How many of you remember those old books for Dummies? You guys remember those? You know what I'm talking about. You might have to be a certain age to remember that. I'm not quite sure on that one.
I think they were most popular in the 90s. They had all sorts of different titles to them. Most of us probably owned one version, one volume of them in something. I know that looking back, I did some research this week, the most sold copy of all the different books they made was Windows 95 for dummies. Now, I don't know if that was because that was kind of the peak of when those books were doing great, was in mid-90s, or maybe that Windows 95 was so complicated that that's the one that everybody needed help with.
I'm not quite sure on that. But that was the most popular. They're still making those books. I don't know if you know that they're still making them. Some of the more recent versions, they've made a copy called Python and AI for Dummies, which is all this new computer stuff that I don't know anything about.
I'm a dummy. I should probably get that book if I cared. They've also made up a bunch of like, ridiculous ones, just ones that. I don't know why they exist. There's one called Puppetry for Dummies, which I think they really missed an opportunity.
I think it could have been Dummies for Dummies. I think it made more sense. But they made that one, so that one's there. They have. They had another one called Paranormal Investigating for Dummies, which is weird.
They also have haggis for Dummies. Do you guys know what haggis is? Let me just read you a description. Haggis is a national dish of Scotland. It's a savory pudding.
I think that's an exaggeration. It's a savory pudding made from sheep's heart, liver and lungs, mixed with oatmeal, onions, suet and spices, and then traditionally boiled inside the animal's stomach. Now I think you know everything you need to know about haggis.
I don't know why there's a book. I feel like a postcard would have been enough right at the start of 2026. This year we rushed or pushed a resource for our church that we wanted to use this year. It's called Core 52. And in a way, it's kind of like Theology for Dummies.
Alright? And it's not so much to suggest that you're a dummy, that it's not so much to suggest that we collectively are dummies, but it was a resource that we felt like over the course of the year it was going to help you get an introductory education on the 52 most important ideas or themes from the Bible. Now, for those of you who've been engaged with this resource throughout the course of the year, then you've seen the value. Maybe some of you started this year and you've kind of dropped off as the year's gone. Maybe some of you never connected with this.
Maybe you're even new here and you didn't know that we were doing something like this. And that's fine, too. I'm telling you that right now would be a wonderful time for any or all of you to be able to get back in to this resource. Because for the next five weeks, starting today, we're going to be jumping back into this book. On what we do on Sunday mornings.
We're going to spend this time just kind of looking at some of the big ideas, some of the big things that are being taught within those, within those chapters, right? So, like, we're not early in the book, we're jumping in late in the book based on where this is at, dealing with that kind of stuff, Right. And what we do here over these next few weeks, to some, it may feel very basic, it may feel very simple, but that's kind of the point. So we're trying to do, we're trying to get back to some of the basics and we're trying to recall some of those foundational pieces. And for some of you who maybe are more advanced or you've been here for a long time, my prayer is that over these few weeks that it would be encouraging to you, be reminding to you that maybe even you'd be able to find some sort of a nugget or something new or a new perspective that could be valuable to you.
And I think that can happen. I also think this is going to be really helpful for a church that is growing as we have been and seeing people come to Christ. This is a great resource. So all in all, want to encourage you to get back into it if you need this resource. We've still got some here in our Connections room on your way out.
And if we need to order more, we will do that. Now, this week, as you've already heard a couple different times, we're going to talk about love. Love is the lowest common denominator of Christian behavior. It's the core of Everything that we are, or that we at least should be. And love is what sets us apart, really, from every other religion or group.
And I don't say that because other groups don't love. I know there's components in all sorts of different organizations or sorts of different groups that are very different than the church that still love in some form or fashion. It's just that Jesus defines it differently. What Jesus calls love and what he calls us to is different. It's very unique, and it's really unlike just about anything else you can find anywhere else in the world.
And so when Jesus talks about love, we'd better focus and we'd better pay attention, because it may not be exactly what we think it is.
Now, the world around us defines love in a lot of different ways. There is the love of a family, the love that a parent has for their kids. It's the love that exists maybe between siblings, back and forth. That idea, the concept of family type of love. That idea that exists in the Bible.
It exists in the New Testament. There's a word for that, but that's not what we're talking about today. Because Jesus lays out a bigger type of a love, the type of love that his followers are called to. And there's a love of friends that exist, right? There's.
