Life, Light and Love | Rev. Adam Hamilton | Church of the Resurrection

2:13 of 1 John today, but I wanna begin by telling you a story of something that we do in our family every summer. We go to the Lake of the Ozarks. We've gone there for 20 years, and as our granddaughter was born, we take her down there during the summer. Her mommy and daddy have come down there with us during the summer, and one of my favorite things to do is we just float in the water. We put on our life jackets and here's a picture of Stella and I. She's now in sixth grade. I think that was last year. But we just lay out there in the water and we float and we look up at the sky and it's just perfect. If the water temperatures in the 70s, the ambient temperatures in the 80s, upper 80s, it's just like magic. And you look up at the sky and blue sky and there's clouds up there and we began picking out the figures, the animals or what we're seeing in the clouds. And somewhere when she was about five years old, she said this to me, Papa, this is the life. This is the life. And you know, that life, it wasn't something that we have to pay for.

3:05 We just lay back in the water. You could do it anywhere. But there's something magical about being with somebody you love and doing something you love and you find life. Now, I mentioned that story because in John's gospel, John is interested in helping us find the life. In Greek, the word is zoe. Zoe, from which some of you, the name Zoe comes from this. Zoe, zoology comes from this. The zoo comes from this word. It means literally in Greek, it means life. And it can mean one of two things. It can mean just physical life, something that is alive, but it can also mean a quality of life. And in John's gospel and in 1 John, the first epistle of John, this word shows up again and again, 15 times in the first epistle of John. It's only five chapters long, 15 times, three times a chapter. He uses this phrase, Zoe, and it really calls it the Zoe, the life. And so when he's talking about the life, what does he mean? He's not talking about something being physically alive. He's talking about spiritual life. He's talking about, he's talking about a quality of life. And that quality of life starts here and now, and it continues into the afterlife. So often he uses the phrase eternal life. Six times in 1 John, he uses the phrase eternal life. And by that, he doesn't mean heaven. He doesn't mean what happens when you die. He means what happens now as you're beginning to plug into the life you were really meant to have as a human being. And that continues after death. And so eternal there means timeless, means beginning without end, something that transcends time. And that's what John wants us to have. He wants us to have life. Today, we're going to explore three big themes in 1 John. And these are themes that I think will mean a great deal to you. I hope they do.

4:36 The first is just life. What is the life? How do we find it? The second is the light. How do we find the light? What is the light? And how do we live and walk in the light? What happens if we don't? And then finally, we're going to talk once more about love. So that's where we're heading in today's sermon. And as we do that, I want us to turn again to this idea of life, the life that God wants us to have. Now, where do we find the life? And let's just say the good life. So when we think about the good life, we often think about, you know, a life of leisure. We think about a life with, you know, our, you know, the house that we always dreamt of and the income that we wanted to have and being able to take trips and travel and, you know, everything that money can buy. And yet in 1 John, that's not necessarily where we find the life. By the way, for people throughout history, they've thought, if I could just acquire enough camels or enough gardens or enough, you know, amass enough wealth, I'd be happy. There's an entire book in the Hebrew Bible that is really about this, Ecclesiastes, about somebody who was, you know, at the end of their life trying to amass all this wealth, and they found none of it ultimately made them happy.

5:37 There was a survey that I was reading this week that was conducted in 2023 by Empower, which is a financial services company, and it's called the Financial Happiness Survey. They surveyed 2,034 Americans, 18 and older. And I'm just going to invite you, if you have pen and paper, I'd love for you to write down what you think the answers are to these questions, and then I'll tell you what the answers are. So first, what percent of Americans believe more money would solve most of their problems? What do you think? What percent? Write it down. The answer on the survey was 71%. More than two-thirds of Americans think, if I had more money, it would solve most of my problems. Here's the second. How much does the average American say they need to make per year in order to be happy? What annual income would you need in order to be happy? What do you think the answer was? You might write that down. And here's the answer. $284,167. That was the average. $284,167. By the way, which gender do you believe thinks you need more money in order to be happy?

