Telling the Truth for Women

Jill Briscoe: God's love for us. That's why we love Him. We love Him because He first loved us. It's no good trying to stir up love in your heart for God. It doesn't work. You might try and get emotional. You might try and listen to wonderful music. You might try and work it up. And you might manage a little bit of emotion, but that's froth. The Holy Spirit doesn't come into your life to do his deepest work in the shallowest part of you, which is your emotions.

Knowing God's love is bigger than that, certainly deeper than that. And when we really realize God loves us, then our heart responds. It's as if it jumps up and says, "Father!" in response. My mom was a poor Scottish gal, and they immigrated to England from Scotland. That might sound funny, but that really was an immigration because we divide up our little tiny island. England is no bigger than Tennessee, believe it or not. And on the top of it, there's Scotland, and on the side of it, there's Wales, and over the ocean, there's Northern Ireland.

And that's the British Isles. And if you're Scotch, you're Scotch, and you're not English. And it's very important to those of us that are British to know where you come from. Well, my mom was Scottish and they lived on the border of England and Scotland, and they immigrated to Liverpool. And my mom got a job in a factory ironing clothes, ironing other people's clothes. And my dad decided that he would never work for anybody but himself.

At 17, he left school, he refused to go into a bank, which is what his dad wanted him to do to get a good career, started knocking on doors and saying, "Can I mend your bicycles?" Mended the bicycles and then one day he said, "Can I mend your car?" He started a car business, which became the biggest car business in the North of England. Became a very wealthy man, very successful man. Well, he met my mom somewhere along the line and she didn't like him one little bit.

And he said, "Peggy, go out with me and give me six months. Give me six months to court you," is the word in England. "And if at the end of that time you still say, 'I don't want to have anything to do with you,' I promise I'll walk out of your life and I'll never bother you again. Just give me six months." And she very reluctantly said, "Well, all right." And for six months, my dad loved my mom in every sense of the word. He loved her and he showed his love for her.

At the end of six months, she said she loved him. She loved him because he first loved her. And out of her heart came this response to his insistent, pursuing love. And God's love is like that. The Hound of Heaven, it's been called in classical poetry. God hounding us with his love, refusing to say no when we say no. Coming after us even when we don't want to see him or talk to him.

In the garden when man sinned, God said, "Where are you? Where are you?" He looked, he pursued. Now, when we really begin to understand how large and how great and how deep and how wide the love of God is for us, then we begin to love him in return. Just as my mom began to love somebody that insisted on loving her and pursued her and came after her, showing her how much he loved her by acts of love.

The greatest need of human beings is to love, to know they're loved, thoroughly loved. And because of that, to be able to love back in return. And our hospitals and our psychiatrists' couches are full of people that cannot do those two things. Perhaps they've been damaged. Perhaps they have loved and they have not been loved in return. They've been rejected. Or perhaps they have been dreadfully damaged in the name of love.

And they say, "I'm never going to love again. I've been hurt." And that might be the case. But God wants us to be vulnerable enough, to risk enough, to open up first of all to his love, and then reflect that as we reflect God's love for us as we love other people. And so, instead of being in the Old Testament studying the word *hesed*, now we're going into the New Testament to a very familiar passage and we're going to stay in this one passage.

So would you open your Bible to 1 Corinthians chapter 13? And I'm reading from the NIV, which is very hard for me being English. I want to go back to my good old King James. I'm resisting it because as a little girl in school, we had to learn 1 Corinthians 13 off by heart. It was a piece of literature to us, Christian literature. And in our schools, we had scripture every day and we did scripture memory. And so I learned 1 Corinthians 13.

So it's hard for me and I have to read it carefully or I will lapse into good old King James English. You heard about the old lady that said once when all these new-fangled Bibles came out, as she put it, she said, "If the King James was good enough for the Apostle Paul, it's good enough for me." Now you think about that. King James lived a long time after the Apostle Paul. However, "If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.

If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, if I have faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast. It isn't proud, it isn't rude, it isn't self-seeking, it's not easily angered. It keeps no record of wrongs.

Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease. And where there are tongues, they will be stilled. Where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.

But when I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection, then we shall see face to face. Now I know only in part, but then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love. Follow the way of love." Somebody put a chapter in that when they shouldn't have done. The end of that passage of scripture is "follow the way of love."

"Eagerly desire spiritual gifts" is where the next chapter should begin. And so it ends saying, "Make love your goal." "Follow the way of love" means have a goal. And what a wonderful thing it is to think of a new resolution. What is your goal this year? To learn how to experience the love of God so I may know I am loved and to be able to love Him and other people in return. What a worthy goal. Follow the way of love. Make love your aim.

