Summary
Pastor Safrit continues his series on love from 1 Corinthians 13, focusing on what love is not. He emphasizes that love is not resentful and does not keep a record of wrongs, urging the congregation to forgive as Christ forgives. He also teaches that love does not rejoice in evil but finds joy in truth, encouraging believers to reflect on their attitudes towards others and to embody Christ-like love in their relationships.
Welcome and Church Information
Thank you for listening to Pleasant Grove Baptist Church Sermon Audio. For more information, please visit our website, pgbcronda.com, or visit on all social media platforms. Young people, like I said, the children's church can be dismissed at this time. It's often said that the young people are the future of the church.
I like to say that the young people are the church. They're leading, they're bringing their friends to church, they're serving just the way we are, just in a different capacity, and yes, they are the future.
Yes, they're going to take over the deacons and the Sunday school teachers at some point, but they're the church now, and I'm thankful that these young people just led, and I can't imagine me as a 13,
10, 8, 7-year-old getting up here and doing what they just did, and I'm thankful for them and what they've done today in leading us in worship.
We're going to be in 1 Corinthians chapter 13, continuing to look at what love is and what love is not, and I'm going to do my best to keep it in their time today.
I like to speak, and I like to talk, and I like to preach, and it's what God called me to do. I will say by way of introduction, my buddy Nathan, I sent a text out this week to be praying for him, and I thank you for your prayers. I covet those.
Thursday, it was not looking good for him. They had called the family, and I think that's when I sent the text out. And Friday, I went to lunch with my dad and my brothers, and as I was leaving, I got an update from his wife that said, Nathan's awake. He asked for his family.
He's sitting up. They've got food in him for the first time.
He's still going to lose most of his fingers, possibly a foot.
Kidneys and liver still haven't woken up. His spleen is operating about 10%, but he's awake, and God is good.
And me and I called a buddy of mine. I sent it to him, and we just cried on the phone, just wept together. And through that crying, I said, I said, John, I said, God's good.
And he said, that's all we can say is God is good. And so I thank you for your prayers. He's got a long road of recovery.
Haven't got an update today, but I know that the family is still requesting prayers. If you would continue to pray for Nathan Cravat, he's on the list as well. Dear friend of mine, we went to Israel together.
And he was a dear, is a dear, dear friend of mine as well. And so if you would continue to be in prayer for him and the family down in Georgia, he's also a church planter in Asheville.
A tree, like I said last week, a tree fell on his house during the storm.
But God was all fit to save his life during that as well. So they've got a lot to be thankful for. We have a lot to be thankful for this morning, church. And I'm thankful for you to be here.
So if you have your Bibles in 1 Corinthians 13, we're going to stand and read the first six verses this morning in the message. The Bible says, Let us pray. And to his disciples. And he says,
Love as I am love. It's not an envy. It's not boastful. It's not arrogant. It's not rude. It's not selfish. And it's not easily angered. And then today we'll look at two of the last two negative statements of today as we look through what love is not.
A few weeks ago, I gave a story about a guy named R.C.
Chapman. Anybody remember R.C. Chapman and what his name was, his famous name? We want to do a little history here, see if you're paying attention. What was that? Not Charlie. He was the apostle of, we're talking about it. It's on the screen. Love. Yes. All right. He was the apostle of love. Okay.
But the problem with being the apostle of love, and you may have experienced this in your life. You may have loved someone unconditionally and poured your love and poured your heart out to them, and yet they not love you back. Has that ever happened to anyone? Where you love someone,
you invest your life in someone, and they don't show that love and appreciation back toward you. I was sharing this morning in our Sunday school class. I did a funeral last night, yesterday afternoon for a lady who's 49 years old.
She died of a drug overdose, and her father called me on Monday when I was at the convention and said,
Grief and Love in Loss
Pastor James, will you do her funeral? And I said, Dale, I'd love to be honored to be there and do her funeral. And he said, you know, this is my last child that I'm burying. I buried all four of my children.
He said, you've done three of the four, and three of those four were died of drug overdoses. And he's just, as he was saying that, as I'm thinking about it, I mean, if I called, we call him Possum.
