FRUIT OF THE SPIRIT
LOVE
DR. JIM DIXON
OCTOBER 25, 1992
1 CORINTHIANS 13, GALATIANS 5, 1 JOHN 3
On this day nine years ago, on October 25, 1983, the United States military forces invaded the Caribbean Island of Grenada. Outwardly the island Grenada appeared to be a peaceful paradise, a kind of tourist mecca with white sandy beaches and blue waters. But according to the Reagan administration, the island of Grenada was not what it appeared to be. In reality it was a Cuban soviet military colony preparing itself to export terror and to undermine democracy. President Reagan told the nation that we arrived there just in time.
Now it occurs to me that there are churches all over this world, and churches particularly right here in the United States of America that in a sense are a little bit like the island of Grenada was. These churches are not what they appear to be. Certainly, there are many churches that are not what they are called to be because, you see, churches by the will of God are meant to be communities where the love of Jesus Christ is manifested. Churches are meant to be communities where the love of Jesus Christ can be experienced. Churches are meant to be communities from which the love of Jesus Christ goes forth.
In 1987, John Carpenter made a move called The Prince Of Darkness. It was on TV a week or so ago. According to the TV guide, the movie was about a minister or a priest who to his alarm discovered Satan himself was living in the church basement. Now one supposes that for any church that would be a major bummer. I do not watch John Carpenter movies so I cannot tell you what happened, but I know this. I know that Satan is indeed working in churches and not just church basements. Satan is working in churches all over the world and he seeks to undermine the ministry of the kingdom of Jesus Christ. Satan seeks to quench the love of Christ in churches. He seeks to sour the fruit of the Holy Spirit in churches, and he seeks to literally kill a church’s manifestation of the love of God.
Now you see, Satan has no capacity to love. Perhaps he is able to love with eros love, which is the love of desire. Perhaps he is able to love even with phileo love, which is the love of friendship because even the most evil people seem to have lots of friends. But, you see, Satan cannot love with what the Bible calls agape love. Satan cannot love with the love of God because the love of God is pure benevolence. The love of God is good will. The love of God is compassion in action. The love of God seeks to mend what is broken and lift up what has fallen.
Every human being, every man and woman all over this planet has some capacity to love with agape love because we are all made in the image or the likeness of God. But, you see, we are fallen, and sin has riddled the creation and none of us love as we were meant to love but when we become Christians, we are initiated by the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit wants to give us a capacity to love with the love of Christ. Churches are meant to be communities where the love of Christ is uniquely felt and experienced. We want to be a church like that. We want to be a church where the love of Christ is manifested, a church where the love of Christ can be experienced and a church from which the love of Christ goes forth.
You know William Booth grew up in Nottingham, England, in the 19th century. When he was a young man, newly married for the first time, he went into the city of London. He went into the inner city. He saw the poverty. He saw the pain. He saw the suffering. He was devastated. He came back and he said to his wife, “I’ve been to hell,” and he began to pray about that. The Holy Spirit gave him a burden for the inner city of London. William Booth went and began to minister in the inner city of London in the name of Jesus Christ. He began to feed the hungry and cloth the naked and share the gospel, the good news, of Jesus Christ.
I think most of you know William Booth founded the organization that is today called the Salvation Army. William Booth went all over the greater London area trying to get churches to help him. He went all over the greater London area asking churches to help him in this love ministry for the poor. Many churches just said no. They said no. William Booth said, “We are called to show the love of Christ and the heart of Christ is burdened by the needs of the poor. Will not you help me?” and the churches said no. For them, love was just something you showed your children or maybe your spouse or maybe a few people in the pew, but you did not take the love of Christ into the inner city.
William Booth originally did not call his ministry the Salvation Army. He originally called it simply the Christian Mission, because William Booth believed that the great mission of the church of Jesus Christ was to show the love of Christ and primarily to the poor. Now as a church, we want to show the love of Christ. We want our hearts to be broken by the things that break the heart of Christ. We want to take the love of Christ into the inner city, and we want to show a love for people who are less fortunate and people who are hurting. We believe that God is giving us a ministry strategy for the inner city that in some ways, from a historical perspective, is even really better than the kind of ministry that the Salvation Army has brought to the inner cities. The Salvation Army has really had a rescue kind of ministry where they have tried to rescue those who are tragically lost through food and through clothing and of course through the proclamation of the gospel We want to be part of a rescue ministry as well, but we also want to be involved in preventative ministries. We want to try to minister in ways that we can prevent some of the pain that has come into the inner city.
I want to share a little story with you. It is a true story regarding a woman whose name was Irene Webster Smith. She was a Quaker. She was a missionary to Japan. Her life story is told in a biography written by a man named Russell Hit. I would highly recommend it to you. Irene Smith went, in the year 1915, to Japan. She went to the city of Tokyo. She was sent by the Asia Evangelistic Society. She came to the Tokyo rescue home in the inner city of Tokyo. There she sought to minister to inner city prostitutes, women who had tragically adopted a life of prostitution.
It was a very hard ministry, Irene Smith found out, and a very frustrating one. Most of these women who had become prostitutes in the inner city of Tokyo had been abandoned by their parents when they were babies and they had been sold into prostitution. They had been taught nothing but prostitution. That is all they knew. That is all they understood. It seemed to Irene Smith that no matter how much of the Word of God you shared, no matter how much of the love of Christ you gave, it seemed like no matter how repentant many of these women became, still, inevitably, many of them would return to the streets and become prostitutes again. How frustrating that was.
