Might As Well Face It, I'm Adopted to Love

Well, good morning to you. It's good to see you again. I noticed you were studying the Baptist Catechism. And so I will share with you that I recently produced a website. And you can find that website at catechize.ing. So catechize.ing.

And on that website I have the Baptist Catechism, the Heidelberg Catechism, the Westminster Shorter Catechism, the Westminster Larger Catechism, an index of every scripture reference that's referred to in any of those catechisms, so that you can see which scriptures are used in maybe more than one of them and how they're used. And so I encourage you to check that out if you want. And with the Baptist Catechism, there is a complete exposition of the Catechism by some guy named Benjamin Beddome.

And you can, right underneath the Baptist Catechism question, you can click on, like, see additional exposition, and you can see all of his exposition with all of his scriptural references that he had made. So that is, is this thing still on? This one's, okay. Do you want it on? Okay, I'm getting a lot of feedback. I didn't know it was because there's like three mics up here right now.

And then I'm, so four mics if you include me. But I want you to check that out if you want. I don't, it doesn't cost anything to you. It's just something I wanted to provide and I've learned a lot just reading from it. And for those of you that are going to present, you could maybe find some information there. So with that being said, now I'll start my time.

Announcements don't count against the preacher's time. I named my sermon today, which you should see in your outline notes, Might As Well Face It, I'm Adopted to Love. And what I learned from that title was that half of the people I know have never heard of that song, which makes me feel rather old. It's probably a blessing to them that they haven't heard the song.

The rest of the people who I know who I told that title to said they couldn't get the song out of their head, which led me to think maybe I shouldn't have titled it that, lest it be a distraction to those of you who are focused on worshiping God without random secular 80s songs in your mind. But I thought the title captured what I wanted to teach you today and preach about today. When you look at almost any verse of the Bible, there's several directions that you could go oftentimes.

Sometimes you can go very deep. One verse of the Bible could produce a half a dozen sermons if you really wanted to look at all the different words and go into detail of each one. In this case, my focus is, like the title says, because I'm adopted by God into his family, I ought to love. And that is the focus that I want to get to today. And so if you want to turn in your scripture to 1 John chapter 4, in order to have some context, I'm going to start in 1 John 4.18 and I will read to chapter 5 verse 3.

That's 1 John 4.18 is where I'll begin. There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear or casts out fear, because fear involves punishment. The one who fears has not been perfected in love. We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, I love God, but hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.

And we have this commandment from him, whoever loves God must love his brother as well. Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the Father also loves those born of Him. By this we know that we love the children of God when we love God and keep His commandments. For this is the love of God that we keep His commandments, and His commandments are not burdensome.

Let me go to the Lord in prayer. Father, even as we sang the music asking Your Holy Spirit to lead us, We continue to desire for your Spirit to guide us and lead us in your worship. We know our worship is acceptable to you only through the Lord Jesus Christ and His shed blood. But we also know that you desire that we would be filled with the Spirit and follow the Spirit and keep in step with the Spirit.

And so let us do that today, for the Spirit loves Jesus. And so we, through the Spirit, can love Him and worship Him truly. Use this text to change our hearts today. May it not be something that simply puffs us up with knowledge, but rather let it be something that is used to drive us to proper belief and action. And it's in Christ's name I pray. Amen.

Amen. If you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ as your Savior, then you are born again. That is the statement that John opens this chapter with. Of course, John would not have divided his book into chapters, so it is probably good for you once in a while to read the books of the Bible without the chapter breaks So many of us read a reading plan where you read these three chapters then these three chapters and oftentimes that creates a break in thought that wasn't intended by the authors, both human and divine of Scripture.

So that's why I started in verse 18. The context is the love that we have from God and then the love that we are to return, And John even reminds us that we are to love our brother. Without getting into the details, I would maintain that loving your brother in the book of John is a reference to loving other Christians. Although I happily use that verse to tell my sons that they ought to love each other as well.

