Relationship Goals Week 8: Love in Relationships
4 Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; 5 does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; 6 does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth;
1 Corinthians 13:4-6
This week in Relationship Goals, we hear from Zack Brady, who along with being one of our Core Team leaders at Flood Blantyre is on the Young Life staff team in Blantyre ministering specifically to our international high schools.
In this sermon, Zack takes us through 1 Corinthians 13:6, “[Love] does not rejoice in iniquity but rejoices in the truth,” and calls us to recognize that this one is not quite as easy as it sounds at first listen. To plumb the depths of what it means to not rejoice in “iniquity,” we go back to the Gospel of Matthew and are reminded that Jesus raised the bar on what sin can be–its not just acting on your lust and committing adultery that is the sin, its the actual looking at someone with lust; its not just acting on your anger and murdering your neighor that is the sin, but the being angry itself. Its not just the actions that we take that are iniquity–it is what is going on inside our heads and hearts as well. This sin, the iniquity inside us, is easily hidden and we love to keep it secret.
But that secret keeping, Zack explains, leads to loneliness and shame, shame that is reflective of the shame felt by Adam and Eve in the garden. Listen in as we unpack Genesis 3 in the context of 1 Corinthians 13:6 and learn how to rejoice in the truth of what God says to us rather than sitting in the lies that have been offered to us by our enemy, who, after all, is only out to steal, kill, and destroy anyone who is called a child of God.
Our next steps for this week
Next Steps:
- Where are you?
- Who will you invite into your secrets? (Who are you going to invite in to help you dismantle the power that your secret sins have over your life?)
- What are you going to put down?
- What are you going to pick up? (And if you don’t know the answer to this one right away, that’s okay! Ask the Lord as you come to him with empty hands after having laid down what you needed to from question 3.)
- Attend Ash Wednesday Service (6-7pm @ Flood Blantyre on Wednesday, 26 February)
- Join in on our 40 Day Lent devotional
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
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