Speaker Identification

Speaker 1 - Worship Leader / Pastor Jonker
Speaker 2 - Congregation
Speaker 3 - Congregational Singing / Music

Speaker 3 - Congregational Singing / Music

[Opening music and congregational singing. The raw transcript contains extended repeated vocalizations and erroneous repeated phrases that are not recoverable as publishable lyrics.]

Speaker 1 - Worship Leader / Pastor Jonker

Our call to worship is from the beginning of Psalm 103.

Listen:

Praise the Lord, O my soul; all my inmost being, praise his holy name. Praise the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits - who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion, who satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagle's.

The Lord works righteousness and justice for the oppressed. He made known his ways to Moses, his deeds to the people of Israel. The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.

Thanks be to God.

Speaker 3 - Congregational Singing / Music

[Congregational singing.]

Speaker 1 - Worship Leader / Pastor Jonker

Congregation, our Lord is indeed compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. He greets us, saying: Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father, from Christ his Son, through the mighty and powerful work of his Holy Spirit.

Speaker 2 - Congregation

Amen.

Speaker 1 - Worship Leader / Pastor Jonker

Welcome, everyone, to our evening service tonight at LaGrave Avenue Christian Reformed Church. It is good to see so many of you here at the end of a warm day. Welcome, too, to those of you who are live-streaming. It will be good to spend time together meditating on God's Word, singing, and lifting our hearts before him in prayer.

Tonight's service, if you are a guest in our midst, is something we do once in a while. It is a series of meditations rather than one long sermon. The part of Scripture I am going to be meditating on today is 1 Corinthians 13.

Part of the inspiration for this is a book by Lewis Smedes called Love Within Limits. It came out a long time ago - I think in the early 1980s, or maybe even in the 1970s. What Smedes did in that book is he took every phrase from 1 Corinthians 13, every attribute Paul gives about love, and wrote a chapter on it.

Tonight we are going to do something similar, except we are not going to do all the attributes. We will consider four from this very familiar chapter about love.

Let's read it together.

Paul says:

I will show you the most excellent way, the best of all the Spirit's gifts.

If I speak in the tongues of men and angels but do not have love, I am a resounding gong and a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have faith that can move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give my body over to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It is not proud. It does not dishonor others. It is not self-seeking. It is not easily angered. It keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices in the truth. It always protects. It always trusts. It always hopes. It always perseveres.

Love never fails.

But where there are prophecies, they will cease. Where there are tongues, they will be stilled. Where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears.

When I was a child, I talked like a child. I thought like a child. I reasoned like a child. But when I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.

For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these is love.

Thanks be to God. The Word of the Lord.

I said your part for you. That was terrible of me.

Love is kind.

Such a modest, unassuming word: kindness. In the army of words that you can deploy to compliment another person, kind is a word of low rank. It is a foot soldier of a compliment. It is a small word that goes about its business without presumption. It is a word dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and work boots.

The Greek word used by Paul here for kind - love is kind - is chresteuomai. Interestingly enough, even though kindness appears in other places in the New Testament with another Greek word, this is the only place in the whole Bible where this particular word is used. But when you look it up and look at its nuances of meaning, it means roughly what we mean when we say kindness. It means pleasant, mild, friendly. Again, nothing too ambitious here. This is a word whose eyes are not raised too high.

And yet, when Paul describes what love is, when Paul is looking for a word to describe this most excellent and important of all the gifts, one of the first words he reaches for is this small, unassuming word.

Love is kind.

What does he mean by that? Love is friendly? Love is pleasant? Or worse, love is nice? What does it mean that love is kind? Is that something like West Michigan nice? I sure hope not.

This is different than West Michigan nice. West Michigan nice is a facade that we all sometimes put on to paper over tension. Kindness is more than that. Real kindness is ordinary, but it comes from the heart and reflects a deep, sacrificial intention.

If I had to define it, it would be something like this: real kindness is a positive disposition toward others expressed in small, repeated acts of sacrificial generosity. Real kindness is a genuine positive disposition toward others expressed in small, repeated acts of sacrificial generosity.

This definition reminds me of an analogy Fred Craddock, the great preacher, once used. He used it as an analogy for how the gifts of God's kingdom are dispersed, and it can also be an analogy for how kindness is used and given out in our world.