If I called Possum tomorrow and said, I need this done, or I need a load of mulch, or if I need, he would drop everything he's got, and he would bring it to my house. And it's the same way with his kids.
When his other daughter died, he was housing this daughter, and she was abusing drugs, and she was taking advantage of his money, and she was stealing from him.
And he would often tell me, I give so much, and yet they don't really give anything in return, and now I'm burying my last child. And oftentimes in our life, we feel neglected when we give love out, and we don't receive it in return.
R.C. Chapman was outside preaching one day in his ministry, and as he was preaching,
oftentimes while he was preaching, a man would interrupt his air preaching while he would be preaching on the street corners. He would be giving the good news. He would be helping people. This is in England, where open air preaching was normal. And one man specifically,
a local grocery store owner, literally said he hated the preaching and his ministry, and he said, anytime I heard him preaching, I would interrupt him. I would make a commotion. I would make a noise to distract the people because I didn't like what he was doing.
It's the man who loved people. It's the man who cared about people. One day, Mr.
Chapman had a relative that came by that had some money and had a little bit of affluence into them, and he said, I want to come and see your hospitality ministry and see your social working of what you're doing, and I want to help out.
And the relative said, hey, can I help you out by buying some groceries for your ministry? It's the least I could do. Mr.
Chapman said, I agree. As long as you purchase every item from this one specific shop,
the man who had made his mission to malign him, that had made his mission to interrupt his preaching, he said, this is where you're going to go. The family member had no idea that this grocer had a problem against Mr. Chapman. So the relative did as directed.
He went and filled up multiple carts of food and pallets of food and went to check out, and the grocery store owner came. He was excited.
He was selling all this stuff, and he said, where do you need me? Can I help deliver this food?
I want to go above and beyond, right? You got someone that's coming to give you business. You want to help them out? He said, can I help you deliver this food? He said, well, actually, I'm out of town. Can you deliver it to the house of R.C. Chapman?
The grocery store owner took a step back and said, you must be mistaken. That man would never send business to this shop. I've done everything I could in the power of my body to stop his ministry.
Why would he send you here? He said, all I know is he told me the only place I could buy food was from this grocery store.
The owner took the food to Mr. Chapman's house, and when Mr.
Chapman opened the doors, it was recorded that Mr. Chapman said that the grocery store owner broke down in tears and began to plead for forgiveness.
He said, that day this man believed in Christ because of one man who wouldn't be resentful toward the actions of another man. To forgive without unbrioting his road is, even by manner or look, is the highest exercise of grace. Ultimately, it's the imitation of Christ.
When we can love and we can withhold our feelings and do everything we can in the manner of grace toward others, we are showing the love of Christ in that moment. So it leads us to the first one is, love is not resentful. As the end of verse 5 says,
love does not keep record of wrongdoings or of wrongs. Love doesn't keep any records.
It's said that when we keep records of what other people have done and we begin to think on it, when we begin to meditate on it, it just begins to work deep in our hearts.
I want you to imagine for a moment your wife or your husband does something wrong toward you, and all you do is think about the wrong that they did toward you.
And you just continue to dwell on that day and night, and the next time you see them, your appearance toward them is going to be resentful.
Your appearance toward them is going to be in a negative manner because all you're doing is thinking about the wrongs that they have done to you. One person said it like this.
It's a common statement that you've heard before. It's like drinking poison and expecting it to hurt the other person.
It's like taking poison and putting it in your bottle of water and every day looking at that person and saying, I hope this poison hurts them, and then you drink it.
And the only thing it's doing is it's killing you from the inside out. It harms your soul, and it harms your mental state because you are so resentful toward them. When we get to the place, church,
that freedom to not keep records of wrongdoings, it begins to liberate the amount of love that we can show to one another.
When we can get to the place where we don't have to worry about what people do to us, where we can just show the love of Christ, the way Christ showed love to the ones that were killing him.
Ultimately, as I've been studying and really immersing myself over the last 10 or 12 weeks in this passage of Scripture, what love is.
It has been a wake-up call in my life, church, to say, am I truly loving the way Christ and the way Paul writes in this passage of Scripture to say, love others this way.