I do think it's referencing our love for other Christians. For many people, the idea that we should have a special love for Christians that we do not share with the rest of the world. I'm not here to prove that today. I'm here to assert that without proof text. But I would share this, that although we're called to love all other people, I certainly hope you love your spouse more than you love all other people.

And I think that it's fair to say that it's analogous that we may also need to love other people in the church more than the rest of the world. Now they may manifest in different ways, of course, but we are to love those who are God's children as well. Well, in the first verse of 1 John 5, in your ESV Bible, in my Berean Standard Bible, you're going to see everyone who loves the Father also loves those born of Him.

This is an instance where I believe the King James gets it better. The King James says something to the effect of, Everyone who believeth that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, And everyone who loves the begetter also loves the begotten. And so the translators of some of our modern translations have interpreted the word begetter, which is not the same word as father that is used throughout the rest of the New Testament.

They have interpreted that to mean the father, and I believe it's a fine interpretation. There's nothing wrong with the way that verse was translated. But it's the idea that if you're born of God, meaning you have been born again because the Spirit of God has come upon you and regenerated your heart, granting you faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and providing you with the knowledge of God that you might love Him as Father, then you are also going to love everyone else who He begets.

And in this case, the begotten is, I think, not the begotten one, although Jesus is included in this sense, but this is talking about those whom God regenerates, those whom God has adopted into his family, his children, the ones born of him. So, if you've been born again, if you have been begotten of God, if you've been brought into his family, you will love the Father. That is one of the things that this verse is saying.

And I would tell you I think that's the easy part sometimes. If you have the faintest notion of how much you deserve God's wrath and eternal torment for the sins that you've committed, and then you come to God by grace through faith To believe that Jesus paid the full penalty for your wrath so that you don't have to pay any of it, and then He died and rose again so that you could ascend into heaven one day yourself in a resurrected body. If you believe that, it's almost easy, at least at times, to love God back.

He loves you, you love Him back. It's natural. If you're born again, it's even more natural. Even non-believers love each other back when they love each other. But the hard part of this verse, I believe, is loving the other children of God. Because the other children of God have not necessarily done anything for you.

The other children of God aren't, in fact, as lovable as God is. I can tell you, you must love God. I can say you're commanded to love God. I can tell you you ought to love God. And if you give any objection whatsoever, the response is very simple. Well, God is perfect.

He's perfectly lovable. So if there's any lack of love from you toward God, that lack of love is a problem in you. It's not the problem in God. This is what the confession of sin referenced, right? We're to love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength. And ideally, we should.

And one day you will. One day you will, say, walk the streets of gold, and you will perfectly love God. Not because you're going to be infinite, but because God will make it such that you will love Him that way. And it will be so pleasurable. You know, before the service, Kelly and Joe were talking about knee pain and back pain, and I'm sure we could...

My pastor has a saying, he says the... Well, what was it now? Oh, and an organ recital when you have your prayer meeting. He calls it an organ recital, right? And if you don't get it, God bless you, you're not there yet. And we all look forward to that day when we going to not have knee pain right And some of you have far worse physical suffering than I ever experienced and more than knee pain But what's even more glorious about heaven is that you will not sin.

You will choose to do what's right in all situations, and that's more glorious. But if you're born again, you love God, and then you are to love the brothers. You're to love the other ones that are born of Him. John Gill wrote this. This wasn't Henry. If you love Him also that is begotten of Him, not only Jesus Christ, who by nature is the only begotten of the Father, for those who know God to be their Father by adoption and regeneration will love Christ.

Who is the Son of God by nature, but also every regenerate person, all that are born of God, since they are children of the same Father, belong to the same household and family, and bear the image and likeness of their heavenly Father. So you ought to love the brothers for that reason, that they are your brothers. Now, it is commanded of us to love God and our brothers.

