All right, everybody, I'd like to just say thank you for joining us here today at the Everlasting Truth broadcast, where we give you everlasting truth for this ever-changing world. Once again, as always, thank you for your time. I know you've got the internet at your hands, you've got all kinds of content you could be listening to right now, but you've chosen and blessed me with the opportunity to try to minister to you and be a help. And I am grateful for your time. We've been getting reports back from some of you that the broadcast has helped and it's been a blessing to you. And that really does thrill and help me to continue. Not that I'm considering quitting, but at the same time, it's always good to know that what you're doing is being useful in somebody's life. And as a minister, you always want to help people with the Word of God, and so finding out that that's taking place has been an encouragement. But I would like to say this, I would love to hear more from you if the broadcast has helped you in any kind of way. Feel free to reach out, correspond with us. Probably the easiest way to do that, there's several ways, but let me just throw you the easiest way. Why don't you just find us on Facebook? and that'll be under Calvary Baptist Church, Live Oak, Florida. You look that up, you'll find us, and send a message there, and it'll be sure to come straight to me, and I'll receive that if you choose to do so. That'd be a blessing. But anyways, I don't want to take your time talking about me and what I've got going on. Let's talk about something out of God's Word today. Go ahead and take your Bible, and I want you to open up to 1 Corinthians chapter number 13. I want to talk about a subject that is absolutely foundational to the Christian life. It's foundational to the gospel. It's foundational to the character of God. It is a chief objective that the believer strives for, and Given that it's so important. It's not shocking to me that the devil has Miss contorted and and twisted it into something that it is not and it's no surprise to me that people don't understand it and that people to Neglect it because the things that matter in the in the realm of God and His will and His plan, they tend to get lost at times because the devil's really good at his job. I wish he wasn't, but he is. And so, without further ado, the subject I want to talk about today, you may have gathered through the scripture reference I gave you, 1 Corinthians 13, is the subject of charity. And you can say charity, you can say love. Your King James Bible says charity, and so that's what the Word of God says, but charity is a form of love. Now, charity, I think, is significant in this way. In our culture, we use the word charity, not necessarily to describe love, but an outworking of love. And we talk about somebody having charity or giving to charity most of the time, which means they are sacrificing some of their money for the betterment of somebody else. They are giving to a charity that's going to benefit other people, and that's what we call giving to charity. They're sacrificing their funds to be a blessing to somebody else. And I think that's significant because it really entails what the meaning of charity is. Charity is not giving to somebody. Charity is shown in giving to somebody, but what charity is, is the love that causes you to sacrifice for somebody. This is the kind of love that Christ had when it says, for God so loved the world. that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. That word love in John 3 16 and the word charity you're going to find in 1 Corinthians 13 are the same Greek word. It's the Greek word agape and it is not talking about some type of emotional, warm, fuzzy feeling as oftentimes we equate love to be in our day and age. No. It's talking about a willingness to sacrifice, a love and a devotion, a commitment that is settled no matter the cost. It endures. It hangs with the stuff because it is set out to do so. It's a level of commitment. That is the kind of love that God has for us and that he calls us to have for other people. We're going to talk about it in the broadcasts to come, Lord willing, but the Lord commands us to agape other people, to love them, and that's the same kind of love that Christ has for us, remember? For God so agape-o-ed the world. And then he tells us that, he says, as I have loved you, love one another. And so we're to love the brethren. He tells us that we're to love our neighbor. And once again, it's the Greek word agape. We are to sacrifice for our neighbor. Husbands, Ephesians 5.25 says, and your husbands love agape, your wives, even as Christ also loved agape, the church, and gave himself for it. And so once again, everywhere really that you chase this word love, agape, charity, they're synonymous, they're all the same thing. Everywhere you chase them down, what you find is sacrifice, giving up for the betterment of somebody else. What does Romans 5, 8 tell us? It says, but God commendeth his love, his agape, but God commendeth his love toward us, and that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. And so yet again, his love is shown in the death, the sacrifice of Christ. And