6:31 What do you think? Men or women? And the answer was men. Men believed that you needed to make $381,000 a year in order to be happy. Women were content with $183,000 a year. By the way, millennials. millennials thought that you needed $525,000 a year in order to be happy, which is really sad news for millennials because less than 1% of Americans make $525,000 a year, which means that 99 out of 100 millennials are destined to be unhappy in their life. And what percent of Americans answered yes to the question, can money buy happiness? And by the way, how much will it take? Well, what do you think? 59% of Americans said yes, money can buy happiness. 72% of millennials thought money could buy happiness. and $1.2 million was the magic number by which you'd be happy. Now, 1 John pumps the brakes on this way of thinking. I want you to listen to what he says in 1 John 2, verses 15 through 17. Don't love the world or the things in the world.

7:28 Everything that is in the world, the craving for whatever the body feels, the craving for whatever the eyes see and the arrogant pride in one's possessions is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world and its cravings are passing away. But the person who does the will of God remains forever. I think this is interesting. 38 times, I think, in the gospel or in 1 John, 38 times in 1 John, John mentions the word love. Almost always he's telling us to do it. This is the only time where John is telling us not to do it. He says, don't love this. Don't love the wrong thing. Now listen, possessions are okay. Everybody needs possessions. We need clothing. We need shelter. Most of us need transportation. We need food. We need a lot of these things. And it's not a sin to have those things, but the question is, is that what you think is gonna make you happy? Is that what you've centered in your life? Because the word agape here is used once more, which has to do with a dogged determination to bless or a care for somebody else or a concern for something.

8:25 And if you have a over-concern for possessions, if you love possessions, that takes center place in your life. You've centered it in your life, and you're gonna find you're never gonna be satisfied. As of course, Mick Jagger said, I can't get no satisfaction, and I've tried and I've tried and I've tried and I've tried. All right, so Jesus said it this way in Luke 12, 15, a passage I read to you at least once a year. Be on your guard against all kinds of greed. Your life, there it is, zoe, your life does not consist in the abundance of possessions. You are not gonna find zoe, the kind of life that God wants you to have simply by amassing more possessions. Instead, in John 10, 10, Jesus says, I came that you might have life. I came that you might have zoe and have it abundantly. abundantly. I love this. The word abundance shows up in both those passages. Luke 12, 15. You know, your life does not consist in the abundance of your possessions. And Jesus says, I came that you might have life abundantly. And the Greek word purisos means to exceed, to overflow more than you could need beyond measure. And that's what Jesus is promising us.

9:30 Now, I want you to notice again that a main theme of John's gospel is to love, but we need to love the right thing. We need to center the right things in our lives. And of course, we know from Jesus that that is to center God in our lives, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and to center the love of other people. And we find that our happiness, our satisfaction, follows from those things. It's not that we don't need a good job. We don't need all these other things. It's just that that's not where satisfaction, where the life is ultimately going to be found. All right, I thought about this, and in what sense could I say I have found life in Jesus? And I began to reflect upon this. It was about 1.30 at night, and I was working on the sermon, and I thought, so what does that look like for me? So what that looks like for me is a sense of Christ just continuing and constant presence in my life. The first person I talked to in the morning, the last person I talked to at night, throughout the day, I have thought about the fact that he is with me no matter what.

10:23 He gives me a sense of purpose and meaning in my life. Like this is what I'm striving to do, is to follow him and to do his will in the world. And when I not only pray, but seek to live, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven, I find joy in that. When I'm involved in ministry, when I am caring for other human beings, I find the greatest joy in my life, not just for my family, but for people, sometimes people I don't even know. But in the process of doing that, I find life. When I take my eyes off of myself and my concerns and I begin thinking about other people, I find the burdens are lessened in my life. When I'm afraid, I turn to him, I pray, I talk to him, and I sense his presence walking with me in the darkest of places. When I feel unloved, I believe his words, that I am loved, that I am loved by God with a love that's everlasting. And when I face the darkest things in the future, when I think about, you know, even sickness, illness, death, I have hope in the face of those because I know none of those things have the final word.