There's the bond that exists between two people who don't have blood relation, and yet they've grown close enough to one another that they call each other brother or sister, right? And the Bible talks about that stuff too. There's a word for that kind of stuff as well, but that's not exactly the love that we're talking about. There's a bigger love that Jesus followers are called to. And then there's a love of romance, a desire type of love.
Our culture loves that type of love. It's a prioritized type of love. It's often seen as the ultimate kind of love. And that idea is in the Bible too. It's celebrated.
It's put up as an incredible gift that God has given us. And yet that's not the love that we're talking about today as well. There's a bigger love that Jesus followers are called to. There's a fourth type of love. There's a more complex love.
And the Greek word for that love is agape. I haven't necessarily added a word for us in English to help us there, although we'll kind of get to some definitions here. The Greek word is agape. If you've been around capsity for a Long time. You've probably heard this word, you're familiar with it.
But it is an unconditional and an unconditional and sacrificial type of love. Unconditional choice, sacrificial love. It's an unconditional choice to work for the good of another. It's the kind of love that would cause you to put someone else's needs before your own. It's kind of like if you're driving to the store and you're going to buy yourself some new shoes, and on the way there, you see a homeless person, you decide you're going to buy shoes for them and not buy shoes for yourself.
That's agape. It's kind of like when you get your paycheck and you're working through what you have and what you need and what you want and all those kinds of things, and yet you set those things aside because you set money aside for the purpose of giving to your charitable or your favorite charitable organization. It's the kind of love that says, I'm going to suffer so you can thrive. It's the kind of love that says, I will struggle or I will hurt for the good of someone else. And that's the kind of love that defines a Jesus follower.
It's who we are, or at least who we should be. And we catch a glimpse from this or of this, from a very popular verse. In fact, you've never been to church. You've probably heard of this verse. If you've ever been to a football game, you've probably seen at least a reference for it.
It's John 3:16, says, God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. Now, before we get to that loved word, let's look at that word world. Because it's not talking about physical context. It's not talking about what God created in the form of like mountains and seas and all that kind of stuff. He's talking about people.
And we get this from the context of the verse. This isn't about the creation. This isn't about the things that God loves of what he made. This is about that very specific part of creation found in humans, the ones that bear the image of God. This is Jesus speaking, and he's saying that God loves the world.
God loves all people, meaning even that God loves you.
And just. I know we're kind of early into this, but I'll tell you, that may be the only thing that you need to hear today. I know that sometimes we think about who God is and we wonder and we have questions and we have assumptions about who we think he is or what he does. And sometimes the word love isn't associated with him. Maybe the only thing you need to hear today is that God is a loving God and that he loves you.
And it may be hard to believe, but it is true. God loves you. And he doesn't just love you in any of these simple ways that we might define it as he loves you in that agape type love. In fact, that word loved here in this verse, it's that word agape, and it's in the past tense. It's love, which is kind of interesting because it's pointing back to a specific word, moment, that there's evidence that there's proof that God loves you.
You can go back in time and you can point at a very specific moment that that has proof and that has evidence of the love of God. For us as Christians here in this time and place, we look backwards and we look at the cross, and rightfully so. We see Jesus sacrifice on the cross and recognize it as an act of love. What's really weird is that Jesus says this verse long before he climbs on a cross, which is very fascinating to me, because the cross isn't when God started loving us. That wasn't the beginning of it.
God had loved us at all times. And there's always been evidence for it. But what's really unique. We kind of miss this in English, but what's really unique in the Greek, in this word, is that it's not just a past tense word. It also has this idea of something that continues in the moment, like it keeps happening.
And so when he says, for God so loved, he's talking about something that's happened in the past, but it's something that is still current, something that's still playing out in real time. And it holds this idea that it will continue to play out off into the future. Because God's love for us is not just about some moment that happened in the past. What Jesus is telling us is that he loved us and that he continues to love us.
And the big idea from this verse, again, is the way that God loves people. It's that unconditionally. Part. Maybe part of the reason why you think God doesn't love you is because you know how much God shouldn't love you. But that's not how God works.
God's love isn't tied to your worth or anything that you could earn God's love for you is given without any expectations of being loved back, which is crazy, which is hard for us to comprehend that God loves you so much. God's love for you actually gives you the freedom to refuse to ever accept or acknowledge him as Lord. He loves you so much that he gives you the freedom to not love him back. It's wild. And it's not just that it's unconditional, it's also that it's sacrificial.
