Relationship Goals Week 4: My Way or Your Way

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;

1 Corinthians 13:4-5

Love is not self-seeking, does not insist on its own way, the Apostle Paul tells us. But we, Pastor Yami pronounces in this sermon, more often use love as an excuse to get exactly that: our own way. We tend to be approach love individualistically and consume love and its benefits rather than practicing it. Being consumers, we treat the people we “love” as commodities, keeping them in our lives if the relationship meets our own needs and throwing them away when it becomes hard or uncomfortable. Further, many of us believe in the Mythology of Soulmates, which causes us to believe that there is no need for us to grow or change to become better for our relationships because once we meet that right person, they will fulfill all our needs and perfectly match all our weaknesses. “When it comes to the Bible, God doesn’t speak much about finding you your perfect person,” Pastor Yami said, “instead, the scripture does speak VERY much about you becoming the person you should be.” To truly love, we must surrender our perception of relationships as commodities that serve us and give ourselves over to being transformed in order to serve.

Our next steps for this week:

1. How are you treating your relationships?
2. How are you performing in your relationships?
3. Share in communion, reflecting on the truth that a God that chose you before you offered any performance still chooses you despite your performance.

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