He said the way we live in this world and the way we build the kingdom is like God gives you ten million dollars. Every single one of us gets ten million dollars, and God gives it to you to distribute for good in this world.

Only there is a catch. You cannot spend it all at once. You cannot write one ten-million-dollar check to a charity, call up the local news, hold an enormous check, and have the newscast say, "Local pastor gives ten million dollars to charity." You would probably be nominated as man of the year.

That is not how it works. You get this ten million dollars, but you have to spend it one dollar at a time. One act of kindness at a time. One small work of sacrificial generosity at a time.

One lawn raked for a neighbor. One casserole cooked for a bereaved member. One half-hour phone call with a needy friend. One more Sunday teaching middle school church school, for which you will receive no thanks. One more game of Candy Land with your four-year-old granddaughter when you would much rather be reading your book. One more afternoon driving someone you know to another doctor's appointment.

The love of God is infinite, right? "I long to tell you," says Paul, "how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ." It is more than we can ask or imagine. There is more of it than we can possibly imagine, and we can give it out. But we cannot give it out all at once. We give it out spoon by spoon by spoon to the world's deep needs.

Does God practice kindness? Is God kind? Absolutely he is.

When it comes to God's kindness, there are great big acts of kindness that God does. Spectacular things. The creation of this world in love is a kind of kindness. Sending his Son to this world is a kind of kindness. Jesus dying on the cross is a spectacular act of kindness.

But so much of God's kindness is just like our kindness: small and every day. Mercies that are new every morning. The kindness of friendship. The kindness of laughing with friends. The kindness of a warm bed, a good meal, a roof over our head, a good cup of coffee in the morning. The mercy and kindness of an evening church service full of faithful people and friends where the Holy Spirit moves.

His mercies, his kindness, are new day by day by day. And all these little mercies show that our God is kind.

Let's sing.

Speaker 3 - Congregational Singing / Music

[Congregational singing.]

Speaker 1 - Worship Leader / Pastor Jonker

Another thing Paul says about love in 1 Corinthians 13 is this: love is not easily angered.

Love is not easily angered. Some translations say love is not irritable.

Irritation - being irritable - is an interesting state of mind. We have all been in situations where we are irritable, where it takes only a small thing to make us angry and set us off. What makes us irritable? And why is that irritability set against the great gift of love that Paul talks about?

Thinking about that this week caused me to reflect on some of the things that make me irritable and put my anger close to the surface. Not having my coffee in the morning makes me irritable. When I am in the middle of a household project that I think is going to take an hour but takes two hours and pushes back something I really wanted to do, that makes me really irritable. People who drive 25 miles an hour on Burton Street make me irritable. In a related theme, people who cruise in the left lane at the speed limit on the interstate make me irritable. That may be more my problem. Watching the Detroit Lions lose makes me very, very irritable.

I am sure some of these resonate with you. Maybe some of you are imagining your own list of things that make you irritable. Maybe some of you are imagining a list for the person sitting next to you, although let me warn you: that is the way of peril.

What is going on inside us when we are irritable? It is not anger exactly. Anger is very specific. There is something specific that makes us angry and sets us off. Irritability is more of a condition.

Smedes says that irritation is the emotional launching pad for anger. When we are irritable, it is as if the flash point of our anger is lowered. Every material has a flash point where it will burst into flame. For paper, the flash point is 451 degrees Fahrenheit. When you are irritable, the flash point of your anger goes down so that it takes almost nothing to set it off.

It is a destructive state. It is destructive for others because when you are irritable, you become conductive of emotion. Someone else may have set you off and made you irritable - maybe because you did not get your coffee, or maybe because they drove slowly on Burton Street - but you will conduct that anger through to the people at your work or in your household. Others will suffer. There will be collateral damage.

But the biggest casualty of irritability may be you yourself.

I used to get really irritated - I am better at this now - when I played poorly in golf. Some of you are smiling because it happens to you, too. I was in the golf league at LaGrave every Thursday night. We would tee off usually between 5:30 and 6:00. I would come to work, work all day, and go right from work to the golf course. More times than not, I would play terribly and get really irritable. I would not be home until 9:00. My poor dear wife, who had not seen me all day, would get me for about an hour before I went to bed, and I was in a bad state. I was frustrated with myself. Everything was negative.

And I was paying for this. I was paying thirty dollars a week for this irritability. I finally dropped out of the golf league because of that.