That this love is proven over and over. This isn't some sort of a theory. This isn't some sort of like a potential thing like God might love you if it's not like that. This is a thing that has been proven and the giving of his only son. I had someone define love to me this way.
They said agape love is wanting to do what you don't want to do because you want to. Which is weird, right? If you're a parent, that probably makes sense. If you're married, it probably makes sense. Doing the things that you don't want to do because you want to, because of love, right?
God's love is proven in that he chose to lose something so that people could gain something. Jesus death on the cross is the moment when we get forgiveness for our sins. And so God loses something, we gain something. It's also really important to just kind of point out what this verse isn't saying. It's not saying that God loves us in some sort of a romantic way, because that's weird, alright?
But it's not even saying that God loves us in some sort of like a friendship type of a way. And even though the New Testament uses that word about our relationship with God, there's places where it talks about how we are a friend of God's whenever we have a restored relationship with Him. And so that language is there, that that idea is there, it's just not in this specific verse. And it's not about the family type of love. Even though you're going to find that throughout the New Testament as well, where we are called sons and daughters of God, where we are told that he is our Father.
That language exists as well. Those things are real. But what's worth pointing out in John 3:16 is that we're talking about an unconditional choice of sacrificial love. This is about God loving you in a superior way and it's personal to you. God loves you unconditionally and sacrificially.
And if there's anything within you that's anything like me Then all of this kind of seems too good to believe, right? Kind of hard. It makes me ask the question, why? Why does God love me? I know all the reasons why he shouldn't.
Why does God love me? Why does God love you?
I think it's because God loves us, because he can't help himself. It's in First John, chapter four, verse eight. If you can get to the next slide, Joe.
Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. God is love. It is who he is. It's the core of his being. In fact, if you've been reading Core 52, or if you will read it with us, you might come across this thing.
This is from Mark Moore, who wrote Core 52. This is a quote from this specific chapter, and I love it. He says, fish swim, birds fly, little girls giggle. I like that. They just can't seem to help themselves.
For the same reason God loves. It's not just what he does, it's who he is. God is love. And God loves us. And God loves you not only in word, not only in emotion.
I mean, he says that he loves you, and we think of love in this emotional sense. We're not talking about those kinds of things. God loves you, and it's proven by what he has done and what he continues to do.
But what about us? What does it look like when we love? And even better maybe, is the question, how do we love God back? Because God loves us in this incredible, sacrificial, unconditional type of a love. Is it possible for us to love God like that?
That. It's a big question. What I want to do for a moment is I want to just kind of pull back, and I want us to look at a relationship that we should be at least a little bit more familiar with, something that's going to make a little bit more sense to us and kind of play that out kind of illustratively, and we're going to pull it back into this relationship with God and see how it may apply. Okay? Now, occasionally I get asked to do someone's wedding, like Dario and Emma, who are getting married soon.
I'm doing their wedding here in a couple weeks. And whenever they come in, we do, like, a premarital counseling session, and they could tell you the stories of the horrible things that I've made them have to talk about with me. All right? But they come in, and one of the very first questions I ever ask them is, why do you love your spouse? Why do you love your fiance?
And it's A trick question for any of you who ever end up in my office. If you hear me ask this, it's a trick, all right? It's a trick question. But it usually gets the response that I'm looking for. Usually it leads to people giving me an emotional answer of what they get from the other person.
And so they'll say things like, I love how they look at me, or I love how they make me laugh. I love how they talk to me or cook for me. I love them because they're kind or they're a great listener. I mean, whatever it may be, right? And we have all these reasons.
I love because of what happens for me. That's what we define oftentimes as love. Now, the problem with this, and what I usually point out after this is that's the weakest form of love. And it's real. I mean, we recognize it, we feel it.
It's there. It's emotional. The problem is what happens whenever those things that cause love disappear. Does love also disappear with it? Do you still love your spouse when they don't look at you like you want them to?
Or do you still love them when they make you angry instead of making you laugh? Do you still love your spouse when they haven't talked to you, or when they do talk to you, but it wasn't in the kind way that you were hoping they would talk to you? Is there still love? And these are the questions I ask. I begin to kind of shift a mindset.
