Love is like an onion There are layers to love. There are more facets than a diamond.

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1 GOD S LOVE LANGUAGE Pictures Worth 1000 Words Isaiah 64:1-8 Love is like an onion-you taste it with delight, but when it s gone you wonder whatever made you bite. Love is a funny thing, just like a lizard, it curls up around your heart and then jumps into your gizzard. Love is swell, it s so enticing, it s orange gel, it s strawberry icing, it s chocolate mousse, it s roasted goose, it s ham on Rye, it s banana pie. Love is all good things without a question; in other words, it s indigestion. Love is like an onion There are layers to love. There are more facets than a diamond. 1 JOHN 4:8 tells us God is Love If God is above our understanding and incomprehensible and his ways and his thoughts higher than ours doesn t that put love on a similar playing field? Could that be why we seem to fumble our way through it, never quite able to master this thing called love? 1 JOHN 4:19 We love each other because he loved us first. Could it be that until we understand the heart of God and his heart for us, we ll never truly get love? Billy Graham - God loves you. And He loves you with a love that you don t know anything about, because there is no human love comparable to divine love. But- in his grace- God loves us enough to give us pictures of his love. He doesn t want to leave his love transcendent and incomprehensible. So he, in his love, gives us pictures.. why pictures? Aristotle The soul does not think without a picture. That isn t far from reality. We remember pictures long after the words have left us. 90% of the information retained in our brain is visual. People think using imagery. People learn better using imagery. 70% of the human population would fall in the class of visual learners That s probably why visual aides help learning by 400% So- naturally- IF we go looking in scripture- we will find metaphorical pictures that God places through scripture to help us better grasp his LOVE. Six images God gives us to better understand his love for us: Potter and Clay, Sheep and a Shepherd, Servants and a Master, Kids and their Father, Two friends, and finally a Bride and a Groom.

2 A Potter and Clay IS. 64:8- We are the clay and you [God] are the potter. We all are formed by your hand. Job 10:8-12 (MSG) You made me like a handcrafted piece of pottery Don t you remember how beautifully you worked my clay? You gave me life itself, and incredible love. But if we re pottery, it s pretty clear like Isaiah 64 highlights- we re broken and shattered John Mayer s In Repair So much to do to set my heart right. It's taken so long I could be wrong, I could be ready But if I take my heart's advice. I should assume it's still unsteady I am in repair I am in repair We get this sense in moments of introspection. Something is broken. Love is complicated because our very hearts are complicated. And not in a good way. Some of you are no doubt ready to take my man card for quoting John Mayer in a sermon but let me redeem myself with a manly fact of note Troy I ve watched it dozens of times picking it up on cable TV. But up until recently I d never seen the first 30 minutes! Thousands of ships and hundreds of thousands of men are sent to Troy. Why? Because of one woman and her beauty. Helen may have grappled with issues like all of us, but she had to know one thing she mattered. How much do we long to feel the same!? We think, man, would love really do that? Never for me. Helen was known for her beauty. My heart is ugly, broken, wicked and dreadful and you can go down the list But to start there with our brokenness is to walk into the movie 30 minutes late and start from there like I did again and again with Troy. Your evaluation of the nature of your soul will be wrong. If you start the story of Redemption from the beginning, starting in Genesis, you ll see something eye opening GENESIS 2:7 before the first relationships, love, and marriage between Adam and Eve, We see that we the clay of the earth dust and dirt. We receive an essential detail in GENESIS 1:27 God created us, male and female, in HIS image. This creator God, the potter God, the one who formed humanity made us in his image. Made in his image, we too should be creative like our Creator God, making our own pictures and creations. BUT on the other hand the command to NOT make images of God is one of the Ten Commandments.

3 Why? Because he has already designated his image-bearers- man and woman. Humanity. Yes, we re broken. But before we were broken, we were created as image bearers. Sure, we ve messed up that image in a major way with sin and brokenness. That s is the bad news: there is far more mess in you- and far deeper- than you ever realized. The good news: mess is God s specialty, and there s no mess too big for him. Give him a misshapen lump of clay and he can make something glorious. God is a potter and we are the clay. The same way you can reshape and transform clay with your hands, he does the same work in us. What does this have to do with love? LOVE in our culture boils down to this: we want somebody who will love us as we are. We want a relationship based on self-fulfillment- not self-denial. The ideal soul-mate is low maintenance, meets my needs, and makes few demands on me. And if you look at the love of God, God loves us so much that he meets us where we are. At first glance this resembles the love we seek as a culture, so we love to stop there. God becomes a god who bows at the altar of tolerance. But God doesn t stop there. God loves us so much that he doesn t leave us where we are. OUR CARING CREATOR CALLS US TO CONFORM. We want a relationship of comfort, not conforming. Love ruins our plans. Love disrupts. Love demands. Love stakes claims. Love gets in our face. Love changes our opinion. Love moves us toward places we'd never choose on our own. Love wrecks our lives as we know it. Love conforms. God is love. God is the potter, and we are the clay. And our caring creator calls us to conform Romans 8:29 - For those he foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed into the image of His Son [Jesus]. Colossians 1:15 - Christ is the visible image of the invisible God. It s no coincidence we re called Christians little Christ s We too are called to bear God s image, imitating Christ in all we do. In Romans 12:2 Paul explicitly tells us: Do not conform to the patterns of this world. God in his love conforms us to his image the image of Christ. How? How do we apply this? This is lofty talk, how does it affect how I live tomorrow?

