What's Love Got to Do with It
Chris Bounds · Tidal Church Moncton · June 11, 2023
Chris Bounds teaches from John 14:15-26 that love is desire and will working toward union, and that loving Jesus means obeying Him. Because our desires and will are broken, the Holy Spirit, who is in us, transforms our desires and empowers our will.
Topics: Love, Holy Spirit, Discipleship
Transcript
[0:00] We have the honor this morning to have an incredible guest speaker with us. He is not only a three-time author, but he's also a contributor to textbook study guides, articles, studies that dive into biblical and theological understandings. He's from Indiana Wesleyan University, where he's a professor teaching the up and coming students in ministry. He has served in the local church in the pastoral ministry, and we are so excited today to welcome Reverend Dr. Chris Bounds. Will you please give him a great Atlantic Canadian welcome. Thank you for that warm welcome. It's a joy and a privilege for me to have this opportunity to be with you, and I have to warn you beforehand. You can already tell that I am loud. Now, the reason why I am loud is when I got a call to ministry, my first four years of ministry was spent in a nursing home where the youngest member of my congregation was 82.
[1:03] So I learned to project my voice, and I've never turned it down. When I'm teaching in the classroom from time to time, I will have professors in the classroom next to it who will knock on the wall, and that is my cue to lower my voice. So you are blessed this morning to have someone who can help regulate my volume, but, it is a joy and a privilege for me to have this opportunity to be with you. Our scripture reading comes from the Gospel according to John, chapter 14, beginning with verse 15 and reading through verse 26. If you have your Bibles with you, if you have your phone, you have your Bible app. John chapter 14, reading verses 15 through 26, hear the Word of the Lord.
[1:59] Jesus said, "If you love Me, keep My commands, and I will ask the Father, and He will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever. The Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept Him because it neither sees Him nor knows Him, but you know Him, for He lives with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you before long. The world will not see Me anymore, but you will see Me because I live. You also will live on that day. You will realize that I am in My Father, and you are in Me, and I am in you.
[2:44] Whoever has My commands and keeps them is the one who loves Me. The one who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I too will love them and show Myself to them." Then Judas, not Judas Iscariot, said, "But Lord, why do You intend to show Yourself to us and not to the world?" And Jesus replied, "Anyone who loves Me will obey My teaching. My Father will love them, and We will come to them and make Our home with them. Anyone who does not love Me will not obey My teaching. These words you hear are not My own. They belong to the Father who sent Me. All this I have spoken while still with you, but the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you." Let us pray.
[3:44] Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, our strength and our Redeemer. Amen. I really became an adult in the 1980s. I graduated from high school in 1984, and I finished university in 1988. I love the eighties. One of the greatest performers in that decade was a woman by the name of Tina Turner. Her number one hit: "What's Love Got to Do with It." This morning, I want to ask the question that Tina Turner raises.
[4:34] What's love got to do with it? Answer, love has everything to do with it. Love is at the very heart of God. It is at the center of the relationship that exists between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Love is at the very center of the church. As the church, we are called to love God with our entire being and to love our neighbor as ourselves. As my good friend, a theologian by the name of Bill Ury, says, love is ultimate reality. But love happens to be one of these words that we throw around in the church, but we never define what we mean by love.
[5:27] If I was to come to you this morning and ask you, what is love? Some of you would take me to Scripture. You would take me to 1 Corinthians 13 and what the apostle Paul has to say about love. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not seek itself. It does not boast. But I would say to you, you tell me what love does in that chapter, but you still have not told me what love is. Some of you know enough about the New Testament to know that it was written in the Greek language. Some of you know that in Greek there are four types of love, four words for love. There's the word storge, which has to do with physical affection.
[6:19] Phileo, which is the love that exists between friends, Eros, which is the passionate, heated love between lovers. And then of course, even if you haven't been a Christian very long, you've heard the word for God's love for us: agape. But I would say to you that what you have given to me are examples of love, but you still have not told me what love is. So at the very beginning of this sermon, I want to give to you a biblical, theological definition of love. What is love?
[7:08] Love is composed of two parts. It's composed of two elements. First is desire. Love is the desire for union, fellowship, oneness with someone or something. If you love something, you desire a relationship with it. Desire, but it's not just desire alone. It is also will, making decisions and choices that actually work towards union in relationship. So love is not desire alone. It's not will alone, but it's desire and will working towards union.
