Good morning again. Welcome to UPC. It's so good to see everyone together again. One service. Was anybody here at nine o'clock hoping to, I won't embarrass you. There'll probably be people coming in late today as well if they'd not already have. But yeah, a feast. Okay, we're being asked. There are some people coming in a little bit late looking for chairs. If everybody could kind of move in, if you've got a couple of empty chairs on your row, it would help our late comers find a seat more easily that way. That would be a courteous thing to do. We will feast one day, won't we? And that's something to look forward to. But we also get to feast right now. We're going to feast upon God's Word and then in a little while we're going to feast upon the Lord's Supper. So it's a very, very special day today indeed. In your Bible turn with me to the book of 1 Corinthians where we are continuing our study of this chapter called the Love Chapter. This is the sermon series that never ends. But it's a good one. And we've been learning a lot of good things about love in this chapter. In case you're new to us, we've been asking the question, what does it look like to love somebody when you tell a friend or when you tell your spouse or tell your parents or your children, I love you. What are you really saying? Well, the answer to that question is here in 1 Corinthians 13. We've been looking at God's definition of love. And so we're going to look some more of that today. I'd like to read verses 4 through 8 of 1 Corinthians 13. Listen carefully to God's holy word. Love is patient and kind. Love does not envy or boast. It is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way. It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice at wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. The word of the Lord. Let's pray. Father, as we come to feast upon this portion of your word, we ask your Holy Spirit to come and be poured out upon us. Father, illumine our hearts and minds. Give us wisdom. Give us understanding. Help us to see Jesus in this passage. Father, help us to not think that by mere self-effort we will be able to do these things but instead equip us and empower us by your spirit and through the power of the gospel to live a life of love as you call us to do. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. We are going to look at just the first phrase of verse 7. This is why this sermon series is taking so long. We are going to focus on that first phrase of verse 7. Love bears all things. Now, at first glance, it looks like Paul is just saying put up with anything. Love puts up with things. Love tolerates all things. Love never gives up. After all that is often how we use the word bear, we might say bear with me or grin and bear it. Just tolerate it. And that is one meaning of the word translated here as bear. It's the Greek word steggo. It's a Greek verb in the present tense. So Paul is saying keep on bearing with one another. Keep on bearing all things. And one meaning of that Greek word steggo is to endure. In fact, earlier in this very book in chapter 9 verse 12, Paul says we bear, speaking of we apostles, we bear or we endure anything rather than put an obstacle in the way of the gospel. So there it is used as endure. But I don't think that's what the word means here in verse 7. For one thing, later in this same verse, Paul says love endures all things. Why would he say the same thing twice? It seems to me that bears all things, needs to say something a little different from endures all things. So I study this word a little bit this past week and found something pretty interesting. The Greek word steggo comes from a root word that means roof, kind of surprising, roof. In fact, back in Mark chapter 2 verse 4 where Jesus is in a house teaching people and the house is totally crowded with people and four men want to bring a paralyzed man to Jesus so that Jesus might heal him. They can't get in through the front door. So what do they do? Many of you know this story. They cut a hole in the steggo in the roof. They make an opening and they lower the paralyzed man down on a mat so that he can be healed by Jesus. That's that Greek word steggo translated here as bear. Back in the Old Testament, there was a Greek translation of the Old Testament. We call it the step 2 agent. And in the story about Noah, at the end of the story of Noah in Genesis chapter 8, Noah has been inside the ark for about a year. And it's finally time to come out. The rain has stopped. The earth is drying up. And in Genesis 8, 13 it says that he removed the steggo in the Greek translation of that verse. He removed the covering. It's translated in our Bibles. The covering of the ark and he looked and saw that the ground was dry. So that's the word translated here as bear all things. It's a roof. So I believe that when Paul says love bears all things, what he's really saying is that love covers all things. Love protects all things like a roof protects a house. In fact, some of you like the new international version of the Bible, I do too. And they chose to translate that verse that way. Love protects always. So love functions in our lives like a roof on a house. And when we love