Because love isn't about what you're getting. Love is an action word. Love is about what you give. And so the better question, the real question out of the this fake, misleading, tricky question, the real question is, how do you love your spouse? How do you love your fiance?
How do you prove your love to someone else? Because you can love them. You can emotionally feel something loving towards them. But that doesn't do anything without proof. What evidence is there of your love?
And after all, that is the example that God has given us. He has not just told us that he love us. He hasn't just told us that he has these mushy feelings for us. He's proven it in action. And so then usually in our counseling sessions, at some point, I'll start talking to them about the five love languages which you've heard from Logan and Mackenzie helped us out earlier.
And you might be familiar with him. You're at least more familiar with them now than you were before. You got physical touch, got words of affirmation, that idea of encouragement, quality Time, you know, spending time together, the receiving of gifts, that's always a tricky one because it sounds like giving gifts, that's not what it is. These are the ways that we receive love. These are the things that happen that make us feel loved, not the ways that we like to love other people.
You hear the difference? Okay? And so it's the receiving of gifts. When someone gives you something, does that make you feel loved? And then finally, acts of service, the ways that we serve someone else.
Now, the five love languages aren't perfect. I think that there's more than just five. And I think that over the years, I've seen how I have shifted in these things, how they've changed over time and in different seasons of my life. However, the main reason I love to talk about the five love languages with couples is because I recognize that there's usually a language barrier. In most marriages, there's usually a language barrier.
Okay? The ways that we show love are not necessarily the ways our loved ones receive love. If you've been married for a while, what I'm about to tell you is going to make a whole lot of sense. Okay? I personally have always felt loved through acts of service.
And so in my mind, it makes sense for me to give acts of service to prove I love someone. The problem is if that's not special to them, if they don't receive love in that same way, I'm doing things of love and getting frustrated that it's not being received as love. Do you follow? Early in my marriage, I think I've maybe shared this story before, but early in my marriage with my wife, I started doing laundry. I'd never really cared, like, did laundry growing up and that kind of stuff, but it just kind of worked out early on in our marriage that I had the time and availability, and I knew she kind of hated it.
And so I just started doing the laundry. And I found out it didn't bother me and I didn't hate it, and I was doing it. And in my mind, I'd convinced myself that I was the most amazing husband that had ever existed. I didn't know of any man who did laundry. Like, I did laundry, right?
Like, I just was blown away. The problem was, like, three months into me just doing this all the time. My wife never said a word about it to me. And it started to kind of eat at me. And I'm like.
I just, like, start dropping hints like, hey, do you see the laundry is done again? Hey, isn't this pretty awesome that your husband's Doing laundry. Like, my hints were not as subtle. And that was when she said a line that I will never forget. It's haunted me to this day.
She looked at me in very, like, no emotion, just straightforward fact. It's your laundry, too.
And that's when I learned that I'd been doing all this stuff out of love. And she's speaking a different language, right? Like, it wasn't connecting with her. Wasn't. Didn't matter to her, didn't connect with her.
Over the years, I've realized acts of service isn't her thing. We're speaking different languages. And so in a marriage, you have to figure out how your spouse receives love so that you can make sure you speak that language. And I loved what Logan and Mackenzie did earlier because they pointed out that this is also true of your kids. It's true of your friends.
It's true of anyone that you ever meet. There's ways in which each of us receives love. Now, what's really interesting to me is, what does it look like if we take these big ideas together? What does it look like to ask, how do you love God? And what does it look like to then say, what language does he speak?
How can I love God in that kind of way? If there's any part of us that wants to love God back, how can we do it? What's the danger of us potentially trying to love God in ways that aren't the ways he receives love? What if we're speaking different languages? So the idea of loving God through physical touch, that's weird.
We're not going to talk about that. We're going to move past that one quickly. All right. But we sometimes love God through words of affirmation. We have a spiritual word for that.
We call that worship. It's one of our core values here. And so we celebrate and we proclaim his greatness. We use language, we use words to proclaim the goodness of who he is. We do it in song every week.
And then we hope that you would, individually, on your own, throughout the week, find opportunities to worship God in that same kind of a way. It can be done in prayer. It can be done through song. It can be done just by saying things out. The important question is, is that how God receives love?
And I think it is.
We sometimes love God through quality time. Might use the phrase spiritual disciplines for that. That's kind of another core value of ours, I think that fits under the idea of grow. We can read his word. We can pray.