If you look back at 1 John 4, verse 21, and we have this commandment from him, whoever loves God must love his brother as well. So lest we are unsure whether this is required of us, it is commanded. According to John Gill, this is my next point, this is from him, It's natural to our profession. In 1 John 4, 11, John writes, Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also love one another.

There's an implied command there, but his point is that it should be natural. Sometimes God tells us to do things that don't feel exactly natural. Let's take, for example, communion. We're going to partake of communion in a little while. And literally, none of us would have woken up without the revelation of God and just said, well, this is a proper thing we ought to do as part of worship.

Communion is something that God tells us about that we could otherwise not know about. Baptisms. When you do a baptism, you're not doing something that you naturally would have ever thought of. John is saying that because you've been born of God, because you've been brought into the family of God, it's actually a natural thought that you would love everyone else who was born of God.

If God so loved you that he sent his Son into the world to humble himself, even to the point of death, death on a cross, So that you could be saved by grace through faith in his finished work. And the Bible tells us he demonstrated his love in that while you were still a sinner, Christ died for you. Then you must look at every other sinner as if God loves them the same way that God loves you.

And so when you despise your brother or sister, sometimes we have good excuses, I'll say. I mean, sometimes we have reasons, right? Somebody really, really did something wrong, really hurt us, really hurt another person. Maybe they've really offended God because of the type of sin they've committed. When we despise a person like that, though, who is in the church, somebody who God has saved, we're despising one that God demonstrated his love for when he sent his son to die for him.

And so we ought to love our brothers and sisters. It should be natural for us to do so, just like it's natural for us to love God. So point number two, point number one was in you're born again, you love God and you love your brothers and sisters and you ought to, it's commanded. Point two, how do we evidence our love for one another? Love is one of the most used and abused terms, probably in every generation, but I'll be happy to say in our generation.

And if we want to get into pop culture again, which I don't, one of the reasons you probably shouldn't is because half the people I talk to didn't understand my sermon title anyway. But you can probably think back to, especially when you were a kid, all the different songs that people write about love. And you know what? Some of them are really catchy.

And most of them are really inane. Most of them are really foolish. They don't give any real definition of love. Love amounts to nothing more than a feeling I have when I think about someone or am near that person. And usually in our current American culture now, that's severely associated with a desire to commit some kind of sexual act with the person.

Whether it's immoral or not. And I will submit to you that anyone that you commit sexual immorality with, you do not love. And they do not love you. Not truly. That's why I don't like when we call people lovers. Because they're having an adulterous relationship.

But God actually calls them lovers in the Bible when he rebuking Israel for their idolatrous relationships So it a natural concept But how can we know if we love the children of God Do you know if you love someone because you feel good when you around them Certainly not. Because part of the point of having to be commanded to love others is that there will be people who are hard to love. There's people who are different from you In a way that offends your sensibilities or maybe the way you were raised.

There's people who are different from you in the sense that they believe in different liberties as a Christian than you believe in. Or they believe in less of the liberty, right? I mean, we have wine here and there's grape juice, right? And so this church is saying we're being responsive to the fact that there's different people with different sensitivities about the use of alcohol.

And then there's people in the world who would be severely offended by anyone that wouldn't have wine and vice versa. So there's people with different concepts of what God has commanded or not. Sometimes we think commandments are very clear. I think God thinks they're clear, but let's bring up a simple example. A Presbyterian who loves the Lord Jesus Christ, by faith has been changed into a new creature, reads the Bible and draws the conclusion that baptism is to be done a different way than we do it in a Baptist church, which you're not named one, but you're a Baptistic church.

It's very easy to not want to love people and to say, well, they're offending God. And it'd be easy for them to say the same about us. They think we do it wrong. And yet in my family, if I tell my sons to do something, and one son interprets it one way and another son interprets it another way, I don't expect them to come fighting each other over it. If they wanted to have a little debate about, well, what did dad really mean?