somebody, we are to cover them. But what does that mean? Well, I like to talk about that this morning. And if you're keeping an outline, I want to talk about three situations today. First of all, what love looks like when someone is being harmed. And then what it looks like when someone is very different from you. And finally, what it looks like when someone is living an unrepentant sin. And I think if we'll understand Paul's explanation of love as a cover in these three situations, we will not only understand love a little bit better, but we will also get to know the love of Jesus Christ a lot better as well. Let's dive in. The first thing I want to say is that when someone is being harmed, love is doing what you can to defend them. So defense is the first way we're going to look at how love functions like a roof. And what do you know is being harmed by gossip, by criticism, by attack, or even by physical or sexual abuse. In this verse, Paul is saying that you must come to their defense. You must protect the person like a roof covers a house. Otherwise, you're not truly loving them. We've all been inspired by stories of people who jump in front of a bullet or who take a punch, intended for somebody else, or who speak up in the fence of somebody being slammed or bullied. Some of you might remember the name Anthony Borja back in February when a kid started shooting up fellow classmates at that high school in Parkland, Florida. 15-year-old Anthony Borja was shot five times while using his body as a human shield in defense of his classmates. Or you might think of Aaron Feiss who did something similar. He was an assistant football coach in that high school and he threw himself in front of students and was hit by bullets and later died. See, those guys covered the kids in that high school. They were a roof. They loved their classmates. But it can happen in less dramatic ways too. I love the story about John Glenn and his wife Annie. Many of you know John Glenn was the first American to orbit the Earth back in 1962. What you may not know is that he and his wife Annie had an amazingly close relationship. They were married for 73 years. Can you imagine? Until John died in 2016. Annie is still with us. She's 98 years old. But Annie suffered most of her life from an 85% stutter. That means that she got hung up on 85% of the words she tried to speak. That is a severe speech disability. Whenever she needed to take a taxi she would have to write out the address and hand it to the driver. She was embarrassed whenever she went out in public. One time one of their daughters stepped on a nail, badly injured, blood streaming everywhere. Annie couldn't even call 911 because she couldn't talk to the 911 operator. Annie was constantly in the public eye and she hated it. That day in 1962 when John was supposed to blast off into space, news reporters and vice president Johnson were on their front lawn waiting to speak to Annie. She didn't know what to do. So she called John. John was preparing for lift off. And here's what John Lynn said to his wife. He said, look, if you don't want the vice president or the TV networks or anybody else to come into the house, then that's it as far as I'm concerned. They're not coming in and I will back you up all the way. And you tell them that I don't want Johnson or any of the rest of them to put so much as one toe inside our house. Isn't that neat? John Glenn's love was like a roof over his wife. It's very interesting that she went on to overcome much of that stutter. She did an intensive treatment program in 1973. Overcame a lot of that. Ended up giving speeches for her husband when he was running for the Senate. And she's now an advocate even now at her age for people with communication disorders. She even became an adjunct professor with the speech pathology department at Ohio State University. How could she do that? Well, to a great extent, it was because she had a husband who covered her with his love. See, when you really love somebody, you have their back. You defend them when they're mistreated. You step in. You intervene. You don't allow a human being created in the image of God to be defaced and defamed by someone else. Examples. When people around you are gossiping about somebody. For one thing, you will not immediately just believe everything they say. And you will not repeat it either. You will remind the person speaking that gossip is sinful when you're tempted to gossip yourself, you will turn away from that temptation. When someone is suffering, you're like Sam Gamji to Frodo in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. You will stay near that person and check in on him or her until the trouble is over. Parents, I think of your responsibility to cover your children. The world, the flesh and the devil conspire every day for their ruin. Are you protecting them? Are you filtering what they can see on the Internet? Are you watching over their use of social media? The TV programs that they watch and the movies that they see. Are you guarding your own speech and your own attitudes inside your home? Do you pray with and for your children if they're often college or living in another city? Do you continue to cover them