Third Sunday of Advent: LOVE | Pastor Bob Webster
Third Sunday of Advent: LOVE | Pastor Bob Webster
Sunday, December 11, 2022
Here are the Sermon Notes from Pastor Bob Webster:
Love the Better Way
Welcome and thanks from our famly to yours.
My heart a home for love:
I believe the spirtual life is lived best from a posture of love.
Love is better than philosophy
Love is better than theology (James Taylor : biology, history and geography)
Love is better than talent and ability.
They will know we are Christians by our love.
Christmas teaches us that God came into the world to be loved.
God so loved......
Love is the Better way -1 Corinithians 13
God’s Risky Love
“Suppose there was a king who loved a humble maiden.
The king was like no other king. Every statesman trembled before his power. No one dared
breathe a word against him, for he had the strength to crush all opponents. And yet this
mighty king was melted by love for a humble maiden.
How could he declare his love for her? In an odd sort of way, his very kingliness tied his
hands. If he brought her to the palace and crowned her head with jewels and clothed her
body in royal robes, she would surely not resist—no one dared resist him. But would she
love him?
She would say she loved him, of course, but would she truly? Or would she live with him in
fear, nursing a private grief for the life she had left behind. Would she be happy at his side?
How could he know?
If he rode to her forest cottage in his royal carriage, with an armed escort waving bright
banners, that too would overwhelm her. He did not want a cringing subject. He wanted a
lover, an equal. He wanted her to forget that he was a king and she a humble maiden and
to let shared love cross over the gulf between them.
“For it is only in love that the unequal can be made equal,” concluded Kierkegaard. The
king, convinced he could not elevate the maiden without crushing her freedom, resolved to
descend. He clothed himself as a beggar and approached her cottage incognito, with a worn cloak fluttering loosely about him. It was no mere disguise, but a new identity he took on.
He renounced the throne to win her hand.
God is not seeking a cowering servant.
Because Love is better:
Kempis on Love:
"Love often knows no limits but overflows all bounds. Love feels no burden, thinks nothing
of troubles, attempts more than it is able, and does not plead impossibility, because it
believes that it may and can do all things. For this reason, it is able to do all, performing
and effecting much where he who does not love fails." -Kempis.
Biggest Risk is in not loving:
Love elevates us: above the troubles and circumstances.
Love Inspires us: Paul motivated by love
Love expands us: Dorthy Day loving the Lost
"Our greatest danger is not our sins but our indifference, We must be in
love with God. It is not so much to change what we are doing, but our
intention, our motive." -Dorthy Day
Surender:
Maybe you have been hurt by love: We often choose to build walls, but love builds bridges.
Songs: what’s love got to do with it. The first cut is the deepest. Both sides now..
Lets make room in our hearts this Christmas for Jesus
Who? If you have never opened your heart to God’s Love.
Job: “I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear, But now my eye seesYou.
You have a hard time accepting love. Self campassion.
If you have become weary in well doing or lost that first flame.
Love involves Surrender
Letting someone else influence your very soul.
A) believe
B) Receive
C) Trust
Lord, I welcome you into my heart today, help me to love your more, to trust you always,
enlarge my heart that you may enter in, soften my the hardness of my heart and give me
a heart of love.
Give me an increase of love, that I may learn to taste with the inward
lips of my heart how sweet it is to love, how sweet to be dissolved in
love and to soak in it.
If Jesus was not too humble to come to a lowly stable to be born among smell shepherds,
he is humble enought ot come into our hearts if we will open them up to him.