Now, when we think of the word love, we realize it's been desperately devalued. Love has lost its meaning. Now, in the old King James, the word was "charity." Charity suffers long and is kind, etc., etc. And charity, of course, has lost its meaning. When you say charity, what do you think? You think of somebody getting something from you. You think of the Salvation Army standing with their little bells at Christmas asking for something.

That's charity. That's charity. And yet that is the exact opposite of what the old English word for love, charity, means. For charity means giving, not getting. And that's a word that has been totally turned on its head. A lot of words get turned on their head. When I first came to America, I had to learn a new language. I wasn't ready for that. I thought we all spoke the same language.

But you had sidewalks and we have pavements. We have boots and bonnets on our car and you have hoods and trunks and things like that. And when you wanted to tell your kids to shape up, you told them to get it all together and we say, "Pull your socks up." And I found I had to learn a whole different language altogether. And the Greek culture had a language that was so much richer than ours. So they had many, many different words for love.

And if they had been describing a wedding, they would have probably used the word *eros*, the feeling too big for words that might last and might stop. And that's the reason that you make this agreement in case it doesn't last. They would not have used the Greek word for real love, which was *agape*. They recognized different levels of love. We don't. Love is liking a lot. Love is the warm, fuzzy feeling. Love is, quote, "falling in love," whatever that means.

And yet in the Greek language, they didn't just say love. They didn't have one word that covered the dog, the husband, clothes, movies, like we do. Love, God's style in the Bible, is *agape* love. There is a film called *Shadowlands*. It's the story, or from the true story, of C.S. Lewis, who was a don, that's a professor, at Oxford University. The other university, I would say, because I went to Cambridge.

However, C.S. Lewis is very famous in England as an Oxford professor who was a committed Christian man. And it's from the true story of his life. He fell in love with an American woman called Joy. And shortly after they were married, quite late in his career and in his life, she contracted cancer. And he wrote a book, *A Grief Observed*, a very honest book. He is one of the all-time masters of words.

Perhaps you've read his children's books to your children, the *Narnia* series. That's C.S. Lewis. Well, he talks a lot about love. In fact, a book I would recommend to you is his little book called *The Four Loves*. It's a classic. It's perfect for understanding all the things I won't have time to explain to you. And he talks about gift love. *Agape*, he says, is gift love. It's unconditional.

It says, "I love you if..." No, it says, "I love you whether or not." We say, "I love you if you're good. I love you if you perform for me. I love you if you are pretty. I love you if you're skinny. I love you if you are this, that, and the other." God says, "I love you if you're fat. I love you if you're thin. I love you if you're good. I love you if you're bad. I love you if you please me. I love you if you shake your fist in my face. I give you my love as a gift, expecting nothing in return."

When you give a gift, you don't expect it back. *Agape* is gift love. And when God gave His gift of love, He did not expect it back, which is just as well seeing we don't give it him back very often. God's love says, "I love you period, whatever, whenever, with no return." It's not a friendly feeling. It's not tolerance without conviction. It's not giving a nickel to the United Fund.

*Agape* is a sober love of the heart and head specifically. A thought-out position. "I will love them whether they want me to or not." You cannot stop God loving you. Now that can drive some people crazy. Like my mom when my dad started to pursue her. Drove her crazy. She didn't want him to love her. And sometimes people behave like that with God.

And yet He says, "Whether you want me to or not, I will love you forever and I will love you always." And so love is defined where God's love is concerned in terms of what love does. Doesn't act out of its feelings, fortunately. Fortunately. Jesus didn't feel like hanging on the cross. And if love had been acting out of its feelings, he would have come down from the cross.

Jesus didn't act out of his feelings in Gethsemane. In fact, he said to God, "I don't feel like doing this. I really don't feel like going to be crucified tomorrow. But nevertheless..." God's love is a "nevertheless" love. *Agape* love is a "nevertheless" love. "I will act in love," says God, "when I don't feel like it because it's right." And that's the key. *Agape* love is because it's right.

A little girl that I had a lot to do with not too long ago, struggling in her marriage, very depressed, had a breakdown and lost all her feelings for everybody. For her father, for her mother, for her husband, for her children, for her friends. And because she had lost all her feeling in her very, very depressed, dangerously suicidal depressed state, she believed that she could never love again, never love her husband again.

She was a believer. And struggling with this situation that she had, she came to the point where she decided, she'd left him, to go back into that marriage. And as we prayed together and talked together over many, many months, best part of a year before she took that step back into that marriage, I asked her one day, "Why are you going back?" She said, "Well, I don't believe I can ever love him again. But I'm going back because it's right."