One night Irene Smith had a dream. She knew it was not a normal dream. She knew it was a vision of God. In this dream she began to repeat a phrase over and over again. The phrase was, “Better to have a fence at the top of the precipice than to have an ambulance at the bottom.” Now, she knew immediately that this was not a normal dream because she is like us. Most of us I know do not usually remember dreams, and if I do, most of them are kind of laughable and do not make a whole lot of sense. But that phrase made a lot of sense, and she knew it was from God. “Better to have a fence at the top of a precipice than to have an ambulance at the bottom.” She realized that the ministry she had been involved in was primarily an ambulance ministry. She needed to build some fences.
So she founded another home in the inner city of Tokyo, a home for little girls who had been abandoned by their parents. This was a home where these little girls would never be sold into prostitution. This was a home where these little girls who had been abandoned by their parents could be reared in the love and the knowledge of Jesus Christ. It was a ministry that was proactive and not simply reactive. As we go to the inner city, we feel like God has given us a concept of ministry. God has given Gene and the Missions Department a concept of ministry we are excited about because it is reactive. It has an ambulance. I mean we know that the love of Christ demands that we bring an ambulance to the bottom of the cliff . We need hundreds of you to be involved in the distribution of food. We need hundreds of you to be involved in ministries that relate to housing for the impoverished. We need you to be involved in ministry to the prisons.
But the ministry we are calling you to (and we feel Christ has called us to) is not simply an ambulance ministry. It also involves building some fences. There is an educational ministry that we are inviting you to take part in in the inner city. I want to just take a moment and speak to that. This educational ministry is a tutoring ministry in the inner city where we can take little children and we can share with them the knowledge and the person of Jesus Christ. We can help them in their education and in learning basic skills. We can help prepare them for the future so that later they would be equipped to compete in the job market and to have jobs and that they would later be able to have the dignity of employment and be able to provide for the families.
You see, the hope for the future of the inner city is the new generation, the youth. We have to reach them. We want to invite you to be part of this tutoring program in the inner city. Let me tell you what it would be like if you were to volunteer, and you were to say, “Yes, we want to work in the educational component of Cherry Hills Community Church inner city ministry.” We would take you and we would train you. We would train you and then we would place you with an inner-city child, approximately a third grader, maybe a second grader, a young child, an elementary school student. We would place you with that student. Now we would do that in a situation where you would kind of be able to pick the child but really the child is picking you. We would explain that to you as you got involved.
In addition to that, what you would find yourself doing is having been placed with a child. If you were a tutor during the afternoon, you would go down and pick that child up from an inner-city school and then you would take the child to an inner-city church because we have linked with five inner city churches. We have also done this in agreement with the public school system in the inner city. You would take that child to one of these five inner city churches. It might be the Anchor of Hope Church, which is primarily a black inner-city church. It might be the New Life in Christ Church, which is primarily Hispanic inner-city church. You would take the child to that church, and you would be there with other men and women from our church who are also tutoring and ministering inner city children.
There in the church you would work with that child’s homework because the child has studies. He would have his books and you would help him. You might think, “Well, I can’t do that,” but you can because these kids are struggling with things at a second and third-grade level and you can help them. You can also share with them the love of Jesus Christ and the person of Christ. There will be a time when the kids will have refreshments and you will have encouragement with other tutors. There will be an opportunity for you then to take the child back to his home in the inner city. If you are tutoring in the evening, one night of the week, one weeknight, you would go down and pick the child up at his inner-city house. You would take him to the inner-city church. You would be involved in this ministry, and you would take the child back to his home.
What an opportunity. I mean, is that not the love of Christ? Is that not what compassion demands? Will that not make an impact? Is not Jesus pleased when we give ourselves in that way. I really have to say I think most people who are involved in this ministry would tell you they went into it because they wanted to bless some kids and they came out of it realizing that they got the blessing. That is really why Christ calls us into ministry anyway not simply in order for us to bless others but because Christ knows that we get blessed when we enter into ministry.
I want to encourage you this morning to pray that God might help you love people more. Whether you work in the educational component or the food component or the housing component or the prison component of this ministry, even if you decide not to work in this ministry, I want to ask you to pray that the Spirit of God might enable you to love people more I was thinking.
You know, when I was growing up, I never ever asked Christ to help me love people. I had times I asked Christ to help people love me. I had times I asked Christ to love me more. I never asked Christ to help me love people more. I remember when I was in high school, I was in a church group. We were meeting at somebody’s house; a whole bunch of us highschoolers were gathered in somebody’s house. In this meeting one of the guys in the high school group said in front of the whole group that he did not think I was a very loving person. He did not think I loved people very much. Well, my response to that was I was very angry. I mean, I wanted to tear this guy limb from limb. I could not stand him because he said I did not love people.
I went home and I thought about that. I thought, “That does not make a whole lot of sense.” It is kind of crazy and I realized that he was really right. I remember that for the first time in my life I prayed that Christ might help me love people a little more Through the years I’ve had a number of times where I’ve felt convicted that I needed to make that prayer and I asked Christ to help me love people more. Now, I’ve got to say I’m not anything like Christ wants me to be and I’m not close to the person Jesus Christ wants me to be, but I know that what love is in me is not because of me. It is from God. It is the Holy Spirit who gives us the capacity to love. The fruit of the Spirit is love.
I want to ask you to pray for that, because I believe if you pray for Christ to make you more loving, he will. How strange it is that many people go through their whole life, their whole Christian life, and they never once ask Jesus Christ to make them more loving, to help them love people more. I believe if you would make that prayer, the power of the Spirit of God would flow through you and give you a heart for people. I think some people are afraid to make that prayer because, you know, they know that maybe they are going to want to begin to mend what is broken and lift up what is fallen and reach out in compassion. Maybe they are not sure they want to do that, so they are afraid to ask Christ to make them more loving. But this morning I just would encourage you to pray that prayer with me that Christ would make us more loving, that His ministry might flow through us. Let us close with a word of prayer.