Advent 2024- Love from the God Who Welcomes

Pastors Brian, Heather, and Anthony Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. [Pastor Brian] Matthew 1, 18-23 Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel, which means God with us. Welcome to the Bridgeway Christian Church Daily Advent Devotional for Sunday, December 22nd. My name is Brian Kiley, and I serve as the Director of Discipleship here at Bridgeway. And this is the beginning of week four of Advent. And the theme historically for this week is love. We've talked about hope and peace and joy. And today we're going to talk about love. I'm joined by Pastor Heather and Pastor Anthony. And for both of you, I often feel like in Christian spaces, our understanding of love can be a little bit too small or can be perhaps incomplete. In fact, in a book I was reading recently, the authors wrote this. They said, I want to get your thoughts on that, both of you. We'll start with you, Pastor Anthony. Do you think that's true? Why or why not? [Pastor Anthony] I have a very strong opinion when it comes to emotion in the Bible. I think we often reduce what we might talk about as love, joy, peace, as something that resides within our regions of feeling and inner emotional realm. When what we see really displayed in the text is an enactment of a relationship. And so when it comes to love, I want to say that there's a strong impulse towards allegiance, enactments of allegiance and deliberate choice when we talk about love in the Bible. And so, yeah, I align with that perspective. That's resistance to an impulse to reduce love to some kind of cozy feeling. [Pastor Brian] So, and we tend to do that. Love is this sort of sentimental, which it is. I'm not saying it's not that, but Pastor Heather, it can be so much more than that. [Pastor Heather] Yeah. Well, I mean, I think some of the gift of 32 years of marriage, that love is cultivated and it changes over time. I mean, I think, yeah, my feelings for my husbands are deep, but they're totally different than they were when we were engaged or when we were first married. I also think when we think about the power of love, we really underestimate the power of sacrifice. And I think that that's the Christmas story. I mean, obviously that's the resurrection story, but it's also the Christmas story because Jesus sacrifices his kingship, his godness, and comes in human form. And that's a sacrificial type love. And the power in sacrificial love, it doesn't come from me, at least not for very long. I might sacrifice in the beginning, but that's not coming out of human strength. It's really knowing the sacrificial love from the father that's undeserved, unmerited. It never ends. There's nothing I can do to reciprocate that love. And yet I still receive it. I welcome it. And then I'm able to actually give sacrificial love or demonstrate sacrificial love. Even when I'm able to do that, not out of my own humanness and mix of emotions, I'm experiencing sort of the power of love. [Pastor Brian] And I can't help but wonder if so often in our world we associate power with things like control or the ability to manipulate circumstances or the ability to kind of, you know, you bark orders and people respond. And those are displays of power to be sure. But I think as the quote I read earlier said, we don't tend to think of love as powerful. But I can't help but think that that is because we have settled for this kind of sentimentalized version of love, whereas what you're describing, Pastor Heather, this sacrificial element, like that is love that can get things done. That is love that can affect change, right? [Pastor Heather] Yeah. Well, and I even think about, you know, my kids when they were younger. They did what I asked out of obedience. They were young. Obedience is really, really important in the early years. But as they aged, we needed them to understand that a lot of what we asked them to do was out of a motivation of love. [Pastor Brian] Yeah. [Pastor Heather] That when they're younger, we ask them to do the dishes and we need them to obey, you know, bring your dish to the sink. But when they're older, we want them to do the dishes because that's what you do in a family to demonstrate love, you know, of being together, of working together. It's a demonstration. So I think that there's different types of motivation that empower us. And I think that that love motivation is so much more empowering than obedient. [Pastor Anthony] Yes. Love as a commitment with a risk. When you see that demonstrated, you can't help but feel it, like be changed and impacted by it. [Pastor Brian] Love as commitment with a risk. I like that. [Pastor Heather] That's really good. [Pastor Brian] That's really good. Now, I'm going to get on my soapbox here and share a little sort of pet peeve of mine that in Christian spaces, so often I'll hear people say things like, well, we need to balance love and truth or we want to stand up for truth but be extraordinarily loving. And it's almost as if we're trying to play love and truth off of each other, that they're actually opposites to be held in tension. Pastor Anthony, are we right to kind of view those things as opposites, that we need to like find a way to hold together? [Pastor Anthony] I like to think of that question from the lens of our Trinitarian God. So 1 John 4, I believe, tells us that God is love. We also read that Jesus describes himself as the way, the truth, and the life. So love and truth are embodied as relational beings and they are in like unison with one another. So from a perspective of the Trinity, they are not opposites. They are in lockstep. They are in sync. They are part of each other, intertwined. And so as Christians, believers, dedicated to living the way of Jesus and to enacting love and truth, I think we have to find a way to bring the Trinity, the reality of God, to bear upon both of those in our lives. [Pastor Brian] And as you said, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit perfectly encapsulate love, truth, all of that. And there's not a tension there to be balanced. I think something that concerns me a lot about that kind of language is that it's almost as if we're giving a pass to go, it's okay to not be loving if you need to tell the truth when that truth might be difficult. And certainly there are any number of environments where we might have to share difficult truth or have difficult conversations where I want to caution us is to go, okay, the truth is not the opposite of love. And the truth is not something held in tension with love. That actually if there is difficult truth to be shared, at the very least, that truth must be shared from a motivation of love. And that is not kind of warm sentimentality as we said, but it's shared from this sense of I desire someone else's well-being. I'm willing to sacrifice for them, not simply assert my own rights or my own authority, but rather I want to kind of put myself in a position where, again, I'm sacrificing, I'm making a commitment, I'm showing that concern for somebody else. And when we kind of pat ourselves on the back for telling the truth and then say it's okay that we weren't loving while we did it, man, I just think we've missed the mark on that. [Pastor Heather] Yeah. Well, and I think the image is coming to mind for me that, you know, love is a really robust trellis for the truth. That we can be really truthful with one another as if we have that relational, the trellis, the trust that is, I know that person cares deeply for me and I know they have my best interests at heart. A lot of truth can be told. It's an and, not an or. [Pastor Brian] And I do wonder if maybe oftentimes if we find ourselves willing to set aside love for the sake of truth, maybe that's a way of just a little catch in our spirit ought to be there to go. Yeah, maybe you just don't have the relational capital, right? I mean, I think about like the three of us, we've worked together for a long time. We've got a super high level of trust. We can communicate very honestly with each other. But if we're brand new or we don't really know each other, there are conversations that would be completely appropriate now. [Pastor Heather] Yeah. [Pastor Brian] That just wouldn't be if we hardly know each other. And I think there's space for us to go, okay, what authority do I have? What right do I have to like share maybe difficult truth to somebody? Right. [Pastor Heather] Have I earned the right? [Pastor Brian] Totally. Now, as we begin to wrap up, the Christmas story, of course, is a profound story of love. Not just because it's about God coming and dwelling with humanity, but because of why he came. God could have taken on flesh and become a human for any number of reasons. But the verse we just read at the start said that Jesus came to save us from our sins. That this was a rescue mission. This was a way to save us from ourselves to restore our relationship with God and to do so at great sacrifice. So as we wrap, I want all three of us to have a chance to share. How does the love we see evidenced in the Christmas stor