Radical Love: Stir Up to Love & Good Works

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Radical Love

Let Us Stir Up to Love and Good Works

Introduction: We read it so easily, don’t we? “Let us stir one another up to love and good works…” (Hebrews 10:24). The word “stir” is translated different ways:

• • NIV: “spur”
  • ASV, CSB, NRSV: “provoke”
  • NASB: “encourage” 
  • NLT: “motivate”
  • Some older versions used “stimulate”

Further, stirring one another up to love and good works isn’t just done on occasions. The Hebrews writer indicates there are designated assemblies in which this stirring up is to happen. The question is, is that what we are doing? Answering that question ought to cause us to more carefully examine why we meet and what we are doing when we meet.

Last Sunday night we sang for well over an hour, not because we had to or there was a written requirement, but because we were feeling and enjoying our shared love for God and for each other. This should be our motivation for all our togetherness.

1. Foundation of Love and Good Works
   1. Our dedication to God and our Lord Jesus is directly determined by our thankfulness to our Father and our Savior and to the Holy Spirit for the beyond imaginable sacrifice they made so that we could escape the bondage of the Serpent and live forever in God’s presence.
   2. A Christian who gives little believes they were forgiven little. Jesus contrasted Simon the Pharisee with the sinful woman when he said, “She loved much because she was forgiven much. But he who is forgiven little loves little.” It is easy to spot. Simon was a good, moral, church going Jew, but his love for God did not come close to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind.” However, the openly, public sinful woman could not stop saturating his feet with her tears and kissing his feet because she was so appreciative of his forgiveness. Which person are we, Simon or the woman?
   3. The Hebrew writer spent 10½ chapters telling the brethren of the Great Salvation that has been offered to them. As he did, he repeatedly rebuked their laziness because it was unbecoming of the great salvation they had been given. In 10:19-25, based on all that God had done through Jesus, he gave three concluding admonitions:
      1. Vs. 22, You must draw near to God… [are we really “near?”]
      2. Vs. 23, You must hold fast… [there is a natural “drift”]
      3. Vs. 24, You must stir one another up to love and good works… 
   4. Now, as we begin this lesson, each of us must ask ourselves two serious questions:
      1. Am I stirring Christians up to love and good works? Do I intentionally meet here to worship in order to connect with and stimulate certain individuals to love and to serve God better? Just put it simply: who are you helping serve God better?
      2. Do I have any intention to love God with all my heart, soul, mind and strength and love my neighbor as myself? That’s the command. It’s the number one command, which if it is not first in our lives, makes anything else I do for the Lord worthless. 
   5. Jesus called us to radical discipleship. He called us to radical love.
2. Radical Love Is Seen in God’s Purpose for a Local Church
   1. It is striking that everywhere Paul preached, he left a local church. In 2 Corinthians 11:28, Paul said, “And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches.” We read it so easily as if God was concerned about people having a place for “worship services,” but we must take a deeper look.
   2. “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another” (Prov. 27:17). If you are like me, you have often read this passage to mean, two friends get together and challenge each other to do better than they have done before; like two friends weightlifting. Nothing wrong with that, but let me offer you a more common scenario: 1 Cor. 1:10.
      1. Imagine the challenge Paul gave the Corinthians in this verse. Imagine what the Corinthians had to do to obey this command. How many times would they have had to meet and talk out problems? How many apologies would have been necessary? How many times did someone have to forgive another (ch. 6)? How many people had to “come forward” and confess wrongs? Even harder, how many false teachers were in their midst who had held sway over the church with their charismatic personalities, but the church had to reject them?
      2. When iron repeatedly grinds against iron, what is happening? When I sharpen my mower blade, both the blade and the grinder lose part of itself. When the blade loses its roughness, it becomes more useful; it is sharpened. But it takes the grinding and the loss to make it so.
      3. When we come together, we are to sharpen one another. But that only happens when we each lose part of ourselves. The problem comes when one of us does not want to lose any part of themselves. They are proudly proclaiming, “I like the way I am.”
   3. Notice another text: Isaiah 11:6-10. 
      1. What was God predicting that he would create when the Messiah came? Wolf with a lamb – violent with gentle. Calf and lion, leopard and young goat – powerful with the helpless. A nursing child with a cobra and a weaned child with a pit viper. 
      2. Then note the words of verse 9: “They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” What did God do when he sent his only Son into the world? He brought natural enemies together. He brought together in peace those who in ordinary circumstances would have devoured one another. In other words, the person whose nature was to be a wolf, no longer acts like a wolf and the lamb no longer needs to fear the person who was at one time a devourer. 
      3. Where will they “not hurt or destroy?” In all my holy mountain? God’s church is to be a refuge from the hurt and destruction that is present in our world. We should not find hurt here! Here, we find healing. Here, we learn how not to be wolves and bears. Here, there is peace. But this requires us to act in ways that are not natural for us. 