Sure, have it. But to despise one another because of a difference of opinion, even on something that I may think was very clear, that would actually be a violation of an even greater law that I would have for my children, which is I want you to love one another. And I think God has that for us. Jesus says in John chapter 13, John's the apostle of love, they say.

So you can just read John and 1 John and 2 John and 3 John. Not much more you could learn about love except maybe Ephesians has a lot of good things. But in the book of John, Jesus says, By this the world will know that you are my disciples. And how does he say that? By your great debates you have. By the way, if you say amen when I'm preaching, I do not consider it an interruption or discourteous whatsoever.

It's actually quite welcome. It may wake up somebody that needs to be woken up, or at the very least, if it's at a well-placed time, it may inspire someone to think about what was said. So feel free to do that. But Jesus didn't say that the world will know us because of our debates. He's not going to know us by our ornate decorations in the church. We can have a plain church.

We can have a big church with good decorations. We can have beautiful architecture. You can have a church that's on folding chairs with half a tent left over from a storm, and you can be doing church. How did Jesus say the world will know that we're His disciples? Let's hear it. Yeah, by the way, we love one another.

Jesus also said in Matthew chapter 5 that even the Gentiles love those who love them. Even the tax collectors love the ones that love them. And so in the church, the primary distinction that God makes in his church that is so different from the world is that people will see you loving someone who, by all practical purposes, you should not love. And it'll be a real genuine affectionate love, not just a, oh, the Bible says I need to love people, so I better do something like this, and kind of almost like gritting your teeth and doing it.

It's an actual affection for other people that manifests itself in certain works, and I would argue that those works are keeping God's moral law effectively, Commandments 5 through 10, regarding all your neighbors. So you honor those in authority. The fifth commandment says honor your father and mother, but the fifth commandment, you should have studied it a few months ago now in your catechism, it's showing proper honor and respect to everyone in their several places and relations that you have, whether they're your superiors, inferiors, or equals.

So the fifth commandment means we obey our authorities in the government properly. The fifth commandment means respect for elders in the church, respect for adults all around you, even in your community. An older gentleman that's a non-Christian ought to be respected by the young children in the community. The fifth commandment also means Christian parents have duties to their children.

You're breaking the fifth commandment if you don't discipline your children well. Older women, Titus 2 tells you what you should be doing with younger women on a regular basis, teaching them to take care of their home, teaching them how to love their own husbands and children. If you're not doing that, you're omitting the fifth commandment's command toward you.

That's just one of them. This is one commandment of how we ought to react to one another. The sixth commandment you saw from the exhortation in the Baptist Catechism, it requires far more than simply walking around not murdering people. Shouldn't steal, shouldn't even covet. So I would argue with you that it's not that complicated to love others. It's basically living out the Ten Commandments, the first four primarily being your response to God, your duty towards God, how you ought to be disposed before God, and the last six being your duty towards other men.

And if you're ever wondering, how do I love somebody? See what the commandments require. See what the commandments forbid. And then when you find it difficult to do so, when you realize that there are certain people in the church that are easy to love, and it's not that any of us are easy to love, I think we just build relationships where it works that way, you know.

I think Joe's easy to love, you might not. He may not be objectively easy to love, but for Joe and for me, it's a relationship that tends to work. And it tends to be easy for us for some reason. When you find the people that are difficult to love, you need to first remind yourself you're commanded to love that Christian. As long as they are considered a member of the church of God, you're commanded to love them.

And when you find it difficult, the answer is not, well, I'll just avoid it. When you find it difficult, the answer is to recognize that the difficulty in obeying any of God's commands derives from the sin that dwells within you still. None of you have been glorified. We all have remaining sin that dwells in us and wages war against us in such a way that what we desire to do, I want to love every other Christian.

God told me to. I want to obey God. I really love God. I do. I'm so grateful for what He's done for me. I want to do everything He says.

And then all of a sudden it's hard. And I have to recognize there's a war being waged within me right now. There's a law in me, Romans 7, 21. There's a law within me that tells me that I don't want to do, that I don't do what I want to do. There's a law that's always waging war. The spirit against the flesh and the flesh against the spirit.

