Growing a Love That Lasts - Part 1

0:37 Over your lifetime, there's a lot of things that are going to change in your life, some for good, some for bad. But there's one thing that's never, never, never, never, never going to change in your life, and it is God's unconditional, unrelenting, undiminished, everlasting love for you. That is what you can build your life on. That's the foundation for a stable life. God's love is reliable. It is unchangeable. It is consistent. It is dependable. It's steadfast. It's unwavering. It's enduring. the fact that God will never, never, never love me any more than he does in this moment and he will never, never, ever love me any less than he does in this moment means that God's love for you and for me is everlasting.

1:31 That's the way God loves you. But he doesn't stop there. He then says this, and here's the hard part. I want you to love everybody else the exact same way. Hello? What? No, no, no, I want the conditional love for me to give out. You gotta earn my love. No, God says, I want you to love with a love that lasts on and on and on. John chapter 15, if you pull out your message notes, the very first verse, Jeremiah 31 verse three, God says, I've loved you with an everlasting love. I loved it in the message paraphrase. I've never quit loving you and I never will. You can build your life on that verse right there. But then, here's the hard part, John 15, I command you to love each other, by the way, in the same way that I love you.

2:25 Hmm. How in the world do you do that? How do you practice everlasting love? I mean, is it even possible to have everlasting love? Today in America, the divorce rate is 41% for first-time marriages. it's 60% for second time marriages and divorce rate for third time marriages is 73%. The track record gets worse. It gets worse. Now the truth is anybody can fall in love. You know, it's like falling in a ditch. I fell in love.

3:03 Anybody can fall in love but it takes a whole lot more to stay in love. Everybody want to agree with that one? It's a whole lot harder to stay in love than to fall in love. The reason is because it includes choices. You have to make some tough choices in order to stay in love. You have to make those choices over and over and over and over. Is it even possible to have a love that lasts an entire lifetime?

3:32 Let me just take a little survey here. If you have been married 25 years or longer, would you stand up right now? Okay, look at this, 25 years or longer, look at this. Okay, congratulations, I honor you. Now, if you have been married over 40 years, stay standing. Look at this, 40 years. Alright, thank you. Now, if I were to ask each of these, you may be seated, if I were to ask each of these people who've been married 40 years or longer, was it easy? What do you think they'd say? Of course not. Kay and I last year had our 40th anniversary. I rolled over in bed in the morning. I said, I'm proud of you, honey. She said, I'm tired of you too.

4:22 The hearing is the first thing to go, you know. Mark Twain said, you don't really know the depths of real love until you've been married 25 years. you can get along on good looks for five or six I'm no prophet but I can tell you two things about the people who just stood number one was their love if they've been married 25 years or longer their love has been tested by doubt and depression and despair and differences and disagreements and disappointments and defeats and their love has been tested by distance and it's been tested by delays and dead ends and by debt and by disease and by demands on their life because it's not easy to stay together. These are what I call the big Ds, doubt, despair, death, disease, all these things.

5:20 But they avoided the big D, divorce. They made it over that one. And the reason they made it over that one is because they made some tough choices. These choices are not always popular They're not always easy They're certainly not convenient But the fact is, and I've told you this many times Love is a choice Love is not a feeling Love produces feelings Woohoo! Yeah, it produces some great feelings But love is not a feeling If love were a feeling, God could not command it Because you can't command a feeling It's like telling a little kid who's crying I command you to be happy I'm trying daddy You can't force the feelings. Feelings are just there. You can't command a feeling. Love is not a feeling. It produces feelings. Love is a choice.

6:11 You choose to love. And if you stop loving, that's your choice. Don't blame anybody else. You chose to stop loving. Love is a choice. And you choose to love or you choose to not love. Now if you want to make a love last, and I know you do, And as your pastor, this church is committed to helping people find the love of their life, those who want to marry. It's committed to helping you stabilize and strengthen your relationships, whether you ever marry or not. Friendships, partnerships, marriages, families, and all the other kinds of relationships there are. You can't live in a world without love, whether you ever marry or not. But if you want to learn to love in ways like God loves, the everlasting kind of love, you're going to have to learn to make four very important choices.