11:18 This is what it looks like for me to have life in Christ. And that comes in trusting in him, putting our trust in him. All right, so this life, this eternal life, we tap into it here and now, and it's meant to be something that shapes us, changes us, and makes us the people that God wants us to be. So I want us to ask this question. What is the evidence that you have this life? So how would anybody know that you actually are living the life that God intended for you to live? And 1 John answers that question. He says this in 1 John 3, 14. We know that we have transferred from death to life, there it is, Zoe, because we love the brothers and sisters. The person who does not love remains in death. So love is a central part of finding life. If you don't have love, you're missing out on life. If you're still living in death, you might have a pulse, but you haven't found life yet.

12:08 All right, that leads to a second important theme in 1 John. And this theme is light. And in the Bible, this is a constant. You find this throughout the Bible, from the very first page of the Bible all the way to the end, a contrast between light and darkness. And we're not just talking about photons that we can see with our eyes. We're talking about a reality that's deeper than just what you can see. And so when we think about this light and darkness, light signifies or symbolizes awareness. We think about enlightenment. enlightenment. We think about a knowledge, understanding. It also signifies purity. It signifies brightness of life. It signifies hope. It signifies righteousness. It signifies God and God's will. God himself is light, we find in 1 John, and clothed in light. This is light. We think of it also as hope. So when we think of light, we think of hope. On the contrary, when we think about darkness in Scripture, we think about despair. We think about darkness. We think about, well, darkness.

13:01 We think about sin. We think about unrighteousness. We think about things that are not according to God's will and anything that is contrary to God. Ignorance, sin, despair are all a part of the darkness. Now, metaphorically, we're all stumbling in the dark without God's light. And of course, scripture talks about God being our light, the light for the Israelites, a light to the nations. God's word is a light to our feet, a lamp for our feet and our light to our path. But we listen to the words of 1 John 1, 5 through 7. This is the message that we have heard from him, that is from Jesus, and announced to you. God is light. God is light. And there is no darkness in him at all. If we claim we have fellowship with him and live in the darkness, we are lying and do not act truthfully. But if we live in the light in the same way that he is in the light, we have fellowship with each other and the blood of Jesus' son cleanses us from every sin. I wanna ask you, are you living in the light?

13:57 Are you walking in the light? Are you listening to the voices of the light? Or are you spending a lot of your time in the darkness? I read a study this week from the National Institutes of Health about kittens, kittens, and how if you take a kitten at about five weeks while their eyes are still developing, you take a kitten at about five weeks and you leave them in a dark room, you know, you feed them, you make sure they're taken care of, they're not scared, but there's no light in that room. If you leave them there for 10 days, they're gonna be blind for seven weeks. Well, not completely blind. The eyesight will begin to come back little by little, but it takes seven weeks for their eyesight to be restored. When light or the eyes are developing, their sensitivity to light, and you shut off the light, you leave the kitten, and I would say spiritually, the human, in darkness. When we think about that is in our own lives, if we spend a lot of time in the darkness, we spend our lives fellowshipping with people whose thinking is darkened.

14:53 If you spend a lot of your time focusing on the kinds of things that are in the darkness, you know, the ignorance or sin or unrighteousness or, you know, all of these things. If you're listening to voices that are not about love but about hate, and you listen to those voices long enough, you find that your own eyesight, your own spiritual eyesight begins to be diminished or compromised. You find that spiritually, you find your heart, your mind drawn into the darkness if you're going to spend a lot of your time in the darkness. This is part of why Paul says light can have no fellowship with darkness, that we're not to be unequally yoked with people who are living in the darkness. Because, you know, it's one thing to befriend people. I want to befriend everybody. But if I'm going to spend most of my time hanging out with people who are thinking, you know, what we might call stinking thinking, you know, if they're thinking hateful things or they're saying hurtful things or their values are different than the values that I have in Christ, I'm going to find myself drawn to that. And it's only by spending more time in the light that I'm going to find my spiritual eyesight restored.