I think irritability boils down to two things. It is an excessive love of creature comforts. We think there are things in life that we deserve and should have - like a good golf score - and when we do not get them, we become irritable. I also think irritability is often about things not going according to our schedule. We look at our day and think, "This is how I want my day to go," and when it does not go that way, when things are out of sorts, we get very irritable.

It is a sign that we are leaning too heavily on our creature comforts and that we want to control our time too much.

Love is not irritable.

Love is not irritable because God is not irritable. I have said it twice already tonight: God is not quick to anger. God is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. He is the opposite of irritable.

When we live in his love, we are not focused on our time going the way we want it to go, and we are not focused on our creature comforts. When we are truly rooted in his love, we are rooted in something that does not ebb and flow, something that is never taken away, something constant and strong.

The love of God, which is ours through Jesus Christ our Lord, is always abundant and always there. When you live out of that love, you are not subject to the wild mood swings of irritability. You are able to be faithful in all things.

Nowhere is a love that is not irritable more needed than in the church, because churches are generally full of irritating people, irritating things, and leaders who do irritating things. There are so many things you can be irritated by in any church if you want to be irritated.

One of the healthiest signs in a church is when the church is full of broken, irritating people and broken, irritating things, but people do not get irritable with each other. They work to change the things that are broken, but the change is not driven by irritation. Because when you try to change someone out of your irritation, how does that go? Not very well.

The change comes out of love - that great, unshakable love on which we all stand.

Let's sing.

Speaker 3 - Congregational Singing / Music

[Congregational singing.]

Speaker 1 - Worship Leader / Pastor Jonker

Paul also says that love bears all things.

With the first two meditations, I looked at love at a granular level, up close. I think when Paul says love bears all things, he is moving up a little higher and looking at the grand sweep of love and what it can do.

Love bears all things. Love has this amazing power to absorb and bear the world's pain. In doing so, Christian love has a power that defies the math.

For example, imagine a widow support group at a church - say, six women who have all lost their husbands. They gather once a month, maybe once a week, and they get together and share each other's pain. They pray at the end of it. It is something we have all seen.

Each woman comes into that meeting with a certain amount of grief, say three pounds of grief each, and they share it. Mary tells her grief and gives a pound of that to Susan. Susan tells her grief and gives a pound of her grief to Mary. They tell each other stories.

Why should grief be alleviated by that? They are just moving grief around. Why would grief be reduced in that system? You would think all they were doing was passing around the same baggage.

But that is not how it works. Somehow, within the sharing of grief, their load gets lighter and their hearts are lifted.

What is happening there? Why does this sharing work? What is borne away?

I think what happens is that the weights we have, when we share them, are lifted up and placed on the shoulders of Christ. They become part of what he bore on the cross for us. There is a pattern of lifting this up to Christ so that our load is made easy and our burden is light.

Love bears all things.

I do not understand the math of it, but I have seen it. I have seen it, and so have you.

We know that this gift of God's steadfast love, this load-bearing love, is at the center of this universe. The Old Testament talks about steadfast love all the time. What is steadfast love? It is load-bearing love. It is a love that bears all things.

Psalm 136 has that repeated refrain: the steadfast love of the Lord endures forever. His steadfast love endures forever. The psalm goes through all the things in the world, all the travails of Israel, the work of creation, and through it all, the steadfast love of the Lord comes back and back and back. It is like the heartbeat of God's love that bears all things and holds this world together, even when we do things that threaten to tear it apart.

As children of God united in Jesus Christ, we have the power to bear the world's pain, to love in a way that takes some of the hurt and some of the fear in the world, puts it on ourselves, and then lifts it up to Christ so he can take it on his shoulders.

It is an amazing ability that only works through the Holy Spirit, and it is a gift the world needs.

Let's sing.

Speaker 3 - Congregational Singing / Music

[Congregational singing.]

Speaker 1 - Worship Leader / Pastor Jonker

Love never fails.

Of all the attributes, of all the things Paul says about love, I think this is personally my favorite one.

Paul says that alone among all the spiritual gifts - and Paul lists so many spiritual gifts - love is the one that does things with eternal effect. All the other gifts are temporary, and often what the other gifts accomplish is temporary. But nothing you do out of love will have temporary effect, because everything done out of the sacrificial love of Jesus never fails. The ripples of your loving acts will keep on widening all the way to the new creation.

This is so comforting. This is true even when the things and the ways we try to love do not end up the way we want.

