularly and regularly renewing their love vows.
E. That is truly a wonderful story at the end of John’s Gospel, especially after Peter’s terrible denial at the trial when Jesus needed him most! 1. The Risen Jesus had unfinished business with Peter. (page 4) 2. Three times he asks his disciple. The third time Peter is really stressed. a. But those three questions erase Peter’s three denials, his denial that he did not know this man he really loved so intensely. b. “‘Yes, Lord, you know everything: you know that I love you.’” 4. Yes, Lord, I love you. “ I believe Jesus went back to Peter because he needed to hear those words. They both needed it, before Christ ascended to his Father in Heaven, just as you and I need to hear it still. (Amen!) (page 5)
|