15:47 The author of 1 John speaks about living in the light and how we know we're in the darkness or in the light. So listen to these words. This is 1 John 2, 10 through 11. He says, the person loving a brother or sister stays in the light, and there is nothing in the light that causes a person to stumble. But the person who hates a brother or sister is in the darkness and lives in the darkness and doesn't know where to go because the darkness blinds the eyes. Isn't that interesting? The darkness blinds the eyes, the eyes of the heart. And so again, who are you listening to? You know, what voices are you listening to? Where are you spending your time cultivating the values that come in the light or those that are in the darkness? I was thinking this week, and I mentioned this last week, we spend a lot of time on social media. And maybe not all of you, but many people do. And the younger you are, the more likely the time is. The amount of time you spend on social media is significant.

16:40 And when you think about that, again, you know, when I'm looking on social media, so I think about, and I don't mean to be critical of X, because there's a lot of good things on X, what used to be called Twitter. But somehow in the feeds that I see there coming across are the reels. These reels are little short video clips. And you see these video clips, and you find the worst of humanity often shown there. And often these little clips are shown to make you fearful of somebody else, another race, another gender, another group of people, another nation or religion, to make you fearful of these other people. You'll find videos of people beating somebody up, and they're designed to make you fearful, and then out of fear comes hate. So perfect love casts out fear. but when we're giving into fear, what we find is hate begins to develop from that. Out of our fear, hate. And you find these, I mean, it doesn't take very much time to find these. They're on TikTok, all over the place on TikTok, depending on what you're watching. If you look on Facebook, you're gonna find this. You're gonna see this in the comments we make towards one another.

17:34 You know, we just find it so easy. You know, people who are living in the light, but you find on social media, they end up gravitating in some ways, or at least we find ourselves regurgitating or taking on the attitudes of the people who are living in the darkness when this is what we're listening to in the darkness? How much of the time do we spend listening to one-sided news? So, you know, there is no perfect non-biased news. As hard as anybody might try to do that, there is no perfect non-biased news because humans are biased by their nature. But when you're listening to the news, you know, as we're listening, or we're watching or listening to our podcast, what voices are we putting inside our heads? And are those voices positive or are they negative? Are they, you know, are they striving to call people to love their neighbor and even their enemy? Are they trying to point out all the flaws of their enemies or their opponents and then making other people, you know, rise up against them? Are they driving wedges between people or are they building bridges between people? And we live in a society today where we make money by having, you know, dramatic headlines on news stories.

18:34 You know, we call it clickbait to get somebody to click on something that just seems ridiculous. And of course, often we find ourselves listening to the things that line up with our biases. And so confirmation bias is where you continue to listen to people who confirm the things that you already fear or think about the other. If you're a Democrat, that's the things that point out all the failures of people who are Republicans. And if you're a Republican, maybe all the failures of Democrats, conservatives, liberals, you know, Christians and Muslims or non-Christians or whatever, you're going to find that we find ourselves listening to and being drawn towards the negative kinds of things that are talking about other people. So I just want to ask you this question. Are the things you're reading or watching making you more loving or less loving? Let me actually say that again. Are the things you're reading or watching or listening to, are they making you more loving or less loving? Listen, we live in a time so polarized that it's hard not to become jaded about people who are on the other side of the aisle or to look at other people and to become angry or to be fearful.