I was talking to someone just the other day who had poured a lot of energy - tons of energy - into someone who was adopted, an adopted child. They loved that person well. But as sometimes happens, in the long term there was alienation. The adopted child moved away and did not reciprocate. There was a rift.

Those parents can still say to themselves: every little thing we did, everything we did to love that person sacrificially, did not fail. Did we get the result we wanted? No. But in the scope of eternity, every little sacrificial act of love we did in that relationship did not fail.

The same is true for you in everything you do every single day.

The reason that is so, I think - and this is a bit of conjecture - is because God is love. God is not tongues. God is not prophecy. God is not knowledge. God is not even justice. God does justice, but God is not justice.

God is love.

That reminds us that everything Paul says about love in this passage, everything he calls us to do, is also something God directs toward us. We think of this passage as a passage that calls us to a certain kind of action. But before it is that, it is also a description of how God has loved us.

Jesus' love for you is patient and kind. Jesus' love for you does not envy and does not boast. Jesus' love for you does not dishonor others and is not self-seeking. Jesus' love for you is not easily angered and keeps no record of your wrongs. Jesus' love for you does not delight in evil but rejoices in the truth. Jesus' love for you always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Jesus' love for you never fails.

In a moment, we will sing a song about that gift of love. We will sing in the chorus of that song, "Let love be ours, O Lord," which is a fine thing to sing. But before we sing it, let me say to you: love is already yours in Christ Jesus, and it always will be.

Speaker 2 - Congregation

Amen.

Speaker 1 - Worship Leader / Pastor Jonker

Let's sing.

Speaker 3 - Congregational Singing / Music

[Congregational singing.]

Speaker 1 - Worship Leader / Pastor Jonker

Let's join our hearts together in our evening prayer. Please pray with me.

Father God, we come to you at the end of this service thankful for love in all of its forms. We have been meditating on the way that you love us, but we know we have only scratched the surface of that. We have only begun to think about the depths of your love because you have told us that your love is wider and longer and higher and deeper than we can ever imagine.

Father, we praise you for the creativity and abundance of your love. In the wonder of our own bodies, in the ways you put us together, we sense that abundant love. In the glories of your creation, in the goodness that surrounds us every single day, we sense the abundance of your love. In the sound of laughter shared with friends at a summer gathering, we see and hear the abundance of your love.

But Father, your love is not just abundant. It is also persevering and steadfast. We thank you for the way your love persistently refuses to give up on us even when we human beings turn our back on you. Thank you for the way your love persists through our doubts. Thank you for the way your love is patient with our fears. Thank you for the way your steadfast love is determined to get rid of our sins - so determined that you, Jesus, died on the cross for us. Lord, when we say your steadfast love endures forever, it rolls off our tongue so easily, but for you it costs everything.

Father, your love is not just abundant and steadfast. It is also full of compassion. Thank you that you are a God who stands with the poor and hears the cry of the needy. We lean tonight on that compassionate side of your love as we offer up our prayers for those in our congregation who are needy and struggling.

I pray for those who have lost loved ones. Lord, be with Gary VandeVelde in the loss of his mom. She was an important person in the life of that family. Give him comfort.

We pray for our sister Laura Jane in the loss of Myron, her husband for so many years. You know, Lord, that for Laura Jane that is the second loss in a short time. Please reach into her sad heart and give her peace that passes understanding.

We lift up to you also others who are dealing with hard things. We pray for Carol Hoffman and Dave VanderArk, who are trying to find their way back to strength. We pray for Renee Kuiper and Steve Palazzo, both in really serious struggles with cancer. We pray for others who are living with and fighting cancer: for Dan Beemer, Jolene DeHere, Marshaan, Jim Crowell, Lloyd Tinholt, Sharon Van Houten, and many others, Lord, who are on our hearts.

God of compassionate love, pour out your compassion on all of them.

And finally, Lord, we thank you that your love is not just creative and steadfast and compassionate. We thank you that your love is personal. Lord, you love us. You know our name. You do not just care about the big geopolitical issues of this world. You care about the small details and struggles of our little lives. You send your Holy Spirit to live in the small tent of our little lives.

So Father, hear us in the silence now as we lift up our concerns and our personal needs to you and to your steadfast love.

These are our prayers, Father. Hear them all through Jesus Christ our Lord, we pray.

Speaker 2 - Congregation

Amen.