in prayer? Single people, students, do you have somebody in your life who has your back? Do you have theirs? See, we all need someone to bear us, to cover us because that's what God does for us. Look at this verse from Psalm 91. It says he will cover you speaking of God. He will cover you with his opinions and under his wings, you will find refuge. His faithfulness is a shield and a buckler. See, the Bible says that Jesus our great high priest ever lives to intercede for us in heaven. Jesus our king protects us from our enemies as our advocate in heaven. When the accusations of Satan are thrown in our faces, the Holy Spirit reminds us through the word of God of our identity in Christ that we are the children of God, that we've been justified by grace through faith, that we've been cleansed from sin, that we've been adopted by the Father and that we're loved by the good shepherd and nothing can snatch us out of his hand. See, when we're being harmed, Jesus our older brother comes to our defense and one day justice. If it's not experienced here and now, one day justice will roll down like waters. See, that's what love looks like. Let's look at the second situation. When someone is very different from you. Love is doing your best to accept them. We've looked at what happens when somebody's being harmed, but what about if somebody is just really different from you? Love is doing your best to accept them and I think that's what Peter's talking about when he says in first Peter 4.8 to keep loving one another earnestly since love covers over a multitude of sins. We are very broken people. In one way or another we're kind of like sandpaper with each other. We rub each other the wrong way. Think about this only in heaven will we never offend anybody ever again. Meanwhile, we have to learn how to love each other in spite of our differences and our failings. How do we do that? Well, I went to the dentist the other day and I saw something I thought I'd share with you. There was a father and his little boy waiting to go to the dentist in the same room that I was in. And the boy looked to be no more than four or five years old, something like that. And pretty soon another man came into the waiting room and sat down. He was bald. Now look, I am not bald. This guy was bald. I had a lot of hair compared to this guy. But the boy said, daddy, that man doesn't have any hair. You know how kids do. They're unfiltered. And the father said, and I thought about that as an illustration of what we're going to learn about right here. I was back to that word steggo. The ancient Greeks used that word steggo that we've been looking at when they wanted to talk about a lid on a container to keep stuff from spilling out. Josephus was a Jewish historian and sometimes he used the word steggo when he was talking about keeping something concealed or hidden or secret. That love is saying about the differences of other people. Love means covering certain things with a veil of silence. So to bear with somebody means sometimes we have to cover something that he or she does with silence, to conceal it from being known by others and not let it become an issue. I love what Matthew Henry said in his comments about this very passage. He says, love will draw a veil over the faults of others as far as it can consistently do with as long as far as it can consistently with duty. It is not for blazing or publishing the faults of a brother till duty manifestly demands it. Though such a man be free to tell his brother his faults in private, he is very unwilling to expose him by making them public to his shame and reproach. My wife loves to soundtrack to the Broadway play Hamilton. I enjoyed it too the first five or ten times she played it. But after what, 357,000 times, I'm over it. She even put one of the songs from Hamilton as her phone iPhone ring. And so I get to hear it every time her phone goes off. Now I'm kind of being facetious, but actually relationships are filled with things like that aren't they? We're all different. We have different tastes and preferences and convictions about a multitude of subjects. We have different child rearing practices. We have different beliefs about how kids should be educated. We have different political viewpoints. We spend money differently. We follow certain religious practices and we ignore other ones. And some of these differences can really get on our nerves. But the Bible still in verse 7 calls us to bear all things. What does that look like? We'll go back to our analogy. What does a roof do? It keeps things contained. It keeps private things private. So if you find that somebody else has certain personal convictions or habits or lifestyles that are different from yours that rub you the wrong way and they are not sinful, it's just a matter of perspective or personality difference or something like that. Here's what you do. Don't go around broadcasting it to people like, you know, can you believe what so and so thinks? Can you believe how could anybody be so weird? Why would they do that with their money? How can they not see how wrong they are? And you certainly wouldn't use it in a sermon illustration. This is another challenge to us parents. It's so easy