Love Is... Patient, Part 1.1

Visionary Family with Dr. Rob Rienow

Hi, my name is Laynie Rienow. Thanks for listening to the Visionary Family Ministries podcast. You are about to listen to a message from my dad, Dr. Rob Rienow, from his teaching series "Love Is." We hope that this study through first 1 Corinthians 13 will help you discover how much God loves you and help you grow in your love for God and to others.
Good morning everyone, it's great to be back with you. As you know, if you've been with me here before at Grace, I always bring one of my kids with me. Amy and I have been blessed with seven children, but it is mother's day, so rather than bring one of my kids, I brought my mom. My mom, Angie, stand up, mom, give a wave to everybody down there. My mom led me to Jesus when I was a little boy. It's a special mother's day for me to have you here. Mom, I love you, just want to honor you today. Thank you for being with me on this important weekend together.
Well, I want to dive right in as we launch a seven week series together. Want to give you a little quiz, a little test. I know it's not a school day, but I've got some fill in the blank challenges for you. We're going to start off with kind of an easier one. I hope to get you limbered up. I need you to fill in the blank for me. For God so blank the world that He gave His One and only Son. Help me here, for God so loved the world. Good, number two, give thanks to the God of heaven for His steadfast what endures forever?
What is it? Love. Give thanks to the God of heaven for His steadfast love endures forever. All right, number three. This is something Jesus said, Matthew chapter five, blank your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. What is it? Love. Some of us would prefer a blankety blank and that blank, but that's what Jesus said, love. Now one more. 1 John 4, you are sensing a trend now, I have a lot of confidence in you. Anyone who does not love does not know God because God is love. We're going to spend seven weeks talking about this thing called love. It's at the center of Who God is. It's at the center of what Christ came to do for us and it's at the center of what God calls His people to be.
I want you to consider what Jesus said about this in Matthew chapter 22 verses 35 to 40, it says, "and one of them, a lawyer, asked Him," Jesus, "a question to test Him, Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law." In other words, Jesus, if You had to boil down the commands of God, now we would have been talking about the Old Testament at this point, if You had to boil down the Word of God into just one thing, what would it be? Well, Jesus answers in verse 37 and He said to him, "you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment and a second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets." This is pretty incredible. Jesus says the first and the greatest commandment is that you are to love God with everything you have and a second is like it, to love your neighbor as yourself and then He makes this incredible statement that the rest of scripture, the rest of God's instructions for us, everything else comes under the umbrella of these two commandments, to love God and to love others.
Well if love is such a big deal, then we had better understand what it is. Now thankfully we don't have to come up with our own definitions. This is not going to be Rob's good ideas about relationships, we don't need Disney, we don't need Hollywood. There's a portion of scripture where God goes point by point to tell us exactly what love is and it's in the book of 1 Corinthians chapter 13 and that's where I want you to turn with me, 1 Corinthians chapter 13. We're going to spend seven weeks on four verses. This morning is just going to be three words and there's going to be three parts, three big parts, to each message that I want to share with you. We're going to start off in verse four today where we're going to learn the first definition of love, which is love is patient.
So the first thing we're going to talk about today, well, if God is love, then that means God is patient. He's patient with us. Let's talk about that. Well then, the first commandment is that we are to love God. Well, that means God wants us to be patient with Him. What does that mean? Well, we'll unpack it and then the horizontal component, God commands us to love our neighbor. Well, that means God commands us to be patient with the people around us and we'll talk about what that might look like. Are you ready to do this? Beautiful, let's go.
Let's read all of four through seven and then we'll come back to our first portion. "Love is patient and kind. Love does not envy or boast. It's not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way. It's not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things."
All right, today we're starting right at the beginning. Love is what? Patient. I don't know why God put this first in the list because it is not one of my strong suits. I spent many years as a youth pastor and one of my patterns at the end of the youth ministry year was to give my volunteer team, maybe fifty or so volunteers in our ministry, give our volunteer team a year end evaluation to evaluate the ministry, but particularly to evaluate me as the youth pastor and one of the things that I put on these evaluations was I want you to evaluate how much of the fruit of the Spirit do you see in my life. Book of Galatians, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control. Give me a one through ten on how much you see the fruits of the Spirit in my life. So I did this for like four or five years and every year the least fruit of the Spirit apparently that I displayed was what patience. So I'm like, why am I going to continue to do this survey if I know you're going to tell me impatient? I'm just skipping the survey and moving on. So I scrapped the whole thing.
So here we are in week one and I've got to talk to you about something that God is having to do continual major league work in my life on and maybe the case is for you too and I want you to know that as we go through this series, this is not a good series to do the elbow to the person next to you. Perhaps even this morning when we talked, today's about patience, I am really glad that the Lord brought you for this, you listen to Him, you could really use this message today, it's a God appointment, trust me. Let's try to avoid that as best we can and to have the Word of God speak to us and let the Word of God speak to your neighbor. Fair deal? Okay, well let's start off with God is love, therefore, God is patient.
