4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
1 Corinthians 13:4-7
In the 10th week of Relationship Goals, we return to 1 Corinthians 13:7, where Paul says that “love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things.” As we touched on how love bears and believes last week, Pastor Yami took us to hope and endurance this week. “Figuring out where you get your hope will completely change how you endure,” Pastor Yami tells us toward the beginning of the sermon. This sermon then proceeds through a look at the everyday language of “hope.” When we say we hope for something in casual conversation, we’re really just naming our wishful thinking, our desire for something to happen. What we hope for reveals our desires and it also reveals our fears. And at the end of the day, we usually expect our hopes to be fulfilled by something tangible–more often than not, our own ability to work things out as we plan them.
To hope in a Biblical way, however, is to stake our confidence on the character of God. Biblical hope does not hang on crossed fingers, fend off the terror of the ‘what ifs,’ or see our present through the lens of what we can expect to accomplish. Biblical hope is “confident expectation and desire for something good in the future,” rooted in the promises of God. He promises to work all things, ALL THINGS, for the good of those who love him. He promises a future day where there will be no more pain or suffering. He promises us rest. In Jesus, our true hope, the work of the enemy–all the pain of this world–is undone. In Jesus, our true hope, our eternity is secured. In Jesus, our true hope, we have a real and ever lasting friend. This is our hope: a future assured in the goodness of God. And in this, we can indeed endure all things.
Next Steps:
- What have you allowed to be the root of your hope – when that place belongs to God alone?
- Where are you downcast?
- What truth (repeated truth) do you need to live out to be more of who Jesus wants you to be?
- What has God said, that you are refusing to believe in, for your situation?
The reality of life is there is no life apart from relationships. Your relationships might be with stuff, not people, but your life is relating itself to STUFF. So our heart and our goal in this series is to just be at a place where we ask the hard questions, we get into the space of trying to understand what is love really like. Now when you get into scripture, scripture has a lot of stuff to say about love. So we are are looking at some few amazing things that God has said in his word in 1 Corinthians chapter 13 of what love is.
Catch up on earlier Relationship Goals sermons: Week 1 , Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, Week 5, Week 7, Week 8, Week 9
Recent Comments