You see, oftentimes in my life, and I can only speak for my life because I'm the one up here speaking,
oftentimes I may be not right physically down people who have harmed me, people who have done wrong, but it's hard in our mind to forget the things that have been done wrong to us. It's hard in our mind to abandon those thoughts.
And Christ, through the writing of Paul, says, if you're going to show love, you've got to abandon the writing of wrongdoings, which how do we do this, church, is simply as love forgives.
Love forgives, and as one person said it this morning in Sunday school, love forgives and forgets, but the forgetting part is the hardest part. It's easy to forgive at times, but it's hard to forget what they've done to us. That's why Paul says, love does not keep a record of wrongdoing.
Forgiveness and Letting Go
Love abandons the record and forgives and moves on. Colossians 3.13 says this, bear with one another, and forgiving one another, if anyone has a grievance against another, just as the Lord has forgiven you, you are also to forgive.
The Bible says in Psalms that when Christ forgives us, he casts our sins into the depths of the sea where no man has ever been, and he separates them as far as the east is from the west. And he forgets all that we have ever done
when we come to the saving forgiveness knowledge of Jesus Christ.
In church this morning, if we are going to be Christians and we are going to be Christ-like, we must get to the place in our life where when we forgive, as Christ has forgiven us and forgotten everything that we've ever done, we also can forget the wrongdoings of other people.
And again, we're not Christ, and we're not God, and we don't have this ability to forget when times are hard. But Christ commands us to forgive as Christ has forgiven us. And then in Romans 12, 21, the Bible says, do not be conquered by evil, but conquer evil with good.
When we are hurt, it allows us to return to the very first sermon we spoke about in this series. It allows us to go back to what Jesus said. They are going to know that you're my disciples by how you love one another. When we conquer evil with love, the world says,
there's something different about that. What does the world say? In this world, it's a dog-eat-dog world.
Step on the person in front of you in order to get to the next stage of life. And Christ says, that's not the way of a Christian.
The way of a Christian is, humble yourself before them. Love them. Wash their feet. Serve them in an attitude of service. Think about the power of love. Love can overcome evil.
Evil that happens in our life. Evil that happens all around us. Love can overcome it. Love can cover painful memories.
Think of something that happened so long ago that you don't even think about anymore because you've allowed love to overcome that. Now in that moment when someone hurts us, when there's a painful thing that happens,
yes, it's immediate in our life, but as time goes on and we separate ourselves from that, that love covers those things and love allows us to live a life that is ultimately of a life of forgiveness. Love empowers us to forgive. Love allows us to abandon revenge. Love allows us to capture resentment.
Resentment can creep in like something so small, something like a small little termite that comes into our house that we don't even see.
It doesn't bother us. And as it stays there a little bit longer and resentment begins to build in our life, that termite brings more termites.
And then the next thing you know, you're having to rip your floors up and tear out the joists underneath your house to fix the damage of one little small insect. And it says resentment is just like that little termite
that builds and buries and begins to corrupt and rot the wood underneath that house.
In church this morning, that is what resentment will do to our life if we allow it to be harbored in our life. Lewis Smead, one of the commentaries I was reading after wrote it like this, he said, love does not have to clear up all misunderstandings. In its power,
the details of the past become irrelevant. Accounts may go unsettled. Differences remain unsolved. Leaders stay unbalanced.
Conflict between people's memories and how things happen may not be cleared up and the past begins to stay muddled. Oh, but then love prefers to tuck all the loose ends in the past right and wrongs in the bosom of forgiveness and pushes us to a new start.
When I read that, I thought, how often do I allow those loose ends to be left unloose and allow the frailty of humanity to begin to go through my life and I don't allow love to tuck all those
loose ends together and just not care about the little things of life. You see, when we begin to move toward a life of reconciliation,
that is when we begin to see forgiveness. That is when we begin to see love that is greater than anything else. And this is, church, the hardest thing any human being will ever be asked to do
is to be pushed our life toward reconciliation. Christ says, I'm going to come and I'm going to give you this more excellent way. If only you can get toward reconciliation.