And so what do I do? I can retreat. I can step back and say, well, I'll go love someone that's easy to love even harder. That's what we do. Like, that's our response. It's difficult to do something that's hard, so I'll go find the thing that's not so difficult, and I'll do that more, and then I'll feel real good about my good works.

It's real easy to do. You ever see some of these guys like me and James? We go evangelize a lot. You know, there's a lot of guys that evangelize a lot because they're avoiding their wife. Not us. I wouldn't have brought it up just to confess it.

I would have fixed it before I brought it up. Listen, there's people out there that are doing all sorts of really good religious works, many of them very public, and some of them even private. We can pick on women too. The women that show up and do all the work around the church. They clean everything. They cook all the meals.

They're always there when somebody needs them. Sometimes it can be compensating for the fact that there's a difficult person to love in their life. That it's not just that easy to just say, here, I'll make you a meal. They need to get into a relationship. It needs to get a little messy and difficult. We all have the temptation.

I don't know what yours is. Some of us, it's talking too much. Some of us, it's retreating and avoiding people. Some of us, it's reading more books. Some of us, it's I never look at a book. We're all made different.

But the point is, is we all have this temptation to avoid what God's commanded. And because we're religious people now, and I meant that in a good way, because we love God, because we're religious, our tendency, though, will slide to, OK, I'll go do something that I know is a really good thing, Because it's going to make me feel a little better about the fact that I'm not doing this other thing that my conscience is now tugging at me for. So we've become little Catholics, right?

The response when you find it difficult to obey any of God's commands is to, at least metaphorically, fall to your knees and ask God to help you. When you find obeying God difficult, go to the same God that sent His Son to die for your sin and ask Him to continuously forgive you and cleanse you of all unrighteousness. He has the power and He promised to provide it And He also I think made it rather clear You think of books like James Made it clear that he going to provide it after you ask for it You do not have because you do not ask.

Sometimes God doesn't give it to you. This is James 4. He doesn't give you what you ask for because you ask with selfish desires. So you want to, I'll use an example, you want to lose weight because you want to look good. Sometimes God won't grant it if you have the wrong reasons. You want to be a better preacher so that you can get a YouTube thing going or, you know, whatever the reasons people have for things.

When you ask for something from God for self-glory, He is perfectly free to deny it to you, or actually give it to you as a punishment, so that you can realize the lack of satisfaction you'll find in your own glory. If you're a Christian today, the only thing that will satisfy you is Jesus Christ. The only thing that will satisfy you is glorifying God.

You will find yourself wanting when you are glorifying yourself. And if Yahweh is your good shepherd, you shall not want, then follow Him and do as He says. So follow the commandments. Do not accuse me of being legalistic. Legalistic, the desire to keep God's commandments and even keep them meticulously is a good desire. Jesus Christ kept God's commandments meticulously and had He offended in even one point, you'd be dead in your sin today.

So be thankful for the fact that Jesus desired to keep God's commands. Legalism is something we can slide into, but we can also slide into lawlessness, and sin is lawlessness. So what I want you to do is to think about being lawful. Don't think about God's law as something that you'll do so you'll grow. Think of God's law as the guide of what you ought to be doing so that you'll run to God to ask to grow you, So that you'll joyfully keep His commands.

Verse 3, 1 John 5. The love of God is that we keep His commandments, and His commandments are not burdensome. Now finally, I want to reference the idea of your adoption. So if you turn to Ephesians 1.5. I think that being adopted is something we need to talk about a lot. In Ephesians 1.5, we'll start at 3.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms, for He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless in His presence. In love He predestined us for adoption as His sons. Turn to the book of John chapter 1. The book of John chapter 1, verse 12.