We can meditate. We can fast all of these are different ways that we spend time with God. Oftentimes when we talk about maturing in our relationship with God, we talk about spending time with God. It's quality time. But is that how God receives love?
I think it is. We sometimes love God through gift giving, through generosity, through certain ways. We'd have the generous buckets here. We talk about tithing. All that stuff is great.
Is that how God receives love? Yeah, I think so. What about acts of service?
Serve is one of our core values as well. But how do you serve God? Because we can't feed him or clothe him. He doesn't really have any sort of needs. I can't do his laundry.
How do I practically love God through serving Him? And the quick answer to that is, well, we just love God by loving what he loves. We love God by loving people. We love his kids. In fact, if you want to know, one of the most incredible things that you could ever do to show that you love me would be to do something very special for my kids and to show love to them.
Isn't that true? I think it's real, and it's the same for God. I can't practically love God in the same way that I would love my wife or my kids or my friends or anyone else. But I can love God by the way that I love his kids, by the way that I love my wife, and by the way that I love my kids, and by the way that I love everyone else. And this isn't just an idea.
In fact, Jesus commands it. One time he was asked, what's the greatest commandment? And Jesus says, love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And that sounds like what we've been talking about.
Just love God, right? They ask for one commandment, and he gives it to them. But then he connects a second one. He says, there's a second one like it, Love your neighbor as yourself. It is the practical way that we love God.
We love him for what he's done and who he is. But one of the ways that we love God is through the love of the people who live around us. It's easy to say that you love God. It's much more difficult to actually love people, to love his kids. And what I want you to know is that how you love people trumps the other ones.
If you think that you love God because you worship and you spend time with him and you find yourself to be generous. But if you Hate people. You're in complete contradiction to God and you cannot love Him.
The other ones flow from that. Acts of service. That last one, the idea of loving people is a deep contradiction. You cannot love God without loving people.
Biggest idea today that all of us need to know, that all of us need to walk away with, is this idea that God loves us. It is one of the most difficult things to comprehend. It is mind blowing. And I've been following Jesus for most of my life and it's still something I wrestle with at times. It's so hard to believe.
I think it's hard to believe because so many of us don't even love ourselves.
I think one of the questions we should ask whenever we're kind of feeling those ways or thinking those things is why can't he love us? I don't know why we ever think of it like that. We don't really ever look at it from his perspective. But why can't God love us? I mean, after all, he did create us.
He created you specifically with a purpose. And not just that, but when he created us, he kind of created us last. Because he created something for us first. Something incredible and beautiful and amazing for us to live in. He created everything we needed for life.
And when all of that is said and done, is love beyond his capacity, the idea that he would love us, is it such a wild idea? God loves you. That may be the only thing that you need to hear today. And if it is what you need to hear, if you need to have a conversation about what it means to be loved by God and to begin that relationship with him, to begin following Jesus, I would love to have that conversation with you. I'll be sitting up front.
You can come during this next song. You can come later in between services. You can email me this week. But I'd love to talk to you about what it means to be loved by God. There's some of you in the room who need to wrestle with that second part, the idea of how to love others.
I hope that today has given you a little bit of clarity, a little bit of open clarity as to whether or not you're loving God back. Is it a yes or is it a no? If you can prove it, is there a how? Is there evidence? In fact, if there were witnesses called in who could testify to whether or not you love them, would it be good or bad for you?
I was talking to someone this week about this message and they told me this. They said, love is the fastball. That's what he said. I don't know if you know much about baseball, but if you were to teach a young kid how to pitch in baseball, the very first thing you teach them to do is a fastball, all right? You're not going to teach them a curveball or the change up or anything else.
You got to teach them a fastball, how to throw a ball really hard, really straight, and hit a target. That's the goal. Because if you can't do that, it doesn't matter if you could throw the curveball or the slide or the changeup or anything else that makes the ball move, it doesn't matter because you're not hitting any targets anyways, right? It all starts with the fastball. And he says that's what love is.
Love is that core piece. It's the fastball. For Christians, we spend lots of time talking about all these other things that we should be and who we should be becoming. But if love doesn't exist, first, we're missing the big picture. It all starts and all flows from love.
If you know anything about baseball, you also know. You also know that if you have a really good fastball, you really don't need anything else. I think that's a good picture of the church. Church we are to be loved, to be loved by God, and to be loving those who are around us. And I pray that we would be just that.