When I was in Middle School, I, along with a number of other students, attended Student Life Camp at Ridgecrest Conference Center in NC with the youth group. At the end of the week we decided to have a water fight. So we had a few water balloons and water guns (which were NOT actually allowed), but mostly the water fight involved dumping buckets of water on each other. I guess you’re technically allowed to bring buckets to camp!
My roommates that summer were Mike Cagle and Stephen Blackwell. We got along really well, but when the water fight started, Stephen locked himself in the room so he wouldn’t get wet. Well that was no fun, so Mike and I tricked him into coming outside and then jumped into the room, shutting and locking the door behind us, and leaving Stephen to have bucket of water dumped on him by Steve Allen’s cousin. Adam Mullens then carried poor, half-soaked to Pastor Ben (the youth pastor at the time), who happened to be waiting with yet another bucket of water. Stephen was now fully soaked.
Now, I think that’s a pretty funny story. But at the time, Stephen wasn’t so happy about it. He didn’t want to get wet, but we soaked him anyways. Looking back, tricking Stephen to come out so we could dump a bucket of water on him wasn’t the nicest prank in the world, and it certainly wasn’t the best way to show love.
Hopefully most of you have heard by now that our theme for this summer is “Love in Action.” We’re talking about what it looks like to see love actually happening and to be a part of love actually happening. The phrase “Love in Action” comes from the definition of love. Which is what? (Allow time for Natalie to give the answer. lol) “LOVE is an act of the will, accompanied by emotion, that leads to ACTION on behalf of its object.” That definition comes, from Natalie, yes, but originally from Voddie Bachum. If you don’t who he is, look him up, he’s pretty awesome!
Love is all about action, behavior, doing something. Throughout the Bible we are commanded to love. What, according to Jesus, is the greatest commandment? (to love the Lord your God) And what is the second greatest commandment? (to love your neighbor as yourself) So the Pharisees roll up to Jesus and they’re like “Wassup JC?” and Jesus was like “Wassup?” (well, they actually probably weren’t that nice to each other, JC and the Pharisees didn’t get along really well) and the Pharisees asked what the most important thing a person could do was. And Jesus’ answer was to love. He said the greatest commandment is to love God and, even though they did ask about the second greatest, it is to love people. Ultimately, Jesus tells us that the most important thing we can do is to Love God and Love People.
Love is more than feelings and emotions, love is action. We know this because God tells us to love others. It is difficult to command emotion. (At this point I asked for volunteers and Keenan and Anya came on stage. I had them stand on 1 foot, jump up and down, spin a circle, etc. Then I told them to be sad. No, don’t try and look sad, just be sad. Anya finally shouted that she couldn’t just be sad.) When I say “Be sad!”, you can’t automatically fill yourself with sorrow. You can fake it, maybe even force yourself to cry, but you’re not wired for your emotions to change on command. If love was just an emotion, it would be difficult for us to obey God's command to love. But love is something you do. It can produce emotion, it’s an act accompanied by emotion, but love is action.
James 1:22 tells us to be doers of the word, not hearers only. That means that we should not be apathetic when Christ tells us that the most important thing we can do is to Love God and Love People. That sort of command should make us responsive. We don’t just sit back and say, “Oh, that sounds nice.” We should get up and put ourselves into action. Love is action.
1 John 3:18 says “Dear children, let us not merely say that we love each other, but let us show the truth by our actions” (NLT). Word and speech are great. It’s great to say that we want to be a youth group that loves each other. It’s great to say we want to be a youth group that comes alongside one another, and helps each other, and has fun with each others. It’s great to say that we want this youth group to be like a family. But it is never going to happen if we don’t actually start doing something about it. Love is action.
It has been said that “Love is as love does.” In other words, how you act determines how you love. Love is action.