That's real love. And walking back into a marriage where she believed that she could never love her husband again, God began to work a miracle after obedience. And of course, it's always after obedience God works the miracle of feelings. But if she had acted out of her feelings, she would never have stepped back into that marriage. God demonstrates his love, not out of his feelings, but out of a sober, thought-out position.

What it's going to take to love that bunch down there, says God, is I'm going to have to go and love them anyway whether they ever love me back or not. Now, how is this love demonstrated in the Bible? God loves his son, the Bible teaches us in John 17:24. Jesus said, "Father, thou lovest me before the foundation of the world." Secondly, God loves those who love his son.

Now think about that for a minute. The Bible teaches that God specifically loves his beloved. "This is my beloved son. My son the beloved one." The father loves the son. But God also loves those who specifically and specially love his son. I remember a long time ago when Dave, our eldest child, had to go to college. And he was going up to Bethel in Minnesota. And we were going to be in South Africa when he went to college.

So his 15-year-old sister packed him up and drove him up there and mothered him to death and hung up his clothes and ironed his shirts and got him all sorted out. And then they had one of these silly rules. You had to get up there and get in and then you had a five-day break for some reason. So he came home again. And the time came for him to go up for good.

To drive himself up there and stay there. And I don't mean for good, but for this semester. And I was miles, miles away, wanting to do this so badly and wishing that I was home, feeling really bad about this, wondering how he was doing. And we knew a friend, she was only a sort of acquaintance friend, in Minneapolis. And my husband had written to her and said, "Now David will be coming up to stay on such and such a date.

Would you be able to meet him and just welcome him and just introduce him to Minneapolis and just tell him that you're there for us? Would you do this?" And this sort of acquaintance friend said she would be very happy, she and her husband. And so they nurtured Dave. They got him in there, they saw him the first week, they invited him into their home, they opened their home, made it available to him and they started to get to know him.

By the time I got back from South Africa, I suppose it was six weeks into the semester and I got in a plane, zoomed up there to see Dave and to go to Bethel. And I was met at the airport by this same lady. And I didn't know her very well, so we were a bit polite. And I started to thank her profusely and I had a present for her for doing what she'd done for Dave.

And we talked sort of as sort of almost strangers talk. And suddenly she said to me, "Jill, I love your son." And suddenly I decided she would be my best friend. Do you know what that did to me? My heart just warmed and responded to this nice lady who loved my son. And so I think I understand that God loves those who love his son in a special sort of way.

Yes, God loves everybody. He loves the sinner. He loves the sinner who's been saved by grace. He loves the one who doesn't love him. But he specially loves his own. And you need to know that. If you love the father's son, God specially appreciates that and he says thank you. And when you kneel to pray and you say, "Jesus, thank you for dying for me. I love you as best I know how," the father's heart warms towards you.

And he says to the angels, "Look at that. He loves my son. She loves my son." And something happens in the heart of God. God loves his son. God loves those who specially love his son. "He who loves me," says Jesus, "will be loved of my father." Have you ever thought about that verse in John 17? "He that loves me will be loved by my father."

Now, perhaps you've never thought that God really loved you, that he had no reason to. If you love the Lord Jesus and are thankful for what he did for you, God has a special part in his heart for you. And thirdly, God loves those who don't love his son. Who never will love his son. He loves those that one day he will have to say, "Depart from me, I never knew you."

While we were enemies, Christ died for us. God commends his love towards us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. We perceive the love of God that he laid down his life for us. "If when we were enemies," says Paul, "Christ died for us, then much more we'll be saved by his life." *Agape* died for us but also lived among us, demonstrating love.

If you want to see love in action—and love is only love when it acts. Love can say what it likes, but it's got to follow it through with actions. And you want to see love working and living, then look at Jesus. Follow him through John, follow him through Mark, follow him through Luke, follow him through the Gospels, step by step. Watch how he deals with people. That's how love behaves.

That's how love acts. And you'll see that real love is a warm love, is a caring love. Stuart's definition is great. *Agape* love is being primarily concerned with the other's well-being irrespective of the cost to yourself, irrespective of their response. Being primarily concerned with the other's well-being. Think of Jesus in John chapter 4 sitting on the well.

The Bible tells us that he was tired, that he was hot, that he was thirsty, and that he was hungry. And along comes a woman, a Samaritan woman at that. And Jesus was primarily concerned with her well-being irrespective of the cost to himself. And he began to talk to her. "Give me a drink," he said. She didn't.