if you want to know how to love other people, just like Jesus commanded you to, we know it is the golden rule. Even secular philosophers will agree that the golden rule is the ultimate standard of living. And if you want to know how to reach for that goal of loving one another as he has loved us, Let's boil it down to a word here. Sacrifice. Sacrifice. You see, this kind of love is what marriage is supposed to be built on. Marriage is supposed to be two people who have agreed to sacrifice their own will and agreed to sacrifice their own desire for the betterment of the other person. And the reason why marriages don't work today is because love is the foundation they're built upon, and our culture has fundamentally misconstrued what love actually is. We have abandoned a biblical definition of love. We think that love is some warm, fuzzy feeling. Love is some type of sensual attraction. But when we study the scripture, we find out that's not what love was. Let me just say this. If love is some kind of warm, fuzzy feeling, Then Jesus didn't love you when he died at Calvary for you. Let me explain what I mean. And some of you say, Brother Caleb, that sounds blasphemous. But if you say that love is a warm, fuzzy feeling, that is the equation that you end up with. Because think about this. Jesus did not have some warm, fuzzy feeling that He just, oh man, I cannot wait to get up Calvary and be crucified and let Him shove nails in my hands and my feet and a spear through my side. And we hear His agony concerning this. as he is in the Garden of Gethsemane and he's praying to the Father and he said, Father, if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me. Jesus did not have a warm, fuzzy feeling of affection towards that cup. The wrath of God that was going to be dumped out on his shoulders for you and I. And I understand that the Bible says in Hebrews 12 that it was for the joy that was set before him, he endured the cross. And there was joy before him in the product that the cross would bring. The fellowship he would have with you and I, that's the joy that was set before him. But the cross as it was set before him in itself was not joyous. He did not have a warm, fuzzy feeling and affection towards it at that moment. But he loved you and I. Hey, there were moments where that warm, fuzzy feeling and his love and his pursuit of you and I, that warm, fuzzy feeling faded away. As he was betrayed, things of that nature. But we know that Jesus' love was a perfect love. The Bible says in John 13, and having loved his own, he loved them until the very end. There was never a moment where Jesus didn't love his people. And so, what is love? If it's not a warm, fuzzy feeling, what is love? Love is that commitment that carried on and carried him to the cross, even when there wasn't a warm, fuzzy feeling. Even as he prayed in Gethsemane, I don't want this cup. Let this cup pass from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done. When he said this is going to hurt, it doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel right. It hurts and it stings and death awaits me and the wrath of the father awaits me. And he's not looking forward to that, so to speak. But love caused him to go anyways. And the problem we have in our culture and the reason that marriages fall apart is because we don't understand that. No, we think love is that warm fuzzy feeling. And so we meet somebody and they produce some kind of feeling inside of us and they make us feel good about ourselves and they make us feel, you can use all the words, they make us feel complete and they make us feel free and And all these things that people say only for a couple of years to roll by, and later down the road we say things like, well, I just fell out of love with them. I just don't love them anymore. And I'm going to show you today, but the biblical definition says if you ever stop loving somebody, it was never love to begin with. Because the Bible says charity is long-suffering. Charity doesn't cease as we go on in 1 Corinthians chapter number 13. Charity never faileth. Charity doesn't stop. And so if you're in a relationship with somebody and there comes a point where you stop loving them, I want you to understand something. It's not love. You may have had an affection, an infatuation with them, you may have had lust, you may have had different things, but it wasn't love because love is that committing, determining factor that pushes through the pain simply for the betterment of the other individual. Ultimately, love is putting the self-interest of other people ahead of your own, even when those other people don't have your best interest in mind. Now, that's sacrifice. That's what Christ did for us. That's sacrifice, and that's what love is. I want to just run this by you really quick before we get into the study, and I plan on spending a couple broadcasts here, Lord willing, talking about charity, talking about love, talking about agape, talking about this great commission to love one another that God's given us. But I want to lay some groundwork first. So in the Hebrew language, In the Greek language, when the Bible tells you to love your neighbor as you love