LOVE IN ACTION
CELEBRATE LOVE: INTERVIEW WITH MARK SHUPE
DR. JIM DIXON
MAY 2, 2010
MATTHEW 22:36-40
MARK SHUPE: Well, as we wrap up our love series, we’re going to do something a little different this morning. You might remember a couple of weeks ago Jim was talking about different styles of preaching. Let’s see—there was expository, suppository, or…I can’t remember what it was, thematic, maybe. This is more of a conversational style. I thought it would be kind of neat to just converse a little bit as we wrap up this series and take a look back over the past five weeks. Perhaps a good place to start, Jim, would be last week. Obviously a very special day in the 28-year history of our church. As you have had a chance to think back and reflect on that day, what are some impressions and thoughts that come to your mind?
DR. DIXON: Well, thank you, first of all, Mark, and I feel a little bit like I am sitting down on the job. I do want to thank you. I want to thank you for overseeing the whole Love In Action Day, the role that you had in the whole series. Thank you. I also want to compliment you on your amazing purple cuffs and collar on that shirt.
MARK SHUPE: I have two good fashion advisers in my family.
DR. DIXON: Your question about the Love In Action Day… if I could summarize the day in one word, for me it would just be awesome. It was an awesome day. In the New Testament there are three different Greek words for awesome, and these will form our three teachings this morning.
MARK SHUPE: That wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.
DR. DIXON: Just kidding. Actually, the day was really kind of strange for me because I was sick. The week prior to that Sunday, Barb and I had been taking care of our granddaughters as our grandson was being born, and Heather and Chris were at the hospital. They had the stomach flu, and as we cleaned up after them, we knew we might be in trouble. Sunday morning, sure enough, is when I became sick. After the service I went up to my office, in my study, and I said to Barb, “Wow, I really feel sick.” We thought we would go out to the work site at Rocky Heights and give it a try. We made it through that, and actually with a lot of fun and joy because everybody there was so wonderful. We painted a few curbs. I got home, and I was kind of dizzy, feeling like I might pass out. I got home and had 102° fever, and then came down with the stomach flu that night. I thought I was going to die. Barb tells me that men, when they get sick, always think they are going to die. So, that might be true of me.
MARK SHUPE: What does that say about us?
DR. DIXON: I don’t know. As I look back on the day, it really was awesome to see all over the Highlands Ranch area 2,500 of our members serving the community out of a love for people and out of a love for Christ—to be able to serve law enforcement officers, to be able to serve firefighters, to be able to serve seniors in some of the senior centers, to be able to go to our schools. Many of our schools are very short on budget right now and they can’t staff the way they need to staff so a lot of things aren’t getting done. But for us to show up and be able to help out like that was an amazing God thing. For us to be able to help out, even just cleaning up streets and roads and everything, was just awesome. I think part of the joy of it was just the bonding that you feel working together with friends like that, and the chance to show the love of Christ and the love of people is wonderful.
MARK SHUPE: You used the word awesome. I would use the word moving. When I left the church service last week, drove over to Mountain Vista, went down Wildcat Reserve Parkway, and on both sides of the street lots of people in their LOVE t-shirts were out, cleaning up the streets. I got to the school where over 100 people, Steve was telling us, were there painting the lines. Then I drove over to Rock Canyon down McArthur Ranch and there were people on either side cleaning up trash, people at the rec centers. I mean, literally, there was just a sea of white shirts. It even continued afterwards in the restaurants, because we joined about 100 of our closest friends at one of them. It was just packed with people with their LOVE shirts. It was really a great day.
DR. DIXON: It is moving, like you say. Actually, my Sunday night with the stomach flu was also moving in a different way.
MARK SHUPE: A different kind of moving, yeah. As you know, we launched this series on Easter Sunday, back on April 4th. We launched by looking at the supremacy of love, God’s incredible and amazing love for us. We since have followed it up with looking at our love back for him, how we’re to take that love and put it into practice with each other and also to put our love into action with those that are outside the church. As we wrap up the series today, and as you, Jim, kind of reflect back on the last four or five weeks of the LOVE series, have there been maybe one or two things that have personally resonated with you?