One of the ways God shows His love to us is by being patient with us. I would've given up on me a long time ago, I don't know about you. Do you have somebody in your life just seems like they're never going to change? Like they just won't grow up, they won't stop doing stupid stuff, they tell you they're going to stop doing stupid stuff, but they keep doing it or they've got a personality pattern, just drives you bongos. How many of us just, we get fed up, we get sick of it, how many of us? Now maybe we don't show it. Maybe we finish the phone call or we walk away from seeing them and in our heart we even say like, I am just so done with you.
Did you know God never thinks that way about His children? He's a Heavenly Father with perfect patience toward His kids. Even when He disciplines us, He does so with a spirit of patience. How many times have we committed the same sin? How many times have we gone back to God to confess that sin? How many times have we asked God to help us not do the same thing again? How many times have we even said, "God, I promise I'll never do it again" and what happens all too often is here we go again. And you'd think at some point, God might just get fed up with it all. I would, but He doesn't. He never gives up. He's never gonna quit caring about you. He's never going to quit loving you. He's never going to give up on you because He loves you and love is what? Patient.
All right. Well, the first commandment is that God wants us to love Him, which means that God calls us to be patient with Him. Part of loving God is being patient with God. Look at a couple of these scriptures. Psalm 37:7, "be still before the Lord and wait patiently for Him." James 5:8, "you also be patient. Establish your hearts for the coming of the Lord is at hand."
I think an area where almost every Christian struggles with this is this whole area of unanswered prayer or what feels like unanswered prayer, where you pray for weeks, months, years, and where's God? What's He doing? A few weeks ago, my four year old boy, Rush, said to me, "daddy, I don't like after." What'd you say buddy? "I don't like after." I'm sorry, Rush, what do you mean? "Well, I don't like after. Dessert comes after dinner. Video games come after school. I don't like after." I can relate to that. I don't like after either. I like now, but no good parent gives their child everything they ask for. Now, sometimes parents say wait, sometimes parents say no.
Part of what it means to love God is to be patient with Him, but there's a key ingredient to having this sort of love for God is that we have to trust Him. Now that's not some like religious phrase. I'm talking about literally trusting Him that He loves me, He knows my future, He's never out of control and because God's never out of control and because He loves me, I don't want to stop trusting Him even when I'm in a seemingly humanly hopeless situation.
So when we're in that seemingly hopeless financial situation or that seemingly hopeless family relationship or medical crisis, see, we have to judge God, not based on our questions of what He's doing now, but with our confidence, with what He's done and what He promises He's going to do. So what do we know for sure? Well, we know for sure is that God loves us and He proved His love for us by becoming a Man in Jesus and Jesus took all of our sin when all of our sin was placed on Him. He suffered and died the death we were supposed to pay, but He didn't stay dead, rose again from the dead on the third day, and then He promises that He's coming back. In the meantime, He's given us His Holy spirit in our hearts. He's going to come back. He's gonna make a new heaven and a new earth. We're going to live together with brand new bodies that never get sick, no more tears, no more crying, no more pain, and we're going to live in perfect relationships with the family of God forever. Those are the facts and that's exactly what God's going to do.
So from those facts, we turn our attention to our current struggles. We turn our attention to our current questions and our current sufferings. See, it's so easy, even people that have known God for a long time, to just, to shake our fist at God and accuse Him of not caring. We want to judge God by the end of the story, not the middle of the story.
So let me give you a couple examples of this in history. Let me tell you about something in the life of Moses in the Bible and this is a really sad story, true history. There was this time where God told Moses to take his hand and to put his hand in his cloak and when Moses took his hand out, he had leprosy. God gave him leprosy. What kind of a God would do that? What a sad story. Anybody want to add anything? You're like, well Rob, keep going, tell them what happens next! Well, God tells him to put his hand in his cloak and he pulls it out again and he's healed! Rob, this is really cool! This is awesome!
Alright let me try this again, how about Joseph? Horrible Joseph's brothers attack him, strip naked, throw him in a well, sell him into slavery. He spends years in prison as an innocent man. How could God send an innocent person to prison for years and years? Just a horrible event in the Bible. You keep going. Don't stop there Rob, what happens next? Well, you see God reveals the dreams of Pharaoh to him and he becomes second in command in Egypt and he saves Egypt and his whole family from the famine and there he and his brothers get reconciled and forgive each other and his dad moves down and it's awesome! It's like the best!
Alright, how about another one? God sends His Son, His perfect Son, sins of the world are put on Him. He's tortured and He dies on a cross. What kind of a God would ever do that? What kind of a God would ever allow that. Keep going, Rob, don't stop at Friday! Get to Sunday! He didn't die and stay dead, He rose again from the dead! So much so that you know what we call that Friday now? We call it good Friday. Yeah!
What am I trying to say? You don't judge God by the middle of the story. You judge Him by the end of the story. We can have full confidence because of what God's promised Him to do. That the end, Romans 8:28, "is all good." It's all good.
We hope that this message on love has encouraged you. You can find more resources for your family at our website, www.visionaryfam.com. This podcast was brought to you free of charge because of financial support from listeners like you. You can help us reach more families around the world. Please visit visionaryfam.com/donate to make a tax deductible gift. God bless you.
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