yourself, when it says, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind, and all thy strength, this is the first great commandment, and the second is likened to it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. When it tells us to do those kind of things, it's the Greek word agape. We've already talked about that, but I want you to understand agape in comparison to some of the other Greek words that oftentimes in literature during these times were translated as love. And they signify a different kind of love. These are not the kinds of love that agape signifies. This is a different love. And so one of the kinds of love in the Greek language is phileo. Now, phileo is brotherly love. That's that friendship type bond. When we talk about Philadelphia, that comes from the Greek word phileo, which in Philadelphia is the city of brotherly love. That's what it's called, and that's where it comes from. And so, we're not called to have phileo love. We're called to have agape love. It's not just a brotherly love, this light-hearted type of love. It's deeper than that. There's another type of love in the Greek language that is called eros. Eros is a Greek word, which is where we get the English word erotic. Eros, erotic. You can imagine what that type of love is. It is a sensual, seductive attraction, so to speak. Let me just put it this way. In our culture, we wouldn't call Eros love. We would call it lust, for the most part. And a lot of marriages and relationships are falling because they're not built on agape, they're built on Eros. There's an erotic sense to it. They're infatuated with the looks of one another. And when all that newness and freshness fades off, then they're out. That's not love. That's lust. That's eros. Now, there's another one. And I want to just emphasize this one briefly. Another Greek word for love is storge. And storge is that natural kind of affection that a mother has for a child. or a father has for a child. That affection that just comes natural. Nobody has to tell you to love your children. When they're born, and I remember both of my boys when they were born, and you look down as you hold that child in your arms, and this great overwhelming sense of devotion and responsibility comes flooding your soul that you are now responsible for this child's well-being and its livelihood. That type of love is natural. Nobody had to look over my shoulder and tell me and say, now Caleb, you have to make sure this thing is fed and taken care of. There was a natural outpouring of that in my life because that store gay love was there. And a lot of people think that that's how love is. It's supposed to be this natural feeling. This thing that's just naturally there. But can I say this? Agape is the love that God called us to and it's not natural. It's supernatural. Natural love always looks out for self-benefit. It always looks out for yourself. It always looks out for your own good. It's a supernatural kind of love to look out for the good of other people above yourself. That's something that only God can do. That is a fruit of the Spirit. When the Bible said in Galatians 5.22, but the fruit of the Spirit is number one, love. It's talking about agape. The only way that you can truly love This sacrificial agape love is if the Spirit of God produces it in you. The Bible says in Romans 5, 5, the love of God hath been shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost, which is given unto us. And so the only way that we have this love inside of us is if the Holy Ghost puts it there. Jesus looked at the lost people of his day and he said, and I know that you have not the love of God abiding in you. Jesus said, by this we know that we pass from death unto life and that you love the brethren. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love, 1 John 4. And so this love is not natural. It's supernatural. And so this cannot be produced in and of yourself. This is something God must produce in you. And this is why our world is not operating in love, because our world is comprised every day by more and more and more people who do not know God. And if we don't love, 1 John 4 says we don't know God. And so not loving and not living in a loving society is a result of a society that does not know God. And so you look at these last days and it's like Paul wrote to Timothy and he said in the last days people would be without natural affection. You know what that looks like? That looks like mothers who don't even love their own children. And they have them aborted. They have them murdered. Without natural affection. It's because we're increasingly living in a society that is overwhelmed with self because they don't know God. They don't love other people more than they love themselves. They love God. You see, God knows that you naturally love yourself. And this is one thing that people always have to say. They say, oh, well, I need to focus on loving myself before I can love somebody else. No, you already love yourself. As a matter of fact, if you didn't love yourself, you wouldn't be more worried about loving yourself than loving somebody else, right? And so you already are absolutely infatuated with yourself. That's why