19:35 And in our fear, we begin to hate. It's so easy for that to happen today. So how do we not do that? Now, this summer, Sonia Barshawski celebrated her 100th birthday. And many of you know, she's a part of the Kansas City community. I've had a great joy in spending time with her on multiple occasions. I interviewed her about 13 years ago. And I've played this interview for you before, but I wanted you to hear it again. Holocaust survivor, her family, almost all of them were killed in the Holocaust. And she talks about hate. Take a listen. We had a hiding spot under our bed, under the floor. They came with German shepherds and they smelled us out. This was, I'll never forget, May the 3rd. Why do I remember? Because this was my brother's birthday. When we came to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the first thing they were shaved, shaved, you know, and a tie and gave us different, you know, clothes.

20:37 And then we were, we had to be numbered. We had a selection. And when I came in front, we were all naked. We already knew what it means right and left. So he put my mother to the left and me to the right. So you can imagine that moment. I wanted to go with her. But the SS woman was pushing me, you know, to the right. It's like God wanted me to see my mother for the last time. I pushed myself to a door and I looked through the little peephole and what do you think I saw my mom in this column for the last time. It was the most horrible, horrible day for me. I shall never forget. Who am I?

21:31 What kind of power am I to say I forgive because this would be wrong for those people in the way they perished? Do I have the authority to say I forgive? I cannot say this, but I will not hate. Spread love. Put goodness in your heart. Be helping each other. people, others, when they need help. This is, I think, the greatest thing for any Christian or any human being. This is a woman who lived through the Holocaust. This woman who lost her family in the Holocaust. And yet she says, I cannot hate. She can't forgive, she says, because it's not mine to forgive. All those people died. They would have to forgive. What I have chosen to do is I've chosen not to hate.

22:25 That's a choice we make. And when we make that choice, we move to the light. And when we choose to hate, we remain in the darkness. Again, who are the voices you're listening to? Are they leading you to be more loving or less loving? to hate or to love. Now, in addition to 1 John's clear call to put Christ in the center of our lives, to follow him and to make him our king and our Lord that we learned about last week, and the call to find life and to walk in the light, the gospel or the epistle is really focused on making sure that we know that all of that looks like love. To live as a follower of Christ, to walk in the light, to find the life, is to find the capacity to and to actually decide to practice love. Now, I want you to remember 38 times in these five chapters, the word love is used more than any other book in the entire New Testament. 27 books in the New Testament, many of them much longer than this one. But 38 times more than any other book in the New Testament, 1 John tells us you have to love.

23:23 And I want to end by noting this. So it calls us to love, but the reason why we have the capacity to love is because God loves us. And that's what we see throughout the epistle. God loves us. God loves you. God knows everything about you, and God loves you. So listen to 1 John 3, verse 1. See what kind of love the Father has given to us in that we should be called God's children, and that is what we are. And then 1 John 3, verse 1, twice in 1 John, John says the same thing. God is love. No other ancient text in the world says that same thing. God is love. Not until the 16th century does the Sikh text finally say the same thing. 1,600 years after, John makes these words, writes these words down twice for emphasis. God is love. The very nature and character of God is to give God's self away, to be selfless and sacrificial and to care for the other, to seek to build the other up.

24:16 And the other is us and we are his children. And God is love. Now, I have to just tell you how I imagine what that love looks like. There are times it becomes really clear to me. I've often said I learn more about God and God's love from being a father than I ever learned in seminary. I have two degrees in theology. But I learned more by being a dad about love than I ever, and God's love in particular, than in any textbook, any class. So I wanna think about this for a second and share with you a story. So we were in England during the month of August. I was leading different groups, as most of you know, preaching several sermons from England. And in the last group, I was in our room. It was 1.30 in the morning, and I was working on my lectures for the next day. And I received a text from my daughter, Rebecca, who's getting married this coming Friday. And she wrote me and she said, Now, for her, it was six hours earlier. It was, you know, 6.30, 7.30 at night.