7:04 We're going to look at them this weekend. Now, of course, the great chapter in the Bible on love is 1 Corinthians chapter 13. It's called the love chapter. And we're going to, in just a minute, look at what God says are the four things, are the four choices I must make in order to make it to the finish line, in order to have a love that lasts a lifetime. 1 Corinthians chapter 13, verse 7, says this. Four things about love. Four choices we need to make. Love never stops being patient. Never stops believing. Never stops hoping. And never gives up. That's everlasting love. That's the kind of love God has for you. It's the kind of love God wants you to have for other people. And so this weekend, Tom and I want to share with you these four choices.

8:00 Let's get right into it. Number one, the first choice for a lasting love is that lasting love extends grace. Lasting love extends grace. I want to spend the most time on this point because the longer you are married, the easier it is to become ungracious.

8:21 You just start getting a little bit more critical as time goes on, taking each other for granted. Every day, if you're going to have a love that lasts, you've got to choose to be merciful, choose to be loving, choose to be gracious, choose to forgive, choose to be patient, choose to cut people slack. No relationship, whether it's marriage or any other, no relationship is going to last without grace, without a little bit of forgiveness, without a lot of acceptance and a lot of patience. In any long-term relationship, you have to put up with a lot, right? I saw some elbows jab just then.

9:01 Now, let's just admit it. It's easy to show grace one time. You hurt me one time, that's no big deal. I can forgive you for that. I'm a big enough guy. It's no big deal to forgive a person, to show grace, to show patience one time. It's that thing that goes on and on and on and on and on and just irritates you no end. But the Bible says this. love never stops being patient. The message says love puts up with anything. The Bible says love patiently accepts all things. The Bible says love is always ready to make allowances. Now, when do I need to extend grace to the people in my life? Three important times. You need to write these down. Three important times you need to work on. This is a choice you're going to have to make every day of your life. if you're going to have your relationships last.

9:55 Showing grace. The first is I'm going to have to show or extend grace when their flaws and their faults irritate me. I heard a murmur in the land just now. When their flaws and their faults irritate me. Now, the longer you love somebody, the more you know their flaws. And you can either be critical or you can be gracious, you can be picky or you can be kind, you can be a perfectionist or you can show mercy.

10:26 The reason why grace is essential in any relationship is because we're both in that relationship imperfect. You're a sinner, they are a sinner. Together, two sinners can't create a perfect relationship. It is impossible and foolish to think that two imperfect people could create a perfect relationship. It isn't going to happen. So grace has to be at the foundation of every single human relationship between parents and children, brothers and sisters, moms and dads, husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends, employees and employers, co-workers and on and on and on. We need grace. Proverbs 17 verse 9 Disregarding another person's faults Preserves love I love that I remember hearing one time A lady talking to another lady in church And she said Do you remember when your husband did that?

11:21 And she was talking about a bad thing that happened And I loved what this woman said She said I distinctly remember forgetting that event That's a choice. I distinctly remember forgetting that event. Why? Because love disregards. Love disregards another person's fault. That preserves love. Ephesians 4.2. Be humble and gentle by being patient with each other. Making allowances for each other's faults because of your love. Circle the phrase making allowances. Now, notice it says, be humble, be gentle, and it says, be loving because of your love. Do you consider yourself to be a loving person? You'd say, probably, yeah, I do. Do you consider yourself to be a humble person? Yeah, I just wrote a book on it, it's a bestseller.

12:15 How to be humble like me. Do you consider yourself to be a gentle person? Well, the truth is, you're none of those if you're critical of other people's faults and flaws. You are not humble if you are critical of other people's faults and flaws. You are prideful. Every time you criticize somebody's faults and somebody's flaws, you are being prideful. You are not being gentle and you certainly are not being loving because love is patient. Love puts up with anything. Love patiently accepts all things. Love is always ready to make allowances. Everybody needs an allowance. The rest of your life, you're going to need a grace allowance in all of your relationships. Kay knows that there are two times of a week when she needs to make special allowance for me. The first is Saturday afternoon when I get PMS.