to make a big issue out of everything that kids do wrong. It's so easy to nitpick. Don't do that. Don't freak out over every little mistake your child makes. Some things just need to overlook. Your child will grow out of some things. So don't broadcast his or her failings. Defend him. Don't intentionally expose his faults or treat him with sarcasm or dress him down in public. You say fathers do not exasperate your children and this is part of what it's talking about. FF Bruce in his commentary on First Corinthians says this, love covers unworthy things rather than bringing them to the light and magnifying them. It puts up with everything. It is always eager to believe the best and to put the most favorable construction on ambiguous actions. Who says your convictions about things are right anyway? Who says your preference is better than someone else's? Who says it's better to squeeze the toothpaste tube from the bottom rather than from the top? See, there's no need to bring such things out into the light and carp on them. There's no need to confront the person and certainly no need to talk about them negatively to others. That's what gossip. Instead, take your pride to the cross of Christ and realize that you are the chief of sinners. Pray and ask God to help you be more tolerant and accepting and forgiving of other people's habits and idiosyncrasies. That's what love looks like. Let's look at a third in last situation. When somebody is living in an unrepentant sin, love is trying to restore them. Love is trying to restore them. Let's say it's not just a personality difference. It's not just a personal preference. Instead, it's a pattern that violates God's word. It's a habitual indulging in sin. Someone you know is clearly living outside the will of God in some area. What do you do about that? Well, if the person is not a follower of Jesus, you're not surprised. You know, you love them anyway. You were in the same boat when you were not a Christian. And if you're like me, you probably came to faith because somebody loved you in spite of your sin. But I'm talking about a fellow believer. How do you bear all things in that situation? The Bible says that you cannot just look the other way. Look at these Bible verses that speak of our responsibility to some brother or sister who is departing from the path of obedience. It says in Luke 173 that if your brother sins, rebuke him. It goes on to say, if he repents, forgive him. But I wanted to emphasize the need for a rebuke. It says in Galatians 6.1, brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. And finally in Matthew 18 says, if your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. And many of you know it goes on to say that if this person does not listen, if he or she does not respond in the way you hope, then it's good and loving and right to bring other people into the conversation as you seek to restore your friend to the path of holiness. So let's bring it down to where we are. Perhaps you have a friend about whom you have real spiritual concern. It's not a musical taste issue. Instead it's a sin issue. And you've been reluctant to meet with him or her. You've been avoiding this person. You hate confrontation. You say to yourself, maybe it's just a phase. Maybe you're blowing it out of proportion. Maybe this will just go away. Now, first Corinthians 13, seven will not let you off the hook. Bear all things means have the conversation. Make the phone call. Set up the meeting. Say the hard thing and walk with your friend to restoration. Do it gently. Do it privately. Do it humbly. But do it. Hopefully, your words of honesty were will be all that's needed. And that's the end of it. If not, maybe a few other people will need to be included. You might have to get a pastor or an elder involved. You may have to suffer the anger, the rejection, the resentment that honesty sometimes causes. Sometimes bearing with somebody means that you will carry a burden that no one else knows about and no one else will understand. It's all right. Suffer in silence with your friend as he or she seeks to make correction. Galatians 6-2 says to bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. And that's what it's talking about. So, whether it's a sin issue or non-syn issue, we are to be a protective roof over our fellow believers. That's what love looks like. These sermons are getting harder and harder to listen to, aren't they? How are you going to be able to love people in this way? How are you going to be able to be a roof for your friends? Well, here's your takeaway. You can be the cover for others because God in Jesus Christ has been the cover for you. Earlier this morning I read Psalm 32-1 and 2 when we were confessing our sins and I used that as our reminder of God's assuring grace. It says, blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered, blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity and in whose spirit there is no deceit. Think of that for a moment. When you were being harmed by your own sin, Jesus came to your rescue and suffered for you. When he was hanging on the cross, rather than expose your sins for all to see, rather than condemn you forever, he said he put a veil