DR. DIXON: Personally, I think I am just a sinner in need of grace. So, every time I preach and every time we do a series, I am always convicted. I mean even during the week of preparation, my time of preparation, feel like God by his Spirit convicts me as to where I need to change. That was true during this LOVE series. I think that every time I preach, I feel like the Lord is speaking to me as well as to everyone else. I am very mindful, and I became very mindful through the five weeks of how I need to grow in love. I have a great love of learning, and I think to some extent that reflects a love of God and a love of people. But I know I need to love God more, and I know I need to love people more.
One of the cool things is that there’re so many opportunities to grow in your love. At this church we have been blessed for 28 years, but prior to that I worked eight-and-a-half years at a Presbyterian church out in Aurora called Faith Presbyterian Church. I was in charge of adult education and children’s education and youth work. My boss was Dean Wolf. He was the senior pastor of the church. Many times, Dean would be preaching and I would hear Dean say, “Marriage is hard, painful, laborious sweat.” We would all look at his wife Jan and think, “Wow, you must really be hard to live with.” Fortunately, I have been blessed with an amazingly wonderful wife. I know that in our marriage I am the problem. Amen, that’s true.
I do think in every relationship in life, including marriage, there’re amazing opportunities to learn to love. And God has crafted life in this world in that way. In every relationship you have a chance to learn to grow in love. But I have also learned through this series that I need to intentionalize growing in love. That means waking up every day, and just saying, “Is
there someone that I can bless, or someone that I can serve, or someone who in any way I can do something for?” It is all part of learning to love.
MARK SHUPE: As we have learned last week, there is a direct link between loving people and loving God.
DR. DIXON: Right.
MARK SHUPE: You can’t really do one without the other.
DR. DIXON: Absolutely.
MARK SHUPE: We know that Jesus, when he kind of summarized all of the commandments, he really did it in one word: love. It’s loving God and loving our neighbor as our self. Then the Apostle Paul in his letters to the churches really picks up on that same theme. In fact, he even says the greatest of all things is love. As you think about that, why do you think the supremacy of love, why is love the big focus, or to be the main focus?
DR. DIXON: I think all the commandments are summed up in love because the greatest commandment is to love. That is the Shema; that is Deuteronomy chapter 6, as we have seen many times. “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one God, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all of your soul and all of your strength.”
This is the first and greatest commandment, Jesus said. But he said the second greatest commandment is like unto it. “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” quoting Leviticus 19:18. All of the Decalogue, as you look at the commandments of God, relate to these two. When you look at, “You shall remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy,” that is part of loving God. When you look at, “Thou shall not steal, thou shall not covet, thou shall not murder,” that is all part of not only loving God but also loving your neighbor as yourself. So, love sums it all up. Then you come to 1 Corinthians 13, and the love chapter, and as you have said, Paul reminds us that, “faith, hope and love, these three abide; but the greatest is love.” That really makes a lot of sense because, if God were not love, there would be no basis for faith. If God were not love, there would be no one to place our faith in. If God were not love and there were no such thing as love, there would be no hope. The greatest is love. That is why this series for five weeks was so important: That we would begin to prioritize love in our lives.
MARK SHUPE: We have been talking a little bit about what, maybe personally, your response has been the last few weeks. But as our pastor, for those of us that are a part of the church, if there were one or two things that you would hope that we would take from this series, what would that be?
DR. DIXON: I would hope that you, the congregation, would take out of this series what I have taken out of this series, which is a need to grow in love, and a conviction that we need to be more loving. I think of 1 Corinthians 13 where Paul said:
“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging symbol. If I have prophetic powers and understand all knowledge and all mysteries and I have all faith so as to remove mountains but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have to the poor and deliver my body to be burned but have not love, I gain nothing.”