But to all who did receive Him, to those who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God, children born not of blood, nor of the desire or will of man, But born of God. God gives us the right to become His children. In chapter 3 of 1 John, John marvels at the fact that we have been called the children of God. It's a marvelous thing.

He marvels. He's amazed. This is a big deal. We grow up in a culture where we say everyone's a child of God. From the moment that they're existent. John chapter 8.

A couple more verses I want to look at. John chapter 8, verse 41. Jesus says, you are doing the works of your Father. So real quick, when I tell you you're supposed to love your brothers in the church and your sisters, some of you will get the idea like, oh, I need to be nice to everybody. And I'm going to tell you that the perfectly loving Son of God was not nice.

The word nice carries with it, I think, from its etymology, the concept of ignorance. Basically, it's foolish stupidity. You're supposed to be kind. Kindness is a virtue that God grants through His Spirit. Niceness is not. Jesus was not always nice.

He was perfectly kind and loving, and sometimes He was even harsh with people when it was necessary. But these guys say back to him, we are not illegitimate children. Our only father is God himself. And Jesus said to them in verse 42, if God were your father, you would love me. So if you ever wonder where John got 1 John 5, 1 from, he's basically quoting Jesus here, right?

John listened to Jesus. We should too. He says You belong to your father the devil and you want to carry out his desires There is a sense that every one of us is a child of wrath before we know Christ. We imitate our father, the devil. We are disobedient. We are following the course of this world.

The prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience. Ephesians 2, 1. And then it's, but God, something happens where suddenly, rather than you being considered a child of wrath like the rest of mankind, you're considered a child of God. That's why John finds this so marvelous, because John understands the miracle of new birth and regeneration.

You get these charismatics, and I apologize if you're one of them. Charismatics today, they say, you guys don't believe in miracles because I'm a cessationist. I say, I believe in miracles all the time. I just don't believe they're the kinds that most charismatics are making up. I see miracles all around the room right here. I don't even know most of you prior to your salvation, And I know it's a miracle that you're sitting here worshiping God right now because I believe the Word of God.

You could have been the kindest, most self-respected gentleman in the whole community before you were saved. And I know it was a miracle for you to be sitting here by faith, trusting Christ as your Savior. And you could have been the worst person in the room here before you were saved. And I knew it was a miracle that God would save you. So we believe in miracles.

We just believe in the ones that God defines. So everyone here needed to be adopted into the family of God. You are not born a child of God. You're not conceived a child of God. You don't resemble God. You're not like God.

You are a child of wrath before you're saved. And God, in his infinite wisdom and mercy, chooses to adopt people into his family. And unless for a second you think that God saw families form and then thought, oh, that's a neat way to describe what I'm doing. Like, families were created by God to help us to understand adoption into his family. All right, God doesn't, God didn't make marriage and then afterwards think, oh, that's a neat analogy for the gospel.

Like he literally made marriage so that he could give us the analogy of the gospel of a husband loving his wife unto death and a wife submitting to her husband and loving him and respecting him. And so families teach us about the family of God by his design. And if you've ever known someone who's adopted someone, and I don't know, kind of judged, Jim was, if you ever did adoptions.

Did you? Did you do adoptions? No, not that kind. Okay, okay. Well, adoption's a serious business, legally. Yeah?

Okay, good. Yeah, I adopted a daughter. And I remember being a little overwhelmed by the seriousness of it in the American court. It was a very serious endeavor. And I meant it, but I didn't realize it was that serious to them. She is now your heir, they said.

Well, isn't that exactly what we are in Christ? We're joint heirs with Christ. So Christ who earned everything, Christ who is beloved by the Father from the foundation of the world, Christ who never did anything to possibly offend God, has an inheritance that is owed to Him. And guess what? It's all ours too. We were adopted.

We're joint heirs with Christ. It's provided we suffer with him that we may be glorified with him. So you are a joint heir with Christ by adoption. It's a real special thing. It's a wonderful thing. You're treated as one of the number.