[7:57] Let me try to illustrate this for you. I'm going to tell you this morning that I, Chris Bounds, love ice cream. Ice cream, you scream. We all scream for ice cream. I love ice cream. What am I saying to you? I'm saying to you that I desire to become one with ice cream. I desire union with ice cream, but if all I did was desire it and not go to the grocery store and buy Ben and Jerry's Heath Bar Crunch ice cream, take it home, get a spoon, and eat it out of the carton, it would not be love.
[8:54] It's desire and will working towards union. If I told you this morning that I love the University of Notre Dame Fighting Irish football team, what am I saying to you? I'm saying to you that I desire some sort of relationship with that football team, and it means that I make decisions and choices to bring it about. So for instance, I will try to watch Notre Dame play on Saturday afternoons. If I'm not able to watch a Saturday afternoon or a Saturday evening game, I will be sure to check the score on Sunday morning. Desire and will bringing about reunion, bringing about relationship.
[9:47] If I say to you that I love my wife and I love my children, what am I saying? I'm saying I desire a relationship with my wife and children, and then I make decisions and choices to bring it about. Let me pause here just for a moment. As a pastor, so many times in my life I have sat down with husbands and wives, and they know that they need something to intervene to save their marriage, and I can see that they actually have a genuine desire to stay together, and yet they never make the decisions and choices that will help facilitate and bring about that union.
[10:36] I will tell you that is only partial love and not full love. Love is not desire alone. It's not will alone, but it's desire and will working towards union. It's this understanding of love that helps us to understand what Jesus meant when He said in Matthew chapter 5, verse 44, "Love your enemies." Love your enemies. Well, what does Jesus mean when He says love your enemies? What He is saying is that we must come to a place in our lives where we desire reconciliation with our enemy, and then we must align our will, make decisions and choices.
[11:22] We must begin to work towards reconciliation, desire and will working towards union. This helps us to understand the most well-known verse in all of Scripture, John 3:16. "For God so loved the world." God so desired to have union in fellowship with the world. Sin got in the way of that. And God then aligned His will. He made a decision and choice to work towards union. "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son." Desire and will bringing about union.
[12:10] Now, at this point you might be thinking that this definition of love that I've given to you is some sort of sappy sentimentality. But I will tell you that true love never settles for superficial union. It never settles for the appearance of union. True love always works to overcome any obstacle, any barrier that would get in the way of union. A number of years ago, when I was a pastor in Arkansas, there was a young woman named Lynn that was brought into membership of the church where I pastored. My wife led her to the Lord, and after Lynn had been baptized and been a part of our church for about five months, she came into my study.
[13:10] She set up an appointment and she said, "Brother Chris, I have a spiritual problem." And I said, "Well, Lynn, what is your spiritual problem?" "Chris, I hate my father. I hate him. The greatest joy in my life right now is to think about my father spending eternity in hell." I said, "Lynn, you're right. You have a spiritual problem." Lynn had been abused in every possible way by her father, and from the world's perspective, she was justified in her hatred of her father.
[14:05] But she knew that this was not pleasing to Christ. And so my wife began to pray with Lynn, and you could see over the months that Lynn began to have a transformation of desire in relationship to her father. She began to desire reconciliation with him, and then she asked me, she aligned her will with that desire, and she asked me to set up an appointment so that she and her father could meet in my office to attempt a reconciliation. But when the father came into the office, he was unwilling to admit that he had done anything wrong in his relationship with her.
[14:55] To this day, Lynn loves her father, desires reconciliation, and works towards reconciliation with her father, but they are still not reconciled. Why? Because if there is going to be true reconciliation, Lynn's father is going to have to repent and confess what he has done to Lynn. This helps us in many ways to understand the relationship of holiness to love. Love and holiness are two sides of the same coin. What is holiness? Whatever else holiness is, it is what love requires in order for there to be true and full union. Again, let me try to illustrate this for you. I'm going to tell you this morning, believe it or not, that I love you.
[15:56] Now, what I mean by that is that I desire union. I desire a relationship with you, the degree to which we are capable of having a relationship because of the circumstances of our lives. But I desire the fullest union possible given our relationship that we have and the limits of that relationship. And that also means that I must make decisions and choices to facilitate that. Those decisions and choices to facilitate it is, in fact, what holiness requires. So I'm flying out tomorrow morning headed back to Indiana, and so as I am speaking to people about my time here, I'm going to say good things.