Jesus, His great command was not learn how to love yourself so you can love other people, but rather love others as you love yourself. Jesus just makes it a known fact that, hey, you're already pretty favorable towards yourself. You already love you. The reason you get up in the morning and you try to make yourself look good is because you love you. The reason you feed your body and nourish it with food so you don't feel bad is because you love you. Everything you do that benefits yourself is that natural love for yourself that's already in you. But what God is calling you to do, after that we've seen the love of Christ, that agape love, that sacrificial love, is that we are to love others with that kind of love. And that's what Christ did. Christ loved others and poured into others all the things that he would have done unto him. And that's why the Bible says, I'm summarizing, but the golden rule, do unto others as you would have done unto you. You love yourself, and so you want it to work well for you. But he says you need to make some sacrifice so that it goes well for other people. And this is what he calls us to. This is what the Bible means when it talks about love. It's not a feeling. It's not an emotion. It's not a fling. It's not temporal. It's eternal. Let me remind you that Jesus in John 13, and having loved his own, agape, having loved his own, he loved them when? Until the very end. When two people get married, their relationship is built on love. And that's why the Bible says this. For this cause, let a man leave his father and his mother and cleave unto his wife, and these two shall be one flesh." Jesus builds off of that in his preaching in Matthew chapter number 19, and he says, if these two became one flesh, in essence, he said, let not man put asunder what God hath joined together. Their love and their relationship together has made them one. Their marriage has made them one. And that cannot be separated. And that love, since it cannot be separated, that love is to always be there. It cannot be disannulled. Man cannot write a writing of divorcement. and make that go away. Love is to be eternal. The Bible is going to go on. We're going to see in a minute, 1 Corinthians 13, that love, charity, agape, is long-suffering. And so, I know we have yet to read our passage, but I'm trying to lay some groundwork because there's so many, so many misconceptions. And our love is what identifies us as believers. It's important that we know how to love. And a lot of people don't. A lot of people don't. Love is something that has to be reciprocated after it has been received. And here's what I mean by that. People who grow up in broken homes that never had a mom and a dad sacrifice for them, they don't know how to sacrifice for other people. And I'll say this as well. I don't think it's their fault. Somebody has to teach you how to do that. And until Jesus Christ encounters the life of somebody like that and he teaches them how to love, they're going to have a hard time committing to anything. And it's because they've never seen commitment that outweighs hardship. Because what they saw in their life growing up was when things got hard, people left, people busted up, people split. But what we find in the example of Christ is that when things got hard for him, as he carried the weight of my sin and your sin and the sin of every disciple he would ever have and the sin of the whole world. He didn't split. He didn't leave. He told Peter, he said, don't you know that I could have had 12 legions of angels get me out of this garden right now and away from Judas, my betrayer, but he didn't split. He stayed faithful to the task that was set before him. He went on. And if you want to know what love is, One of the best way it's exemplified is by going on, not quitting on somebody. If you love somebody, you keep on with them. You don't part ways and just stop. That's not love. The Bible said 1 Corinthians 13, I've quoted this a couple of times, but I'll quote it again. Charity suffereth long, long. And so, I think it's important that we understand this, because if we don't understand what love is, then how are we ever going to love our neighbor? If we don't understand what love is, how are we ever going to love the Lord thy God with all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength? You were born knowing how to love yourself, but let me ask you, do you know how to love other people? You were born knowing how to do well for yourself, but do you know how to do well for the other people around you? And as we go on in the broadcast to come, I want to open up the scripture. Specifically, we'll begin with 1 Corinthians 13. And we will get a biblical example of what love is. And it's amazing that 1 Corinthians 13 actually spells out and says, here is what charity actually is. And so it's wonderful that the text is that clear. And so we can get in 1 Corinthians chapter 13, go through that chapter and find out Are we really loving? Are we loving God? Are we loving our neighbor? Are we loving our spouses? Are we loving our children? And so, I hope to see you, and I hope you hear in the days to come. God bless you, friend. See you next week.