Title: Love and Life
Content :150%}
<The 2nd Sunday of Christmas on January 5, 2003>
Nurturing Sermon / Video
love and life
Jonah 4:5-11
1 John 3:11-18
On the morning of the first Sunday of the new year, I pray that the infinite grace of God who has given you the hope of eternal life be with you and your family.
This year too, we have set the theme of our church as “a church that cultivates a culture of life”. Cultivating a culture of life means laying the groundwork for life to grow properly. It is about respecting life and providing a place where it can freely extend without being threatened with death. It is to usher in an era of peace without war, and to create an equal world free from poverty. However, the culture of life does not stop there, and furthermore, it is about creating a religious climate that can achieve spiritual growth.
The world we live in now suffers from confrontation and conflict. Many people die of starvation due to the gap between the rich and the poor. As the environment is being destroyed, the foundations of our lives are collapsing. Our spirit is drying up with the material civilization developed by humans. Man's insatiable desire is driving people away from God. In the end, this world is still in darkness, so God-given life cannot grow freely, and it is bound to shrink in the face of the threat of death. Cultivating a culture of life is to change this world and make it a place of peace, love, and cooperation, and to create a world where material civilization is overcome and spiritual values are respected by spreading the gospel of Christ, who became the resurrection and life, throughout the earth. work.
Cultivating such a life culture is by no means an easy task. This is such a grand story that we feel so isolated from ourselves. But if you think about it, it's just starting from me. When I have a love for life, a clear awareness that life can survive and grow in organic relationships, and a belief that life can be completed when meeting God, the culture of life will blossom. Therefore, cultivating a culture of life can begin when you have the right consciousness from yourself.
In the words of 1 John that we read today, "This is the news you have heard from the beginning, that we are to love one another. We must not become like Cain." Cain is the first murderer in the Bible. He was jealous of his brother Abel and killed him. It emphasizes the fact that we must love each other rather than become like Cain who killed life. Without love, you become a murderer like Cain. Verse 14 says that those who do not love remain in death. And in verse 15 it says, "Whoever hates his brother or sister is a murderer. Whoever murders does not have eternal life in him." A person who does not love is a murderer after all, and there is no eternal life in him. In other words, eternal life resides only in those who love.
Cain's culture is a culture of death. Even if it is a brother, if it is considered a competitor, it is the life of Cain that he hates, hates, and tries to get rid of. As modern society becomes a competitive society, black and white are divided, and they divide their allies and enemies, and they fight and compete left and right, trampling their opponents and gaining power, or driving their opponents to death through war. When a stronger person appears, the history of being chased by death is inevitably repeated. After all, in this culture, both winners and losers cannot escape from the shadow of death. A life in which people are divided into two poles and oppose each other, cursing and denying each other, is bound to ruin both of them. There can be no peace in such a world, and no true life can grow in it.
According to the book of Jonah we read today, Jonah was watching the city of Nineveh and waiting for it to be destroyed. In Jonah's mind, he firmly believed that the city of Nineveh, the heart of Assyria, the enemy of Israel, should not be forgiven as it is, but should be judged and destroyed. Jonah was waiting, expecting God to eventually destroy the city of Nineveh.
These thoughts of Jonah dominate us today. We believe that North Korea must be destroyed by God's judgment in the face of confrontation between the two Koreas. I am convinced that that is the work of accomplishing the justice of God. But the book of Jonah shows that this conviction is not God's will. God's will was that even though it was a city full of iniquity, He wanted them to repent and turn back to be saved. God does not kill and destroy life, but it is his will that even the dead give life and make perfect.
To save this world under the dominion of death, God sent his Son to teach him love. Because we meet God through love and our neighbors through love, he made us realize that we are all a community of life. He taught us that we need to love each other because we are organic lives that we should all live together, not in a relationship where we should be divided, opposed, hated, and killed. He taught us that when all living things love each other, we can become healthy and build a beautiful community of life. He also taught us that when we love each other like this, we can grow into eternal life in that love. He taught us that eternal life does not come suddenly, but that it is a life that grows in love. It means that if you do not practice love in your life on earth today, you cannot enter the kingdom of God and receive eternal life. It is because if you do not know love, eternal life cannot dwell in it and cannot grow. So, in today's text, we are saying:
If anyone has the world's riches and sees his brother or sister in need and does not close the door to help, how can God's love remain in that person? 3:17
Living in this world makes it clear that without love, God's love cannot remain in it, and without God's love, eternal life cannot take place in it. Love is ultimately about respecting the life of the other person and acknowledging that you are connected with God's life cycle with you.
How can we know that we believe in Jesus and have eternal life? You can do it right through love. When love springs up within me, I have entered eternal life and proves that I am abiding in God. According to John, love is the surest evidence of faith in Jesus. If love is restored to me, it is proof that I have entered eternal life, and it is proof that God is in me. The restoration of love is the restoration of life and restoration of my existence. No matter how much I believe in Jesus, pray fervently, speak in tongues, prophesy, and move mountains while praying, 'Lord, Lord,' without love, it means nothing, and in the end, life cannot be restored. That is why love is the core and essence of life.
Beloved, being a church that cultivates a culture of life means becoming a church that practices love, the core and essence of life. It is the mission of the church to nurture the fragile life and create an environment where that life can grow and be cared for. It is the mission of the church to avoid the competition for survival of the weak and strong, and to provide a way to live together by helping each other. It is our mission to create peace by leading the polarized, extreme confrontation and fighting relationship to reconciliation and cooperation. It is also the missionary task of the church to actively participate in politics to minimize the gap between the rich and the poor and to create a society that helps and shares those who do not have. The goal of the church is to change the society of a zero-sum game in which the opponent loses when I win so that it becomes a win-win game or a positive sum game society in which both you and I win. When the culture of life is established in this way, our life will grow and be completed into eternal life.
Until now, our society has suffered a lot from division and conflict. Now, we must usher in a new era of peace by overcoming the discrimination against foreign workers, such as discrimination against racism, regionalism, and discrimination against foreign workers, which are prevalent in our society, and by communicating with each other through love, understanding and cooperating with each other. Remembering that these efforts not only bring peace to this land, but also lead to the Kingdom of God, we should do our best to cultivate a culture of life in the new year.
I hope that this year will be a life of prayer, love and devotion so that the history of life, which started with God's love, can be grafted into the history of this nation today to blossom a beautiful culture of life.