3. How the Local Church Produces Radical Love
   1. Now back to our original question. Why did God put us together as a church? It is because the design of a church is similar to the design of a marriage (Eph. 5:22-34). My boys often asked me how important compatibility is in choosing a mate. My answer has been that while having similar backgrounds can make things easier at first, all of us change in many ways. Therefore, adaptability and two people learning to grow in unity and love in spite of flaws and sins is the more important than compatibility. Marriage, just like the church, throws us into close quarters, causing us to learn about each other’s flaws and demand that we love, forgive, and renew our relationships anyway.
   2. The reason God calls divorce a sin and places upon it harsh consequences is because when there is no way out, we must work it out. Ephesians 5:31-32 When Jesus quoted the words, “The two shall become one flesh,” he then concluded, “What God has joined together, let not man separate.” However, in our text, Paul tell us that the command goes beyond our physical relationships. Our  local church and our marriages are a preparation so that the Lord can present us to himself a bride of splendor.
      1. God has used marriage and the church to cause us to learn to become more God-like; to learn to love like God. Marriage isn’t intended to be easy, nor is its primary goal to give us happiness. The primary goal is holiness. It is the same for having children. These independent “creatures” who have a mind of their own, offer us a mirror into which we see our own flawed image. They challenge us to lay down our lives and truly love even when they have acted unlovable. 
      2. The same is with the church. God throws wolves, lambs, leopards and calves together into intimate quarters, not because it is going to be easy, nor because the primary goal is an idyllic paradise, but because our striving together for love and unity brings us to holiness and godliness.
   3. This calls us to an accountability to one another. When the apostle said, “Let us stir one another up to love and good works,” (10:24), and “exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today,’ that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin” (3:13), are any of us to sit by idly and watch another Christian slip/drift away! If I start drifting, you better not be silent!
   4. How sad when a marriage splits up, and how sad when we church hop just because we can’t get along or someone treats us poorly, or even that we are embarrassed for how we acted and we do not want to face people. It is interesting that as bad as the Corinthian church was, Paul never told the few who were not in sin to move down the road and start another church. On the other hand, Paul expected change; he expected repentance, and he expected a church that learned to love one another (1 Cor. 13). There are some people we naturally & quickly love. Others, we must learn to love.
   5. For example, in the parable of the good Samaritan, who loved his neighbor as himself? Was it the person who naturally would have come to the aid of a dying Jew? “The wolf and the lamb have been brought together.”
   6. Catherine Anne Porter made this observation about the dilemma of marriage for a young bride: “This very contemporary young woman finds herself facing the oldest and ugliest dilemma of marriage. She is dismayed, horrified, full of guilt and forebodings because she is finding out little by little that she is capable of hating her husband, whom she loves faithfully. She can hate him at times as fiercely and mysteriously, indeed in terribly much the same way, as often she hated her parents, her brothers and sisters, whom she loves, when she was a child… And yet, she hides those contradictory feelings from him because as she goes on to say, ‘Above all, she wants him to be absolutely confident that she loves him, for that is the real truth, no matter how unreasonable it sounds, and no matter how her own feelings betray them both at times. She depends recklessly on his love.’”
      1. In the same way we experience those feelings in our church family. We want to love and we desire to be loved and we demand of ourselves to love because of God’s love for us, but our flaws and our feelings often betray us. However, we must press on.
      2. What will destroy us in marriage and in the church is expectations that problems and hurt feelings are somehow indications that this marriage or this church is not for us; that somehow we made a mistake. No, there is no mistake. Wolves and lambs have purposely been put together so that we learn to love like God loved us. Unless we do, we have not become like God and we do not love God.
   7. Thus Ephesians 4:1-3. We act in such a way that creates an atmosphere of love. That is what we do to make a good marriage knowing that in so doing we will reap lasting benefits and deeper fulfillment from the one we love. Therefore, let’s face it, whether it is marriage, children, or that which we are all called to be, members of his body, his family, these relationships force you to face some character issues you would never have to face otherwise.
   8. Matthew 25:34-40 Consider Jesus’ words, “As you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.” We are the bride of Christ, right? As his bride, we want to treat him with love, we want to know him and understand him, and be drawn close to him. Jesus said, the way we treat one another is how we are treating him. Every person who is married knows one thing, and every person who has children knows one thing: these relationships call upon us to confront our selfishness; they call us to a selfless life. That is exactly what we are confronted with in a local church.

Berry Kercheville