Lots of Loves Bind You, But Here is the Only One That Sets You Free

Has it ever happened to you?   You are going along through your life, minding your own business.  And out of the blue, it comes, without warning.   But once it does, it doesn’t go away.  No, it stays, tormenting you for hours, days even.   Has a song ever done that to you?  No matter what you do, the tune sticks with you, rambling around in your head, whether you like it or not.

That happened this week, but here’s the strange part.   I didn’t hear the song.  No, I just heard the words.  As I thought about the words we’re about to hear, the words of this song kept popping into my head.   It’s fairly old, but most folks know it.  In fact, the movie, Boss Baby, used it this year.  It goes like this. 

What the world needs now is love, sweet love

It’s the only thing that’s there just too little of…..

The song goes on from there.  Now, why did those words pop into my head?   It’s because, I began to think.    The world doesn’t have too little of love.    The world has way too much.  That’s the problem.   Too much of the love in the world doesn’t bring you life.  It brings you the opposite. 

I’m not saying that the world doesn’t need more love. The world does need love, at least the kind of love, that song proclaims.   But do you know what stops that kind of love?   It’s other kinds of love.   And those other kinds of love, if you let them take root in your life will twist you up. 

They twist up your relationships.   They twist up your health.   They certainly twist up the world.  But these loves have such power that they can trap you, and you don’t even notice it.  How do you become free of that power?  How do you find the way out?  How do you find the only love that truly frees you, that truly enables you to become who you most deeply yearn to be?  In these words, God points the way.   Let’s hear what God has to say.

I John 3:10-19

Love, the wrong kind of love, never brings you what it promises.  It never brings you life, at least for any length of time.  In the end, it brings you discouragement, emptiness, even death.  But this love can bind you up before you even realize it.  But here, God offers the way out.  God opens the door to the only love that gives you life.  But here’s the twist.  Before you get the life, you gotta have the death first.    

But before we get there, let’s talk about this wrong kind of love or rather wrong kinds of love.  You see.  You can’t stop loving.  If you are human, you’re going to love.  Over 1500 years ago, the writer of the very first memoir in human history, Augustine put it well.   To be human is to love…We are cast into love.  We are born and destined to love.  It is our nature to love.  We can choose what to love; we cannot choose whether to love.

You’re going to love.  That’s not the question.  The question you gotta ask is this.  What are you loving, really? 

That question prompted the writer David Foster Wallace to give my favorite commencement speech of all time.   Wallace said this to the graduates of Kenyon College:

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such things as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.  And the compelling reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship…is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

If you worship money and things if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough…worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly.  And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you…Worship power, you will up feeling weak and unafraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear.  Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.  But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is…. they’re unconscious.  They are default settings.

When Wallace uses the word worship he is pointing to the same thing Augustine was talking about with love.  In life, the human problem isn’t that we love.  It’s often not even that we love bad stuff.   It’s that you can love even good stuff way too much, so much that you could even say you worship it.   And when you do, that love will eat you alive.  And it will take you away from the very love that you most need.

That’s why John brings up the ancient story of Cain and Abel.   In that story, Cain took care of the garden.  He grew awesome fruits and vegetables.  His brother, Abel, took care of the animals, the sheep and the goats.   All seemed to be working out well, until, one day, God made a request.  God said to Cain and Abel.  “I’d like you to bring me a gift, some animals would be nice.”  But Cain felt disrespected.  What was so wrong with his fruits and vegetables?.  So, Cain ignored God’s request, and brought a nice fruit and veggie basket instead.   And what did God say?  God said, “No thanks.  Please go get the animal like I asked.”    But Cain still didn’t listen.  In fact, he became so angry, so hurt by God’s rejection, that he actually killed his brother, Abel. 

What was going on?  Cain loved what he made in that garden.  He loved it so much that made it the source of his value.   So, when God asked for something different than that, Cain couldn’t do it.  To turn his back on what he produced would be like turning his back on himself.   And when God rejected that produce, in his hurt and pain, he lashed out and murdered his own brother.   Do you see the insanity of it?   Cain loved what he produced so much he valued it above his relationship with God.  He even valued it above the life of his own brother.    Yet the whole time, he had no clue how much that love bound him, how much it had captured him. 

And it hasn’t stopped.  People still sacrifice their families and relationships for what they produce.   And the out of control loves don’t stop there.   People get addicted to relationships, to substances, to sensations, to appetites, to stuff. 

Human beings are idol making machines.  We’re always getting trapped in the wrong kinds of loves. And those loves twist everything up.   They are what, as John puts it, makes too many human beings children of the Devil.   After all, the Devil loves.  That’s not the problem, it’s what the Devil loves, and how much the Devil loves it.  The Devil is the source of twisted love, and Through that twisted love, evil enters the world and binds up people left and right.

But John offers a different way, a way out from that twisted love, a way that leads you to love as God created love to be.   This true love frees you.  It frees you to love yourself without condition, to love others that same way.   This love frees you to live so intimately with God that you become God’s very child.  But for that true love to come, the twisted loves have to go.  They have to die.   And that can be very hard. 

You could hear this talk, and resolve to do better.  You could say.  I will love the people around me more.  I want to become that child of God.  But you will still be placing your trust in what you can produce.   You’ll be no better off than Cain.  It’s just instead of producing fruits and vegetables, you’ll be producing good deeds, loving acts.  Even religion becomes a twisted love. 

 So how does the love come?  It comes when you realize that this love has already come. to you.  In Jesus, this love has come.   This love has come and offered up everything to free you.   And when God in Jesus did that, he shattered the power of every twisted love forever.   Why?  God showed you.   You don’t need them.  You don’t need them to give you value, to give you worth.  You already have it.   All you need to do is believe it, is to let that love in.   And as you do, Jesus will wither away the twisted loves that bound you.   Jesus will free you to love, to love yourself, to love others, to love this world like never before. 

Christianity should not have survived, much less become a movement that transformed the world.   It had no powerful patrons, no entrée to the inner circles.  What did it have?  It had a love that the world had never seen before.  This love shattered every social barrier. This love included everyone, rich and poor, male and female, no matter their race or culture.   This love sacrificed for everyone, whether they believed in the love or not.  And this love changed the world.  This love continues to change it. 

It’s why next Saturday, guys at the church I serve will gather to make sandwiches for the homeless in our community.  It’s why that same day, folks from all sorts of different churches including ours will come together to bring hope to our city.   It’s why folks will gather next Sunday to celebrate pumpkins and the community they bring about.  It’s why the following day, many of those folks will show up at a Methodist church in Fort Lauderdale to see justice happen in our community with our sister churches in Bold Justice.  And as the church I serve lives the love that God has given to us in such places and times, God will work in ways we cannot even imagine.    And if you let that love live in you, this love will work and change you too, in ways you could not even imagine.   Are you letting that love live in you?   If not, will you let that love live in you today?  Let us pray.