25:09 And she said, hey, Dad, you know, what songs do you think we should dance to? What songs should we dance to for the father-daughter dance? And I stopped everything I was doing on the lecture. And I just began to think about my daughter and her getting married. And the, you know, the song I wanted to dance to with her. And I started getting kind of choked up as I am right now even talking about it. And I began going through pictures of my daughter. she was growing up as I was listening to songs, you know, that are the, you know, I went on and searched, you know, father, daughter, dance songs. And I'd already done this when our older daughter, Danielle, got married 15 years ago. So I had some songs in my mind and I'm looking at these pictures. Here's some of the pictures that I was thinking about. That was, you know, this picture when Rebecca was born, we were at St. Luke's Hospital. Or the next picture, when she was baptized, like the second Sunday, Church of the Resurrection was in existence 35 years ago in the Funeral Home Chapel.

26:02 And there she was. I was holding her. And these other pictures. Oh, by the way. So look at that picture. And I'm holding Rebecca in my arms. And Danielle's standing, you know, below LaVon. And we restaged that picture 30 years later. You can see it here during our Love Your Neighbor campaign. And there we are. And I'm holding Rebecca in my arms. And Danielle's on her knees about the height she was when she was little. And we just had a good time restaging that. The next picture is, you know, when she was a little kid. And she's just so full of life. Just such joy. And the next photograph, you know, is a picture when we, this is just recent. This was at Rebecca's new plant shop as she opened it up, Virgil's plant shop. And just the joy LaVon and I've had in being, I'll just tell you, LaVon feels it, but the joy I feel in being her dad. And this is Rebecca and Jared's engagement picture. And this is the man that I had prayed for for years, that Rebecca would find somebody who would love her the way I love her, who would love her as much and care for her and cherish her as much as I cherish her.

26:57 and I'm listening to these songs, you know, and sending ideas to her back and forth and I sent her the name of a particular song, Aloud and Wainwright's, That's My Daughter in the Water. Everything she knows, I taught her. Everything she knows. That's my daughter in the water. You know, everything she wants, I bought her. Everything she wants. And then later on, every time she fell, I caught her. You know, and I listen to the song and of course it's not true because I didn't catch her every time. I tried to. I didn't buy her everything she wanted. I didn't teach her everything she knows. You know, she's learned a lot since she moved out of the home. But what I started thinking as I was crying, listening to this song, is I thought, you know, that was my heart's desire. It's like whatever she wanted, I wanted to give her within reason, something that wouldn't hurt her. But I wanted to bless her with everything. And I wanted to teach her every good thing I could possibly teach her. Everything I knew, I wanted to give that to her. And if she ever fell, I wanted to pick her up.

27:50 That's my daughter in the water. And I sent this to Rebecca and had a little video with it with a little girl. And Rebecca said, now I'm crying, Dad. But here's the thing. I love her so much, sometimes it hurts. I love her so much that if it was within my power to do it and it would be good for her, I would do it for her. And I've told her before, you know, if you needed a heart, I mean, I really believe this. If she needed a heart, I would ask the doctors, please take mine. I don't need to live anymore. I want her to live. That's how much I love her. And as I was thinking about this crying, you know, preparing my lecture for the next day in England, I thought, I think that's what 1 John was teaching us when he said, God is love. Is that God loves you so much it hurts God. God loves you so much that he was willing to send his son who would lay down his life to show you, this is the depth of God's love for you. God loves you so much. And it's out of that knowledge that you are loved, that you have the capacity to love other people. You see, it's really hard when you've never felt loved to love other people genuinely. Instead, you're constantly trying to get people to say they love you. But if you really feel loved and you know you're loved, you find the capacity to love other people. So this is what we read in Scripture. We read in 1 John, this is how the love of God is revealed to us. God has sent his only son into the world so that we can live through him. This is love. It is not that we loved God, but that he loved us. And once more, we read, God is love. So we have two responses that we are to make to a great love shown to us. I mean, my daughter could reject my love. She could decide, you know, I don't want my dad. I don't care about my dad's love. Doesn't matter to me.