13:15 Pre-message syndrome. I'm just going, oh God, this is not good enough. These people need something better than this. Surely somebody could teach this better than me. Why don't you get somebody who really knows how to do this? And I'm always going through this every week, going pre-message syndrome. And then the other time she shows grace is on Monday when I'm recovering. After all of the multiple services of the weekend. But she makes allowances. When other flaws and faults irritate me, then I need to extend grace. Another time is when their words or actions hurt me. Now the truth is because we're human beings we hurt each other, sometimes intentionally. But the truth is a lot of times we hurt each other unintentionally. We say things we don't mean, we say things off the cuff, we do things, we're not thoughtful, we're thinking about ourselves, we're not intentionally trying to be hurtful but often we're careless with our words and with our actions.

14:18 The reason why we're careless is because we're not paying attention. We're not paying attention to other people's lives. You might write this on your outline. Grace listens. Grace listens. The reason why we hurt each other is because we're not really listening to each other. God gave you two ears and one mouth. You know that means you listen twice as much as you talk. The first duty of love is to listen.

14:49 I'll say it again. the first duty of love is always to listen. The number one organ for showing love is your ear. It's listen. When you look at people in the eye and you listen to them with your ear, you're saying, I value you. And that says, I love you. And it makes you gracious. The problem we have in all our relationships is we talk too much and we listen too little. You know, I grew up in the country and we actually had a lake behind our house and it was filled with French frogs who would croak every night. Did you know that bullfrogs, when they croak, they have a muscle in their throat that when they croak, that muscle cancels that frequency to their brain. They can't hear how obnoxious they are. We're a lot like bullfrogs. We don't realize how obnoxious we are when we're talking, talking, talking, talking, and we're not listening, and we can't even hear it.

15:52 Now, I used to do marriage counseling. I can't do it anymore because our church is just so big. But when I did, the single most important marriage advice I could give you for the rest of your life is the next verse. James chapter 1 verse 19. It's up here on the screen. Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry. If every married couple followed that verse, 95% of all the arguments wouldn't happen. Usually we're quick to speak and we're slow to listen and then we're fast to anger. Now if you do the first two, the third is automatic. If you are quick to listen and if you are slow to speak, you will be slow to get angry. That's a choice. It's not an easy choice. It's not a convenient choice. But that's a loving choice.

16:45 It's an unselfish choice. And if you want to have a love that lasts forever, you've got to learn how to be quick to listen and slow to speak instead of anger. Now, if you want a love that lasts, you can't hold on to those angers. You can't hold on to your hurts. A lot of people, when they get hurt in a relationship, they stockpile them for ammunition. They not only stockpile, they not only remember every hurt they've done, they categorize them. They inventory them. They get them all ready so then later when they do a mistake, they go, well you did this, but you did this, but you did this, but you did this, but you did this, but you did this. I was talking to a lady the other day and she said, man, you know, I did something wrong and my husband got historical. I said, you mean hysterical. And I said, no, no, historical. He told me everything I've ever done wrong.

17:38 The Bible says love keeps no record of wrongs. You gotta let it go. Proverbs 17, verse nine. Love forgets mistakes. Nagging about them parts the best of friends. If you want your marriage to last, you gotta eliminate nagging. It doesn't work. It's never changed into anybody. Which is, by the way, why I don't nag you. Nagging doesn't work in a home. It doesn't work from the pulpit. Every week I could get up here and tell you everything you're doing wrong. Because I know it.

18:09 I see you. I read your mail. And I could get up here and I could just nag you every week. Has nagging ever changed anybody? No. It doesn't. It's worthless. It doesn't work in church. It doesn't work in home. It doesn't work at school. It doesn't work at work. It doesn't work anywhere. Nagging parts the best of friends. The Bible says love forgives all offenses. and there on your outline, Proverbs 19, 11, when someone wrongs you, it is a great virtue to what? Circle that. Ignore it. Just ignore it. That's extending grace. Hey, thanks for listening to Pastor Rick's Daily Hope. Here's Rick with an important message. You know, I just want to take a quick second to say thank you, everybody. Thank you for listening, for sharing this broadcast, and for your faithful prayers, and especially your financial support. God is using you in a mighty way to get the message of hope out to a world that's desperately in need of Jesus Christ. Thanks for listening today, everybody, and please be sure to join me next time as we look into God's Word for our daily hope.