It seems to me that knowledge is important; the gifts of the Holy Spirit are important; abilities and talents are important; but nothing is more important than love. So, I think as a congregation God wants us to seek to grow supremely in love. We want to grow in knowledge, we want to grow in our gifts and our abilities and our skills, but most of all we should want to be more loving. The really cool thing, biblically, is that this word for love…when Jesus said, “a new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another even as I have loved you,” this is a very special word for love. It’s not really a word that is rooted in the feelings. “Eros,” or romantic love, is rooted in the feelings and the emotions. That is also true of friendship love like “phileo,” or family love like “storgeo.” This is “agape,” this Christian love. Agape love is really rooted in the will. It involves the emotions, surely, but it’s rooted in the will. We can wake up and will to love. You can’t control all your feelings, you can’t control all of your emotions, but you can will to love. You can will to seek to bless someone. You can will to serve someone—no matter who it is. And God knows that, he knows this, and that is why he has given us this word agape and given us this commandment as a congregation, all of us together, that we would begin to wake up every day and will to love. That would be my hope.
MARK SHUPE: It seems like, connected to that, besides the will to love, is becoming more aware of the opportunities to love that are right around us each day.
DR. DIXON: I think you have to intentionalize loving. There are so many things in life that we can get caught up in. Sometimes the most important things we don’t even think about, so we need to intentionalize it.
MARK SHUPE: If we were to do that individually, if we did that collectively as a church family, if we, in a sense, became more loving people, became a more loving church, as you picture us down the road as a church, what do you think is the potential of what we could do as a church if we really became more loving?
DR. DIXON: I know that we all have different images of the church. When people all over the world think of the church, when they think of Christianity, they think of different things. I am sure in this room many of you have different feelings about what the church is and what the church is meant to be. I think some of you, perhaps, think of the church as a school—kind of an institution of learning where you come and are meant to grow in your knowledge of Holy Scripture. And the church is a school. Some of you think of the church more like a cathedral, a place of worship, a place of awe, a place where we witness his majesty. That is true too. I know as a congregation, and really as a staff, we do everything we can to make Sunday mornings very worshipful. I think some people, and perhaps some of you, think of the church as kind of a hospital, where you can come to get healed, where you can come to get put back together, where you can come to get mended a little bit from some of the diseases and brokenness that is out in the fallen world. That is true too. I think some people think of the church as a kind of a spiritual fitness center, where you come to exercise your soul and grow stronger at the level of your soul that you might respond to the call of Christ in the world. I think a lot of people actually think of the church as a kind of a giant Starbucks, where you just come and hang out, make some friends, and enjoy your friends. That’s true too. In fact, it’s a wonderful thing about the church of Christ that you can come here and make friends. Many times, you make friends that are not only life-long friends, but friends for eternity. That is all so wonderful.
But I think it is important to understand that the purpose of Christ for his church… because it is his church. He said, “I will build MY church,” so it is his church, and his purpose is that the church be a place where we are transformed. You look at Ephesians chapter 4 and it explains how God is in the church. He appointed-apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers, etc. But it is for the purpose of the building up of the body of Christ, until we attain to the unity of the Spirit and the fullness of the knowledge of the Son of God, and the fullness of the measure of the stature of Christ. So, we are meant to grow into Christlikeness. The church is meant to be a place where we come and we’re transformed into the likeness of Christ. So, we need to have that ever before us; that whatever else the church is, we are here to be transformed into the likeness of Christ.
So, when we teach in the Sunday school, we are learning to love as Christ loves as we minister to those kids. We go to the inner city, we tutor a kid, we’re learning to love as Christ loved. We sing in the choir. Whatever we do—we minister in a small group, we participate in a small group, whatever we are doing—it is all meant to transform us. We are transformed in action. So, it is very important for the church to mobilize people. You go on a short-term mission trip, this is a mobilization that not only blesses others but also transforms us. Even a love-in-action day like we had last Sunday transforms us. That is what it’s about, that we would be transformed to be more like Jesus, and that means more and more loving. If we could do that, there is no limit to what God might do through the church, this church. If we could become as loving as Christ would want us to be, that would empower the gospel.