4 Want to conform to the image of Christ and help others do the same? Paul breaks down one major key in Ephesians 4:15 we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ. Ephesians 4 one of Paul s passages about the Body of Christ containing one of dozens of one anothers found in the NT. One of God s tools that shapes us OTHERS. One anothers. A second tool present in this verse COMMUNICATION. Truth spoken in love, covered in God s grace. The common phrase truth hurts is often- ironically- painfully true. But that s why it s not to be taken by itself, but paired with grace and love. They aren t opposites as our culture would often paint them, where love and unity and tolerance make truth optional. 1 Corinthians 13:6 says Love rejoices with the truth! Jesus- who John s gospel introduces as the Word- came in grace and truth. The communication that helps us conform to his image should come across with the same mix - grace and truth. Love and truth. As Tim Keller put it in his book, The Meaning of Marriage: Love without truth is sentimentality; it supports and affirms us but keeps us in denial about our flaws. Truth without love is harshness; it gives us information but in such a way that we cannot really hear it. Our culture majors in sentimentality. Love wins is the popular phrase, but often at the cost of truth. In fact, in 2016 the word of the year according to Oxford dictionary was post-truth. Feelings are more important than facts. Truth and less important than what makes you feel happy when it comes to making decisions and determining your reality. A question we often should pose: Are we being made in the image of God? Or have we shaped god into our image? God doesn t conform to us. We re called to conform to Him. To be his image bearers. But there s an old song that speaks to our impulse to shape our own truth. We ve put a mirror in the sky. We look up and see ourselves magnified. Our god looks just like you and I. We ve put a mirror in the sky. Our songwriters and philosophers have long lamented our inability to be truthful. Billy Joel s Honesty once said: If you look for truthfulness, you might just as well be blind It always seems to be so hard to give Honesty is such a lonely word. Everyone is so untrue. Honesty is hardly ever heard. And mostly what I need from you.

5 Our culture has long majored in what Tim Keller called sentimentality, ditching truth that would otherwise challenge us, change us, and shape us. Christians need to be communications majors. HOW do we speak the truth in love WELL, growing in every way more and more like Christ, into the image of God we were intended to carry as image-bearers since Genesis? 1.) TONE We re coming up on our one year anniversary of adopting Raj. We carried him out of his orphanage last year on the 28 th of Feb. He s two. And he s trilingual. He knows Marathi. He knows sign language. And he knows English. Only here s what many of you know- he knows about 3 words of each. Communication for us all about tone. Communication for me and Steph it s not that different when you get down to it. Aight, I got it. Vs. All RIGHT, I GOT IT Tone sets the atmosphere. And tone must communicate one thing: I CARE. Sacrifice tone and you ll inevitably sacrifice communication. Why is communication so hard on social media- specifically sharing truth in love? Tone is entirely absent. You see somebody put something out there that s you believe is wrong, and somehow you feel attacked- it s like a knock on your beliefs, and you feel the undeniable itch to jump in the fray? I m not immune, I just hit delete far far far more often than I hit enter. Why? Facebook Debates are more often than not entirely fruitless why? You know what s key in debate teams and competitions? You practice speed, tone, and volume. None of which is present on a keyboard. It s why you see more miscommunication and misfires on FB than genuine fruitful communication. It s why you see more division than actual unity. 2.) TIME You can t microwave conversations. In the hectic pace of life we often try to push through and rush communication-- we have to be proactive with communication. Proactive communication time Talking before you fight. Agreeing ahead of time, preventing disagreements. Would you rather have regularly scheduled, 40 minutes of sometimes difficult conversation that leads to peace? Or 40 weeks of fighting about the same issue? BE PROACTIVE in your communication. Realize that if the Devil can t stop you, he gets behind you and pushes you too fast. That applies to a lot of areas in life, but it absolutely does in relationships and

6 communication. We don t have time for relationships that hold us accountable. We don t have time to sit and share our heart with our loved ones. Slow down. Pause. Make time. And proactively invest time into communication. 3.) TRUST Patiently listening builds trust. Allowing your spouse or friend to vent builds trust. Loving listening says - I may not understand it but I ll respect it and you don t have to pay the price for saying it. 2 other keys to trust: Confidentiality I ll keep what you say in confidence Responsibility I ll take responsibility for my words (if you haven t said you re sorry in a while, you probably aren t communicating ) God loves us enough to meet us where we are. And He loves us enough not to leave us there. Not just that He loves us so much that he left where HE WAS. Heaven. We were stolen from the relationship we were created for, intimate communion with Him, and he launched the greatest campaign in the history of creation to get us back. A campaign of redemption, to recapture his love. God almighty came in the flesh of a newborn, a Trojan Horse of Biblical proportions. Not just a 2D picture of his love. God came in the flesh, in 3D glory. We don t just get an image. We get a life. Isaiah 29:13 is a verse Jesus quotes while on his earthly mission, and it says their hearts are far from me. God s heart for us, his love, is that we would come back into intimate communion with him. And in that communion, we re conformed to look more like him. Returning again not just to the intimate relationship of the Garden of Eden, but also our call as image bearers. Shaped by love. Shaped by truth. Clay in the hands of the potter, conformed to the image of the invisible God, Jesus Christ. Encounter you in your word Embrace your people, the one another s that shape us Engage our mission, living as your image bearers that declare your glory