You're not thought of as a stepson or a stepdaughter. You're just a son or a daughter. That's what it is. You've become part of the family in such a way that you're inseparable. And you're indistinguishable from the physical children of parents. And it's a wonderful thing when you are stuck in sin, when you're suffering, when you're having some difficulty to recognize, I'm one of God's children now.

He's not going to leave me or forsake me. In fact, my suffering is how he's conforming me to be more like Jesus. And then sometimes you look at another Christian who's suffering, or you look at another Christian who is living in their sin, and instead of thinking, that's my adopted brother or sister that God thought it was important to send Jesus to die for, We despise them You don have to actually hate someone to despise them By God standard just not loving them and reaching out and doing all you can to love your brother and sister in word and deed that's despising them.

1 John 3. 1 John 3, right after talking about Cain killing his brother, verse 17, If anyone with earthly possessions sees his brother in need, but withholds his compassion from him, how can the love of God abide in him? And then I think a more general statement John makes, Little children, let us not love in word and speech, but in action and truth. So you are to love your brothers and sisters because they were also adopted.

You needed adoption. There was a point in time that you needed other brothers and sisters to love you, even though you were acting in a way that was probably pretty gross to them. And probably all of us will still have some of those moments the rest of our life, where someone else needs to love us at that time, Not because of what we're doing for them or could do for them, or even because we're asking forgiveness, but because they ought to unconditionally love us because they love the Father.

And we must do that for others. I want you to think about one analogy, and that is the idea that if you have a family, Maybe they already have some kids and the kids are pretty well behaved and they're all cleaned up and the man's managing his family well and the wife takes good care of things and then they decide to adopt someone. And I don't know if you've ever seen Little Orphan Annie.

I think of all those kids with their hard knock life, you know. And you adopt one of these kids that's a little rough around the edges. Maybe they used to be a criminal. Maybe they've been through a lot of things in life that have shaped the kinds of temptations that are easy for them to jump into. And when those parents adopt that other child, knowing that that child is going to need time and care and nourishment to become what the parents are going to try to conform them into, right?

They're not going to leave them like this criminal or whatever situation that person came from. I think dutiful parents would expect their other children to love that other child. I think they'd expect the other children, rather than be annoyed by the child, offending their senses and even offending the father's rules, even earthly parents would want their other children to try to be helpful and patient And allow their love and kindness to lead that other child in the right direction.

And I think if we would expect that from even earthly children, how much more is God authorized to expect us to love those that He brings into the church of God, and He brings them in, what do we say, come as you are? We want God to save people. I'll be honest, I'm not trying to offend you, but there are a lot more empty seats right now in here than there are full ones.

What if God filled them tomorrow with people that say they love Jesus, but only have one day of knowing Jesus, and so they still do a lot of things that you don't like. They still say a lot of words that we don't say in church. They may even have tattoos, visible ones. Nope, sorry, I didn't mean to offend anybody here. Mine are all hidden, right? So I can say that.

The point is this, you want a full church, right? You want a full church of people worshiping God together on Sunday, going out in the community and making a difference in the community, and then helping one another as well all week long, Supporting elders financially and through prayer, having deacon teams, doing things. You want that, and you know what?

In order to get to that point, there's going to have to be some times that you love people that aren't that easy to love. And how glorious it would be if God should bring people into your midst, and that you would say, I will love them as if. I will love them as if God has commanded me to, as if it's natural for me to love my brother and sister, And because they've been adopted into the same family I've been adopted into.

And when you struggle, I'll remind you, ask God. Ask God to grant you the grace to love the people that you have trouble loving and to bring to your mind how difficult you must be for some people to love. Let me pray. Father in heaven, we pray that you would make your word come true in our hearts, That we might be cut by the severity and the seriousness of it and then healed by the balm of Jesus Christ, blood shed on our behalf to forgive us of our failures.

And we ask that you would strengthen us that we may do what you've commanded. And it's in Christ's name I pray. Amen.