When I was growing up, we’d go to church and sometimes you would see banners in front of churches that would have the Great Commission. Sometimes, even on the outside of a church, you would see banners that had the Great Commission. “Go into all the world and make disciples. You shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” In our church, the Great Commission is big for us, and we want to be faithful. We want to take the Gospel to the nations. We want to tell people about Jesus. We want to talk about the cross and the crown. He died for us. He is our Savior. He rose from the dead, and he is Lord—the cross and the crown. It’s only empowered by love.
As we take the Gospel to our communities, as we share Jesus with our neighbors where we live, in our neighborhoods, as we share Jesus at work, or when we go to some other nation with the gospel, it is all empowered by love. God is love. He set it up like this. I think organizations like World Vision and many others have kind of figured out that if you want to tell people about Jesus, you better love them first. So, I think the message for us is if we would learn to love, it empowers the Gospel. The Holy Spirit attends the Gospel. No matter how faithfully, it is proclaimed, if we don’t love, we reduce its potency. So, we are meant to go forth and love, in our neighborhoods, where we work, right here at church, and out in the world. That empowers the message about Jesus. If people see us loving, there’s no limit to what he could do.
MARK SHUPE: So, it’s not really an overstatement to say it really is all about love.
DR. DIXON: It really is.
MARK SHUPE: Part of celebrating God’s love for us and our love for him is we’re coming to the Lord’s Table. Again, it wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that there is a direct correlation, a link, to love. That is really what The Table is all about.
DR. DIXON: Absolutely. Communion is all about love. In fact, in the early church, as brothers and sisters in Christ, moms and dads and kids gathered and they celebrated, normally in homes in the earliest church. They would celebrate communion. But they would do it in the context of what was called the agape. It was the community meal, where Christians would come together, kind of a potluck, and they would have a loving meal together. And they would close that time off with the Lord’s Table. So, that whole time was called the agape. Whenever you look at communion, you should think of the word agape and the word love. Of course, Jesus said, “Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” So, we come to the table and the bread and the cup, and we remember how he laid down his life for us. In the little book of 1 John, we are told, “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and gave his son to be the expiation for our sins.” So, we come to the table and we recognize the fact that, by his mercy and grace, he has expiated our sins. It also says in 1 John, “By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us. And so, we ought to lay down our lives for each other.” So, we come to the table to celebrate our Savior. We celebrate his bloodshed, his body broken, his mercy and his grace. But we also consecrate ourselves to love as he has loved, that as he has laid down his life for us we would begin to lay down our lives for others. This is the commitment that we make today as we come to the table.
MARK SHUPE: I was reading this week some of the writings of Philip Yancey, who is a popular author who has spoken at our church before. Kind of summarizing the gospel, he described it in two different ways: as absolute ideal and absolute grace. I think that kind of fits as we conclude the LOVE series because, as we know, Jesus said, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, and all your might. Love your neighbor as yourself.” The verb tense there is that we would continually do that all the time, and none of us can do that because we are not perfect. That is the absolute ideal that Jesus calls us to, but yet, the grace is really what he did by going to the cross. Jesus knowing that we wouldn’t be able to do that, but his mercy and grace come alongside of us.
DR. DIXON: Amen. Well said.
MARK SHUPE: Often times when we come to communion, we certainly remember what Christ has done on our behalf, his love, his incredible love for us. But it is also a time where we can renew ourselves: renew our level of commitment to live in the way that he desires for us to do that. To help us do that this morning as we come to the table, you will notice that you have some sticky notes there. We really wanted to give you all an iPad, but we didn’t have that in our budget, so we gave you a LOVE pad instead. We all have LOVE pads. What I would like for you to do is to think, as we go into communion, about one thing, just one action point. We would like you to actually take out a pen or pencil and write down on the top sheet here one action point that you’re going to walk away from this series with that is going to allow you to be a more loving person.
This is just between you and God. Fill that out, write it on there. Then what I would encourage you to do is make that commitment to him as you come to the table and you receive the elements today. Then to go a step further, you might take it home, stick it on your mirror, stick it on the dash of your car, somewhere that will remind you of that commitment that you’re making to him today. And Jim, will you pray for us as we prepare for the table?