I oftentimes will mention different Bible characters and I want you to imagine for just a moment David. David, David who had ascended to the place where God said, you're going to take over the throne of Israel.
You're going to be the greatest leader that ever lives and eventually I'm going to bring my son, the redemption of Israel through your line.
Think about David in this moment, how puffed up and easily it could have been for him. Then he goes and he kills Goliath and Saul looks at him and says, I hate you.
I can't stand that you're getting all this recognition. I can't stand, resentment began to build up in his life and he said, I'm going to chase you into the end of your life or the end of my life.
And all throughout 1 and 2 Samuel, you read the story of David running and David fleeing and David trying to survive and David almost being killed and David almost being captured. And then you come to 2 Samuel where David heard the news that Saul was killed in battle.
Now you can imagine, if you've taken this word picture with me and you've imagined maybe your mortal enemy in life who has tried to ruin your life and you hear the news of them being killed,
the excitement that may become of your life and this is what David's response was to Saul being killed.
David took a coat of his clothes and he tore them and all the men with him did the same. They mourned, they wept, and they fasted
until the evening for those who were dyed by the sword. For Saul, his son Jonathan, the Lord's people,
and the house of Israel. Man, when I began to see that, I began to say, if that would have been me
and my mortal enemy was just killed and now I have the rightful heir to the throne, I am going to ascend to the throne, I am going to be the king of this wonderful nation, I don't think that this would have been my response. I don't think I would have said,
how can it be? How can it be that Saul was killed and I began to rip my clothes and began to mourn and began to weep and not eat because I would have been so excited that finally my mission that God has called me to do is there.
And oftentimes, church, we don't have the response that David had and I'm going to get to this point right here because David was a man after God's own heart.
And when our heart is not aligned with God's heart, we don't respond like this.
But when our heart is aligned with God's heart, and a bad news comes that we don't know how to respond and we don't know what to do and we turn our heart over to God, we say, God, give me the wisdom that only you can give.
We begin to see our heart begin to align with God's heart and our heart begin to look like what David's heart looked like. Jim Elliott, a famous missionary who went to the Q&A and the Indians,
him and his four people that were with him, five in total, were killed by the people he went to love. The five widows, when they were interviewed, they asked, what is your response to what has happened? And each one of those five women said, revenge is never going to be an answer.
One reporter gave this account. The widows believed that their husband's death was not a meaningless tragedy as it appears to many. No thoughts of revenge cost our minds, but rather the contrary. They felt an increased sense of urgency and the need to bring their message of love and redemption to the Echuan Indians.
Jim Elliott's wife wrote it like this. It gives, and I want you to think, your husband is just killed by a foreign people who he sacrificed his life for, and this is the response the woman gave. It gives me much more personal desire to reach them.
The fact that Jesus Christ died for all makes me interested in the salvation for all. But get this, the fact that Jim loved and died for these Indians
intensifies my love for them. Today, because of these women, New Testament translations have been made in the language of these Indians, and countless New Testament churches have been established in their tribes, all because love doesn't keep count.
Love doesn't keep count of the wrongdoings. Love just forgives, and love moves on, and love says, I love you so much, all I can do is share Jesus with you. That is what love does.
Which leads us to the second point here, and maybe my last point for the day, love is not joyful over evil. This is the last negative statement that Paul gives. He gives eight negative statements in the middle of positive and positive.
And we're going to go back to the positive next week, but I think it's important for us as human beings to sometimes just sit in the negative and to sit in our minds in what things are not, the negated statements of the scripture, and us to understand
there are some things that are difficult in life. There are some things that we're going to go through as human beings that because of sin, because of the wrongdoings that we've done, we're going to have to have some of these hard conversations.
Love and Moral Integrity
You see, love cannot find distorted pleasure in injustice or unrighteous acts.
Think about it for a moment. We live in a world today where people have called evil good and good evil. Abortion, the world says it's good and God says abortion is bad. Same-sex marriage, the world says this is good and God says this is wrong.
Scroggie said it like this, another commentary, a man rejoices in its fair test of his character. What a man rejoices in is what his character is in.