[16:46] I'm not going to disparage you. I'm not going to lie about you. I'm not gonna spread gossip about you. That's what holiness is. Holiness is what love requires for there to be true and full union. All right? Now you're asking the question, "What in the world does this have to do with this passage of Scripture?" I will say to you again, love has everything to do with it. You will notice that in this passage of Scripture that I've read to you, Jesus says, not once, not twice, not three times, but He says four times, "If you love Me, you will keep My commands."
[17:31] Notice in verse 15, He says, "If you love Me, keep My commands." Verse 21, "Whoever has My commands and keeps them is the one who loves Me." Verse 23, Jesus replied, "Anyone who loves Me will obey My teaching." Verse 24, "Anyone who does not love Me will not obey My teaching." What Jesus is saying here is that if you and I desire to walk with Him, be in fellowship with Him, being in step with Him, then we must align our will with His will. We must keep His commands.
[18:20] You see, if we don't walk in obedience to Him, if we do not align our will with His will, then there is separation, there is rupture. If you and I are going to truly love Jesus, then we must desire union, fellowship with Him, and then align our will, make decisions and choices, follow Him if we're going to experience that union, which is the very essence of love. But here's the problem. As a result of the fall in the Garden of Eden, as a result of the decisions and choices that Adam and Eve made, our first parents, you and I come into this life with the problem of desire and the problem of will.
[19:24] If we are going to truly love Jesus, then God has got to transform our desire and He must empower our will. First, He must address the problem of desire. As a result of the fall, you and I come into this life with corrupted, broken, depraved desires. We come into this life desiring our will above God's will. We desire our reign, our rule over God's reign, over God's rule. We desire our ways and not God's ways. We desire sin, not holiness and righteousness, the very character of God.
[20:13] We come into this life with disordered desires, wrong desires. Martin Luther, a Protestant reformer, the early Protestant reformer, who said as a result of the fall that each of us come into this life wickedly, curved, viciously, seeking all things for our own sake. We have a problem of desire. We don't truly desire Jesus above all else, and that's the problem.
[21:05] I teach theology. I'm a preacher, I'm a pastor, I am a theologian. And I will tell you that I believe that there is a hell, and I have a healthy fear of hell. I don't want to go to hell, and I don't want anybody to go to hell. But even though I have this healthy understanding of hell, very rarely in my life have I ever told anybody they were going to hell. Why? Because I'm not the final judge. Thanks be to God. That's God's business and not my business. But there have been a number of times in my life where I have gone to someone and I've said to them, "I fear for your soul.
[21:57] I fear for your eternal destiny." One of those groups of people that I've had that conversation with are people who at times have claimed to be Christians, but all they really want out of Christianity is fire insurance. They want to continue to hang on to the pleasures of this world. They want to continue to live life in their sin, clinging and holding onto their sin. They just don't want to suffer the consequences with it. But here's the problem, my friends, is that I don't believe that when we come to the end of our lives and we stand before God in final judgment, He is not going to give us in final judgment something we never really wanted.
[22:55] we never really desired in this life. C.S. Lewis, in his famous work, The Great Divorce, helps us to see this truth. Lewis imagines, has a vision of final judgment, and in that final judgment, there is only one pronouncement: "Thy will be done." And when the righteous stand before God in final judgment, they come before God and they say to God, "Thy will be done," because it is that which they desire above all else. That is what they want. They want Christ and His kingdom. "Thy will be done," and they get exactly what they want: "Enter into the joy of the Lord."
[23:52] But when the unrighteous stand before God in final judgment, God says to the unrighteous, "Thy will be done." You want your rebellion, you want your disobedience, you want your selfishness, you want your way. "Thy will be done," whatever else is taking place in final judgment. It is a revelation of what we ultimately want. We see this as well in another vision that Lewis has in The Great Divorce, and this time what happens is that there are people who are in hell who have an opportunity to go to heaven, but when they get to heaven, after they've been in heaven for a while, what do they want? They want to go back to hell, because their desires, the desire for their own pleasures, their own will and their own way, their own self-focus and self-preoccupation, is so contrary to heaven.