Andy Stanley, pastor of the 2nd biggest church in the country, famously says that “It is not intentions that determine direction. Decisions determine direction.” You can fully intend to drive to Washington DC, but if you start heading south, you’ll wind up in Florida, regardless of your intentions. We can fully intend to be a loving youth group, but if we don’t actually make an effort to reach out to each other, talk to each other, spend time with each other, then all we are are a group of people who happen to be in the same place every Sunday and Wednesday. If we want to be a youth group that loves, we have to start making decisions that take us there. Love is action.
So what does this action look like? Well, it can look like a lot of things. It can look like you getting to know visitors, or people you don’t normally talk to before Impact. Although you may have to give up playing dodge-ball for a night to do it. It can look like you investing in each others lives and caring about what each other is going through. Although listening to people’s problems does take time. It can look like us coming together to comfort each other when we have rough day (week, month, or year), when we break up with a boyfriend or girlfriend, when we have a fight with our parents, when someone close to us dies. Although, being open and honest with each other means you’ll have to let yourself be vulnerable.
I don’t know if you noticed, but each of those examples of what love looks like was followed by an “although.” Love can look like a lot of things. But when it comes down to it, the action of love looks like sacrifice. Love is sacrifice.
John Ortberg once said “There is a type of love that seeks to love what seems beneficial to the lover. But there is an entirely different type of love, that of Christ, which seeks to make its object lovely, even at great cost to the lover.”
Love is sacrifice. We know this because the clearest example of this is Christ. In the ultimate act of love, God sent his one and only Son down to Earth to take the form of a weak, poor baby, to crawl around in the dirt, to be betrayed, arrested, spit on, mocked, beaten, tortured, whipped so viciously that he wasn’t even recognizable as human, to have a crown of thorns crushed onto his forehead, nailed by his hands and feet and groin to a tree, naked, the last taste in his mouth vinegar from a sponge used to clean the sewers, on a cross where death doesn’t come from blood loss, but from suffocation, to die and after to have his side stabbed by a spear causing water to come out because Jesus’ heart had literally burst, breaking the hearts protective casing which is filled with water. Love is action. Love is sacrifice.
I’m not asking that you let yourself be tortured or killed, but our lives should be filled with crosses at every moment; moments where we live out love in self-sacrificing way. And our youth group should be filled with crosses. I’m asking that you be willing to give up a bit of what you have, your time, to spend time caring about each other. When you graduate, or when you move from middle school to high school, you should be able to look back at your time see where you have sacrificed for others and where others have sacrificed for you. “Oh, there’s a cross. There’s a cross. There’s a cross. There’s a time where someone gave up their time to listen to me when I was hurting. There’s a time when I sacrificed to be there for someone else. There’s a cross. There’s a cross.”
How many of you have ever heard of laminin? Laminin is a microscopic protein molecule that acts as the glue or the stitching of the human body, it’s what holds us together. And this particular protein looks really really cool.
Each of us have millions of microscopic crosses holding our body together! Is that cool or what? It’s amazing, because the love shown on the cross is also shown in the very fabric of who we are; we’re held together by it. And it is love that holds us together as a group. It’s not Jeff, or me and Jenn, or your SS teachers or Echo leaders. We’re here for you, we care about you, but we can never be what holds this group together. Love is the laminin of this youth group. Love is the only thing that can hold us together.
Becoming a loving youth group will never be easy. Love is action. Love is sacrifice. Apathy is easy, it requires nothing. Love is hard, it requires the courage to take action. We have to look around this room and find the people we need to start loving on. Love is specific, intentional action, not just feel-good emotions. Loving everybody in general is often just an excuse for loving nobody in particular. We have to take action.
Arlington Cemetery is one of the stunning sights in DC. Thousands upon thousands of little white crosses marking the graves of soldiers; individuals who sacrificed because they loved their families and their country. They sacrificed for love. That’s what this youth group should look like, green fields filled with white crosses, a group of lives filled with the evidence of self-sacrificing love. Love is sacrifice. Love is action.
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