over you, the veil of his own blood and said, father forgive them they don't know what they're doing. Even when you were an enemy of God, Jesus reconciled you to the father through his blood. And now, though you and I failed God time after time, Jesus continues to have our back. That's what love looks like. Jesus bears all things with you. He has covered you with his love. Now go and do likewise. Let's pray. I want you to take a moment and just imagine what life would be like if this was how everybody treated each other, coming to each other's defense, hiding people's differences, not making an issue out of them, carrying enough to confront in a loving way. It'd be like heaven on earth, wouldn't it? This is how Jesus treated people when he was here. And it's how he treats us now. Think about this too, Richard Pratt, if you were here last week, he reminded us that we're supposed to turn this world into the kingdom of Christ. Well, this is one way to do that by bearing all things for each other. Father, I ask that you will forgive our natural tendency to expose rather than cover, to be self centered rather than other centered. Would you help us, Lord Jesus, to be a roof and a covering for other people, to defend their character within the limits of truth, to conceal rather than broadcast their imperfections, to choose to focus on the positive and the good and other people, even to have the hard conversation when necessary, empower us, Holy Spirit, to love others as you love us. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen. We have a wonderful privilege it was alluded to earlier to receive some children into the membership of our church. Let me tell you a little background of this. These kids went through my Communicance class a couple of months ago, and each of them, with their parents, agreed that it was time for them to make a public profession of their faith. And so they met with elders and pastors, and they confessed the fact that they believe in Jesus Christ as their Savior and their Lord, and so the elders said to welcome these children into the official communing membership of UPC. So I'm going to call their names, and they're going to come up here a few of these children might not be here today, because vacations are what not, but the ones who are here will each get a Bible inscribed with their name on the front cover. And we have Pat Puckett to thank for that. Many of you remember Pat Puckett, who is now with the Lord. She suggested that we set up a Pat Puckett Memorial Bible fund for the collection of Bibles for the children of our church, and so let's continually thank God for his grace in Pat Puckett's life. Linda Wheatley is going to come up. Our children's director, I believe, where's Linda? Oh, there she is. Linda's going to come up and assist me in handing out these Bibles. So let's begin with Joseph Onger, Valerie Hall. I forgot your bottom. Laura Bowie, Gavin Darnell. Oh, here she comes. They're Laura. Gavin Darnell, Phoebe Dishman, Juliana Simmons, Ruby Onger, Francie Markle, Chase. Oh, here she is. Come on up, Francie. Chase McGuire, and Tristan Darnell. Awesome. Children, I'm so proud of you, and we, the church family, rejoice that you are becoming members of our church commuting members this morning. So I'm going to ask you the five membership questions that we have gone over and that all of our members have answered in the affirmative. So children, first of all, do you acknowledge yourselves as sinners inside of God? Do you understand that you're a sinner without the mercy and grace and love of Jesus Christ? Do you understand that? And do you believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and the Savior of sinners, and are you trusting in Jesus alone for your salvation today? Are you? Do you promise, in humble reliance upon the grace of the Holy Spirit, that you will try to live in a way that the followers of Christ live? That is, do you promise to live a Christ-like life seven days a week for the honor and glory of God? Do you promise to support our church and its worship and work to the best of your ability? I do. And do you promise to submit yourselves to the government and discipline of this church and promise to promote its purity and its peace? Do you? Thank you. Awesome. Let's pray together. Father, we thank you so much for these children who have come to know Jesus. Turn from sin and understand that Jesus came to die on the cross for them. Lord, as they take communion today, we ask that they will draw near you, that they will actually fellowship and commune with you around this table, and that we together as their church family will rejoice in our salvation. Rejoice in your love. The way you've covered us and will cover us for all eternity. We pray for them that you will protect these children. Lord, we pray a covering over them. We pray that as they grow, they will grow to love you more and more, that Father, you will protect them from evil people, evil places and evil pursuits. We pray, Father, that they will grow in holiness and Christ's likeness, and that they will take their place in the visible church and serve you with all their hearts. And we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.