VBS 2014: Blast Off on a Mission of God’s Love
Scott Bayles, pastor
Blooming Grove Christian Church: 8/3/2014
As you can see we had a blast at VBS this weekend. I’ll bet as you were getting ready for church this morning, you didn’t expect to be taking trip to the space station. Our outer space theme this weekend helped underpin a very down to earth concept—loving one another. In fact, our key verse for the weekend, as you heard the kids recite earlier, has been this: “Let us love one another, for love comes from God” (1 John 4:7).
Love one another. It sounds like such a simple command, doesn’t it? The problem is—our love is often lacking. Loving people isn’t easy—the vow-breakers, the truth-benders, the moneygrubbers, the backstabbers that we meet, work with, and even marry. How do you love people who are hard to love? People who have the warmth of a vulture or the tenderness of porcupine? How can we love as God loves? We want to. We long to. But how can we? Our typical strategy is to try harder, dig deeper, strain more. We’re going to love that person if it kills us! And it just might. Could it be that we’re missing a step? After all, you can’t give what you don’t have.
A marriage-saving love is not within us. A friendship-preserving devotion cannot be found within our hearts. We need help from an outside source. A transfusion of love. If we want to love as God loves, we have to begin where this verse ends—God. The secret to loving others is first living loved. The essential first step in keeping this command is receiving God’s love.
• RECEIVE GOD’S LOVE
We preachers have sometimes been guilty of skipping the first step. “Love each other!” we tell our churches. “Be patient, kind, forgiving,” we urge. But instructing people to love without telling them they are loved is like telling them to write a check without first making a deposit in their accounts. No wonder so many relationships are overdrawn. Hearts have insufficient funds. That’s why John reminds us: “love comes from God” (1 John 4:7b).
A few verses later, John makes a deposit before telling us to write the check: “We love because he first loved us” (1 John4:19 NIV). If those words are true, it changes everything, doesn’t it? Imagine what the world would be like without God’s love… A dark planet hurtling through space unguided, undirected. No hope. No future. Nothing to live for. No greater purpose to our existence. Every death would be an end. Every grave a place of despair.
But God does love us! We see it in every sunrise, every blade of grass, every fountain of water, every birth, and every child’s face. One of the sure signs of God’s love is this amazing universe He created. The universe we live in stretches out for billions of light years in every direction. It consists of billions upon billions of galaxies each containing billions and billions of stars. During VBS we talked about some of those stars, about how immense and incredible they are, but what we didn’t talk about is how essential those star are to life right here on earth.
Next time you’re out gazing at stars twinkling in the night sky, spare a thought for the tumultuous reactions they play host to. It’s easy to forget that stars owe their light to the energy released by nuclear fusion reactions at their cores. These are the very same reactions which create chemical elements like carbon—the building blocks which make up the world around us. During a supernova, when a massive star explodes at the end of its life, the resulting high energy environment enables the creation of some of the heaviest elements including iron and nickel. The explosion also disperses the different elements across the universe. Almost every element on Earth was formed at the heart of a star. The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were all forged in the interiors of collapsing stars. It sounds like a line from a poem, but we are all made of star stuff.
In other words, God created and collapsed hundreds of billions of stars, just so that he would have the materials he needed to could create you. That’s how much he loves you. In the words of Matthew West, He “loves you more than the stars in the sky.”
God loves you. Personally. Powerfully. Passionately. He loves you with an unfailing love. And his love—if you’ll let it—can infiltrate your life and saturate your heart! Receive his love—embrace the wonderful, undeniable truth that God loves you. Once you’ve received the love of God, then you’re ready to redistribute God’s love, by sharing it with others.
• REDISTRIBUTE GOD’S LOVE
Having made such an outrageous, eye-opening deposit, John then calls on you and me to pull out the checkbook: “Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (1 John 4:11 NIV). Our country, community, and even our churches are filled with love-starved souls. People who’ve been hurt. People who’ve been reject. People who feel unloved, unappreciated and even unwanted.