And as I begin to think through these things in our world, my mind went to Romans chapter 1.
If you've ever read Romans chapter 1, you begin to see a generation of people that God began to work in, these wicked Roman people, and it gets to the end of this chapter, and this is what Paul writes about Romans and these people of Romans.
And because they did not think it worthwhile to acknowledge God, God delivered them over to a corrupt mind.
I want us to just think about that statement for just a second. God delivered them over to a corrupt mind so that they did what was not right.
Church, how often is it that this is where we are at in our life where the people that were around where God says they could not even think of me and acknowledge me and so I'm going to give them over to your wrongdoings.
Verse 29, and they were filled with all unrighteousness and evil and greed and wickedness.
They were full of envy and murder and quarrels and deceit and malice. They were gossipers, slanderers, God-haters, arrogant, proud, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to their parents, senseless, untrustworthy, unloving, and unmerciful. Love cannot be found in any one of those attributes of the Church of Roman.
The Christians in Rome, the people of Rome, nowhere does Paul say they loved God, they had a corrupt mind, but they loved God. No, it says they were corrupt and God turned them over to their corruptness. Paul, in this writing, I don't see anywhere where Paul looks at it and says, I'm so glad.
Man, look at these Roman people, they're evil, they're wicked, they've done all these wrong things, I'm so glad God's turned them over to a wicked mind. No, in this writing, you can hear the despair in Paul's writing that they were full of evil, they were gossipers, they were slanderers, they hated God.
And you can just see that he wasn't joyful, he was praying for them, he said, God, I want you to deliver them, I want you to help them, and he said, but you don't even see it worthwhile because of how wicked they are.
Paul looked at them and he said, I can't rejoice over this, I can't rejoice over these things, I'm going to pray the more, and he goes on for so many more chapters encouraging them and trying to challenge the church of Rome because he wanted them to reach the ones that were around them.
So often, church, we get to this point where we go to church and we should go to church and we're around people and we say, well, at least I'm not like that person over there. At least I'm not wicked like that person over there, you know, I'm pretty good.
And God says, when did that become the test of who we are? When did the test of looking at someone else and saying,
well, I'm just happy I'm not where they're at become the bedrock of who we are? Paul says, love is not joyful over evil.
Love Rejoices in Truth
Love, love, love when it sees evil, it should be, should be pushed to the, should be, should be pierced to the soul that would to God their life be changed. Instead, he says, love rejoices in truth. Counterparts to this rejoicing in evil should be rejoicing in truth.
A loving heart should be saddened by the wrongdoings of others.
We think of Israel, we think of, as Terry mentioned last week, the problems in Israel and the difficulties that have happened in our day and age that we're living in right now, that I tell my kids and I tell people that I'm around often, we are living in history right now.
We are living in what will be written down in the history books and we will be saying like those who I've talked to that were in World War I and World War II and the Vietnam War where they'll,
they write and they tell me these stories, we will have these stories in our life that we will be telling our children and our grandchildren.
Love rejoices in truth. Love doesn't rejoice in genocides. Love doesn't rejoice in the abuse of children and love doesn't, love doesn't rejoice in the abuse of women. Love applauds all virtue and goodness.
One of the greatest delights and this will be my last personal illustration before I close these down here. One of the greatest delights as a pastor in my life and I've never done this until this last week. People often say,
well, why do you go to the convention? Why do you go to the North Carolina convention or the SBC convention?
This past week I was sitting with a buddy of mine, Dave, who just took a church in Bethel, North Carolina and he looked at me and he said, James,
he said, why do we do what we do? Pastors, it's tough, it's difficult, I'm not going to lie. People are difficult.
If you're a school teacher, if you're an administrator, Don over here, he's an administrator for many years, people are difficult. He could get up and tell me stories and stories and stories. He said, why do we do what we do?
He said, he said, just think for a moment. He said, how many lives has your life actually really touched?