[25:05] There is no way that they can enjoy a reality that is so contrary to their desires. All of this to say, whatever else it is to be born again, whatever it is to experience spiritual regeneration, it is about a transformation of desire. If we are going to love Jesus, He must transform our desire. But second of all, He must empower our will so that we can align our will with His will, so that we can truly follow Him. My friends, it's quite possible to have a certain degree of happiness and satisfaction in this life apart from Jesus.
[26:03] There is a certain happiness and peace and satisfaction when we actually realize the sinful, selfish desires of our heart. But if God transforms our desires, where we begin to desire to be one with Christ and to walk with Him, and we don't have the power or the wherewithal with which to do so, to align our will with His will, it is miserable. It is a frustrating life to desire to follow Jesus and not have the power and wherewithal with which to do so. It is a miserable life to desire to be a Christian and not be able to live as a Christian.
[26:52] When people experience this frustration, which comes about from this disparity between the holiest desires of our heart and what we're living out, when we hit this sort of wall in our life that we seem to can't get past, there's usually one of four responses to it. One response as a Christian is to sort of settle in and acquiesce to the reality of what it is to live in that frustration. Oh yeah, there might be times and places I can align my will with Christ, but there will be times and places I simply can't. And that's the reality of this life. So they acquiesce and give up.
[27:39] That's one response to this frustration. A second response is to turn back and give up on Christ altogether. You know, if you tell someone who has been so broken by their sin, most of us in this life, if you come from a fairly healthy background, a fairly healthy family, you can learn to manage your sins. You can learn to sort of get by in life, but if you've been so broken by your sins, strongholds of sin, addictions in your life, you can't take one step forward.
[28:24] You can't make it through life, and then you tell someone like that, "Give your life to Jesus Christ and He will change and transform," and that person gives their life to Christ, but they never experience the change that you have said He would bring. They hit that wall, and they've been hitting that wall all of their lives, and they never get past that wall. Some people just give up and turn back on Christ altogether. I will tell you, that was my temptation in life. There's a third response. A third response is to believe that when we hit that wall in life, maybe by the grace of God and the Holy Spirit, we can bring down that wall one brick at a time, so that if we live long enough in this life, that wall will be taken away from us. That's a third response.
[29:17] A fourth response is to believe that God in a moment can smash that wall down and not only transform our desire, but liberate our will so that we can truly follow Jesus, so that we can truly love Him. My sisters and brothers, I have good news this morning. I will tell you that God can not only transform your desires, He can empower your will so that you can walk with Jesus, so that you can experience union with Him.
[30:07] And it has everything to do with the Holy Spirit. You will notice Jesus, as He's talking about, "If you love Me, you'll keep My commands." It's all interspersed with His discussion of the Holy Spirit. Notice in verse 17, Jesus says, "The Spirit of truth, the world cannot accept Him because it neither sees Him nor knows Him, but you know Him, for He lives with you and will be in you." Would you say this morning, I can see some of you have fallen asleep in the dark. I'd be doing the same thing, so don't feel bad. Would you say, not just with you but in you, not just with you, but in you. One more time, not just with you, but in you.
[31:03] And then in verse 26, Jesus says, "But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, will teach you all things and remind you of everything I have said to you." I want you to know what Jesus is talking about. Here isn't some sort of intellectual cognition here. When He says, when the Holy Spirit comes, He will remind you and teach you of all things. In other words, though, when the Holy Spirit comes upon us, He will empower and impart the teachings of Jesus to us in order that we might be able to live it out in life. Oh, my sisters and brothers, my friends, the good news is that through the Holy Spirit of God, you can truly love Jesus.
[31:53] You can desire Him above all else, and then you can align your will with His will, desire and will bringing about the union, which is the very essence of love. Hear me this morning, hear me this morning. The Holy Spirit of God has been sent by the Father through the Son, so that you and I can truly walk in love. What's love got to do with it? It has everything to do with it. In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, amen.
[32:42] Let's pray. Holy Spirit, we welcome You into our midst, and we thank You that You are not just with us, but You are in us. We pray that our lives would be so filled, that our desires would be transformed and our will would be empowered in order that we might be able to walk lockstep in union and in love with our Lord Jesus Christ. We know this is nothing that we can do in our own power and our own strength. So we bring before You our desires, and we bring before You our will, transformed and empowered, in order that we might be able to walk in love. And we ask this not just for our sake, but we ask this for the sake of the church, and we ask this for the sake of a lost and dying world.
[33:39] In the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord, we pray into the glory of the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Let's give Christ a thank you.