God, thank You for loving me just as I am—not the version I try to impress You with. Help me receive Your perfect love fully, even when I feel messy or unworthy. Teach me to rest in that love and let it overflow to the people around me. Let my life reflect not perfection, but Your patient and powerful grace.
Thanks so much for jumping in my friend. And today we're in the final episode of this five part series on Only God Can Love Perfectly. This is episode 20 of the series that Pastor Bobby and I been together on was we talked about what only God can do. We've explored God's faithful love. This week we've explored God's rejoicing love. And today we're going to take a look at what perfect love really means through the lens of the most famous passage on love in the Bible. You heard Bobby preach and if you missed it, I encourage you go back and listen to it from this past Sunday sermon at Sugar Hill Church and he taught on it on Tuesday and Thursday of this week. I just can't get enough of this passage. I've officiated hundreds of weddings over the years and I can't think of a single one where this passage wasn't read. It's beautiful poetry. I can actually remember reciting it when I was about 12 years old in church. But I've come to realize that it's also one of the most challenging texts in the entire Bible because it holds up a mirror to our imperfect ways of loving. In recent years, researchers in the field of neuroscience have discovered that our brains are actually wired for connection. Dr. Matthew Lieberman at UCLA has shown through his research, the social connection is as fundamental a human need as food and water. Now, I'm not sure why we needed to spend that kind of money to get that kind of connectivity understood. I mean, the Bible taught that from day one because we're created to love and be loved. And yet why is it we struggle deeply with loving? Well, well, when you listen to how Paul describes perfect love in 1 Corinthians 13, starting in verse 4, it says this love is patient and love is kind. It's not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It doesn't demand its own way. It's not irritable. It keeps no record of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice, but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith. It is always hopeful. It endures through every circumstance. Prophecy and speaking in unknown languages and special knowledge will become useless. But love will last forever.
He ends the text by Saying three things will last forever. Faith, hope, and love. But the greatest is love. You know, when you sit with this passage as many years as I have, I've come to this humbling realization. This perfect love that Paul describes is simply not something we humans can achieve on our own. Patient and kind all the time. Never jealous, never boastful, never proud, never rude, never demanding my own way or keeping records of wrongs. That's just, that's a really high bar. It's an impossible one for we humans. And yet this is exactly how God loves you.
Brene Brown, and I've quoted her all week, has this quote that I love. She says, we cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known. That's what God does for us. He allows Himself to be deeply seen and known, even in our messiness. And that's what he invites us to do in return. A few years ago, I went through a. A really challenging season in my life. I mean, I was totally burned out, questioning my calling. I mean, I contemplated leaving ministry altogether. I felt like a. Like a failure, a radical failure on multiple fronts. And during that time, I found myself avoiding time with God because I was ashamed of my struggles. Like, Chuck, how can you not get your junk together? You're a pastor, for goodness sake. I thought that I needed to get myself together because I was l literally play acting before the Lord. How silly, right? But then one day I. I felt God speak to my heart one morning. Chuck, I don't love the polished, put together version of you. I don't even love the pastor version of you. I just love you.
I don't love the thing you think you need to be. I just love you. The real you. With all your quirkiness, with all your doubts, with all your questions, with all your struggles, with all your weirdness. I just love you. I hope that gives you some encouragement because in my case it's like, wow. How could anybody love me in the middle of all my own weirdness? That moment changed everything for me. I realized that God's perfect love creates space for my imperfection. He doesn't demand that I love before he loved me instead. His perfect love transforms my imperfect love over time. And here's what I now have come to believe. That only God can love perfectly. But his perfect love enables us to love more perfectly than we could on our own. His love flows. Flows through us to others. We become channels of his perfect love. Even in our imperfection, we should literally spill over with his love. Paul acknowledges this when he says, now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. There's a humility in this admission that we don't yet see or love perfectly. But there's also hope that one day we will. In the meantime, we practice, we fail, we mess up, we ask forgiveness, we try again. And through it all, God's perfect love sustains us.
That's more than enough, y'all. So as we wrap up this week with one more week in this 20 part series or 25 part series, I should say I want to leave you with this thought. Stop trying to love perfectly in your own strength. Give it a rest. It's exhausting and it's not what God asks of you. Instead, allow yourself to be perfectly loved by God and then rest in his patient, kind, hopeful, enduring love. And from that place of being loved, let his love flow through you to others. Remember, of the three things that last forever, faith and hope and love, the greatest is love. Not because of how well we love, but because of how perfectly God loves us. This is Chuck thanking you for joining me on this journey. And until next time, may you know the depth and the height and the width and the breadth of God's perfect love for you. God bless you friend. Have a great day. Bye now.