29:37 Or she could be grateful and receive my love and then love me in return. And that's our response to God's love is we accept his love. We let him love us. We trust in his love. and then we love him, we reciprocate his love and then we hear his call for us to love other people and out of the depth and resources of our love from God, we are able to love one another. Listen to what 1 John says in chapter four. Dear friends, if God loved us this way, we also ought to love each other. No one has ever seen God, but if we love each other, God remains in us and his love is made perfect in us. I was listening to a story this week on the radio and it was on NPR and there was a man who was talking about, you know, his parents, his father, and he was talking about how his father had found religion and after his father found religion, things kind of went sideways in the family and there was, you know, his father began to believe in conspiracies and just things got hardened.

30:33 And then there was somebody else who chimed in and they talked about, you know, a family member found religion and after they found religion, they were less loving, not more loving than they were before. And I thought, what a tragedy. Religion's not meant to make us, at least the Christian religion is not, I don't think any religion, is meant to make us less loving. Our faith is meant to make us more loving. So I want to ask you another question today, or just really a statement. I just want to say this. If your religion is making you less loving, you either have the wrong religion or you seriously misunderstand it. And I'm going to say that one again. If your religion is making you less loving, you either have the wrong religion or you have seriously misunderstood it. I want to ask you, is your faith making you more loving? And my aim every week when I'm preaching, this is how I picture the act of preaching, is I'm hoping that you're hearing a word from God and that when you leave the service of worship, you leave intent on being more the person God intended you to be than when you walked in the door.

31:36 And that also means, particularly means loving other people. All right, one of you wrote me this last week, a note, and I appreciated it. You said, you know, governments can't really live according to these ethics you're talking about, you know, Adam, it's kind of naive to think a government can practice that. Maybe it's naive. But of course, politics involves rules and restraints and punishments. But you know, even those you can do in a loving way. And so I think it's worth asking, is our government, this government, the last administration, the next administration, are they doing what governments are meant to do in a way that reflects love? Because as human beings, that's what the creator of the universe is asking of us. Another wrote from the opposite political party and said, I think, you know, how can I love people whose policies are hurting others who are taking away freedoms and liberties? I cannot see how I can love people like that. And you know, sometimes it's really hard.

32:28 But here's the thing, we have to be able to protest, but to protest, if you disagree with what's going on now, or if you disagreed with the last administration or the next one, you have to be able to speak up and say, I think this is wrong. I think we need to choose a better way. but even that you can do with love or you can do it with hate and with hate you just divide people but with love you have the opportunity to actually change people's minds I spoke to a friend this week who ran for Senate some years ago he described the death threats he received when he ran for the U.S. Senate like what is what have we come to as a nation I think about obviously Charlie Kirk last week or Democratic Minnesota Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband who were both murdered because of their political you know, their political, her political role. Or I think about, of course, President Trump, who had two attempts at assassination, or Pennsylvania Governor Shapiro, his house being set aflame. Like, there's something terribly wrong in our society, and it has to do with the voices of the darkness and listening to them. We can stand up for what we think is right. We can protest when we think something is wrong. We can, you know, we can advocate for government to do what it's supposed to do and various government policies from right to left. But we can do all of that seeking to do it from the perspective of love. And I just want to remind you of what Dr. King said.

33:43 You know the quote very well. Darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that. Jesus said this, this is my commandment, that you love one another. So I want to ask you this question. What voices are you listening to and which ones do you need to tune down or tune out altogether? And is your religion making you more loving or less loving? And if it's less loving, you either need a new religion or you need to rightly interpret your religion. And I'm hoping here at Church of the Resurrection, you're hearing really clearly, the call of Christ is to love. So I wanna end this two-part sermon series by going back to our memory verse today. Would you join me in reading this aloud? Dear friends, let's love each other because love is from God and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. The person who doesn't love does not know God, for God is love.

34:41 Let's live these words. Let's not just memorize them, but let's live them. In Jesus' name.