And I never thought of that question like that. I really, I do what I do because I love people. God called me to do this and I sat there
and for the next hour we sat there and talked about lives after lives after lives of the three ministries, four ministries, if you count one, that I volunteered in that I had been a part of.
the marriages that I've officiated, the kids that they've now had, that they're raising their kids in church, the marriages that I've helped save through the grace of God as I sat with a mom and a dad who was ready to bust up that marriage. And I began to go through
person after person who's a deacon in a church now, who's teaching a Sunday school class now. And in that moment, in that hour span, I looked at Dave and I said, I've never done that thought experiment before
but I'm more encouraged now after you ask that question than I was before you asked that question. Because love rejoices in truth.
Yeah, I could ask that same question of the reverse of how many people are now living a life of immoralness.
And I could go down that thought experiment, I could go down that as well and me and Allison, we've had those conversations of a girl named Tamara who grew up in our youth group who now is married to
another woman who is in a same-sex relationship. And I'll just give that one because her mom often will text me and say, I'm just broken over my daughter. Will you pray for my daughter? She's not rejoicing in the wrongdoing of her daughter. She's saying, God will work in this situation.
And oftentimes, we just need to take a step back and say, what is Christ doing around us? As Terry comes and plays as we close down this morning, what is your love toward one another this morning?
When you begin to think in your life, when you begin to examine your life, how is our love toward one another? All of these negative statements are toward one another.
Love is not envy. Love is not boastful. Love is not arrogant. Love is not rude. Love is not self-seeking. It's not irritable. It doesn't keep record and it finds no joy in unrighteousness.
All of these statements are toward someone else. Patience is us.
Kindness is us. We're going to get to the next couple of statements. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. This is personal toward us. But these eight statements are how we approach other people.
C.S. Lewis wrote it like this in his book, Mere Christianity. Do not waste your time bothering whether your love, you love your neighbor,
act as if you did. As soon as we do this, we will find one of the greatest secrets that the world is not telling. When you are behaving as if you love someone, you will presently come to love them.
If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking them more. But if you do a good gesture toward them, you will find yourself disliking them less. End quote.
C.S. Lewis said, the more we love someone else and the more we show this love, the more that all that's going to come out is love.
But the moment you do something negative toward someone, that's going to begin to harbor inside of us. So I've just got a couple of questions maybe for you to ponder, maybe for you to write down. Are you harboring resentment in your heart this morning?
Is there something in your heart that as I begin to talk about resentment, a person came to your mind? And you begin to think, man, I've been resenting that person too long. These are questions I've had to ask myself and wrestle with this entire week. Where is your joy at this morning?
Where is your joy resting in? Is your joy when you look at someone who's your enemy and something bad happens to them, you rejoice? or is truth shared
and truth shared and someone responds to truth and you rejoice over that and you're truly rejoicing over the truth being shared?
Knowing the God of Truth
And ultimately this morning my last question that we'll ask is do you know the God of truth? It's hard to rejoice in truth if we don't know what truth is.
If we don't know who God is and what he's done for us by sending his son to die on a cross for us it's hard to rejoice in truth and if you find yourself constantly rejoicing in evil maybe the truth of God's word and God's love is not in us.
So church as we begin to think through those things
see what the Lord is dealing with in your life. Lord we love you. God I pray that you would just have your will and way. Lord help us to be molded to be more like you. Lord this has been an extremely hard couple of weeks you know that.
Lord physically emotionally mentally for me with my friends and people that are around me Lord you know but God this has also been an encouraging week.
Lord you've answered prayers you've worked in our lives and I pray God that you would just continue to do as only you can do.
Help us to be so in love with your word that that is what comes out when we're shaken up. God help us to be so focused on your love that everything else fades into the distance. Let's in your love we pray. Amen.
Thank you again for taking your time to listen to the sermon audio of Pleasant Grove. Please subscribe to get our latest sermons each week.
Auto-generated transcript · 5,823 words. May contain errors. Select a timestamp to play from that moment.
More from What is Love? Love is not...
View all
What is Love? The Preeminence Of Love - Week 10
What is Love? the Permanence of Love - Week 9
What is Love? Love In All Things - Week 8
What is Love? Love is not... - Week 6
What is Love? Love is not... - Week 5
What is Love? Love is not... - Week 4
Listen to this sermon