Pluto knows a little something about that. Astronomers had long predicted that there would be a ninth planet in our Solar System, which they called Planet X. After a years of observations, in 1930 Clyde W. Tombaugh at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff Arizona finally discovered an object in the right orbit, and declared that he had discovered Planet X. His discovery awarded him the right to name our newfound planet, which he called Pluto. Everyone celebrated the discovery Pluto. Finally our Solar System was complete! And for seventy-six year Pluto had a place to belong. But then in August 2006, due to recent discoveries, a committee of scientists met to make some changes to the definition of a planet. After two weeks of debate and discussion, the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union decided that Pluto failed to meet solar-system standards. They downgraded the globe to asteroid #134340. Once celebrated, Pluto got demoted. Voted off the island. Cut from the team. Not good enough to qualify.
Sadly, many people know what that’s like. They know what it’s like to be voted out. Turned down. Devalued. Rejected. It happens all the time and it results in love hungry hearts. One psychologist has said, “I’ve never met a person whose greatest need was anything other than real, unconditional love.” There is a planet full of people who desperately need God’s love. God has called us to share it with them.
So how do we do that? What does God’s love look like? John answers that for us. He writes, “But if someone who is supposed to be a Christian has money enough to live well, and sees a brother in need, and won’t help him—how can God’s love be within him? Little children, let us stop just saying we love people; let us really love them, and show it by our actions” (1 John 3:17-18 TLB).
Love requires action. In 1 Corinthians 13, where Paul says, “Love is patient, love is kind…,” all 15 words he uses to describe the spectrum of love are verbs. What this means is that love is not simply a feeling, or an abstraction or passive; love is a verb. Love is only love when it acts. It reminds me of an eight-year-old who was once asked the difference between love and true love. He said, “Love is when Daddy reads me a bedtime story. True love is when he doesn’t skip any of the pages.”
Friday night during VBS a few of us guys were hanging out by the sound booth swapping stories. Dusty Ribble spoke of co-worker—a young married guy with a little boy and a lot of stress. Dusty noticed the he seemed distressed at work, so Dusty invited him out for lunch. They sat across from each other in a booth at a crowded pizza joint waiting for the buffet to be replenished. Under the clamor of the crowd, Dusty listened as the young man talked. He shared about what was going on in his life, his worries and woes. As their lunch hour came to a close, Dusty reached into his pocket, grabbed a fistful of cash, and said, “I don’t know if you need this but I think God wants me to give it to you.” By the time they reached the parking lot, the young father was in tears. He looked up at Dusty and said, “No one has ever done anything like this for me before.”
It was such a simple act of kindness—just some pizza and few dollars. But still he said, “No one has ever done anything like this for me.” How many people just like him are out there? Hurting, harassed, and unhappy people—each one in need of God’s love. They don’t wear signs that say “I need God’s love—will you help me?” We have to look for them. They may be in the pew in front of you, the cubicle next to you, or in the checkout line behind you. Wherever there are people, there are people in need of God’s love. “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God” (1 John 4:7).
Conclusion
That’s my prayer for Blooming Grove. I want this church, more than anything else, to be a community of love. I want to be able to come here, and I want you to be able to come here, and feel totally and completely loved. Nothing, according to Jesus, is more important than loving God and loving people. Let’s make that our mantra—not just on paper, but in our hearts every moment of every day. If we love each other as God has loved us, then we will become a church of love that will act like a magnet, drawing people who are starving for love into the presence of Jesus and the salvation that he offers. Because, you know, the greatest act of love was Jesus’ death on the cross. John describes it, saying, “This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.” (1 John 4:10 NLT).
Invitation:
Do you need to experience God’s love this morning? Are you low on love? Do you long to be more loving? It may be that you’re trying to give what you’ve never received. So I want invite you to experience God’s perfect love—embrace it, let it wrap around you like a warm blanket, and start living in the overflow of God’s love today. If I can help you with that, then please talk with me while we stand and sing.
