Main Idea: Wholeness heals our wounded lives as we give more love than we receive.

This morning we come to our next to last sermon in our series called "The Quest for Character." Today we are going to talk about wholeness. It’s easy to see how qualities such as gratitude, faithfulness or integrity are character qualities but it’s not so easy to see how wholeness is a quality of my character. Wholeness is not the same as perfection. Perfection is where you feel you have or need to excel at a flawless level. Wholeness has to do with satisfaction. It’s when you look at your life or yourself and say, "It’s not perfect but I’m ok with that because I’m satisfied." The struggle is: "How do we get there?" Well, what I want us to see today is that wholeness heals our wounded lives as we give more love than we receive.

Bob Dylan has a song called "Everything is Broken." One verse says, "Broken bottles, broken plates, Broken switches, broken gates, broken dishes, broken parts. Streets are filled with broken hearts. Broken words never meant to be spoken, Everything is broken." (Bob Dylan, 1989 Special Rider Music) While this may sound all "touchy-feely," the reason you and I need wholeness is because not only everything but everyone is broken. Dallas Willard calls this "woundedness." I know that saying that can sound "whinny" and can be an excuse for not overcoming certain issues in our lives but it is true. Our "woundedness" comes from the reality of the deep rejection each of us has experienced in some relationship of life. Because of our sin we reject God. Because of the brokenness of human relationships we have been rejected because we have not been loved and we have not loved. As John says, "We surely ought to love one another" (I John 4:9). But we haven’t been loved and we don’t love and what results are wounded, broken lives needing to be whole. You may or may not be at a place today to admit it but there are more people out there, just like you, who would give everything they have to be whole—not perfect—just together, just satisfied with their life.

How do you get there? John tells us so beautifully that you and I become whole by giving more love than we receive. Living with our broken and wounded lives is an emotional black hole we can never fill. Wholeness is found by taking the love we have been given and then giving more.

Why do we live such wounded and broken lives? John tells us that we live wounded lives because of sin, fear and hate. (I John 4:10, 18, 20) The first wound that you and I have is the result of our own choice: sin. Sin is simply knowing the right thing to do and doing the wrong thing. Sometime in every one of our lives we made that choice. When we made that choice, the Bible calls that sin and it is our sin that caused us to rebel against God. Sin so wounds and breaks our lives that there is nothing you and I can ever do to heal the wound or repair the break. John says that is something only God can do. He says, "This is real love. It is not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins." (v. 10)

Another wound that you and I live with is caused by fear. John describes in verse 18 that if love in our life and relationships is perfect then we would have no reason to fear—God, ourselves or other people. Yet we do live in fear, fear of not being accepted or being rejected. Then in response to our fear we withdraw or distance our self as a defense mechanism or to get even because we have been wounded. So we live needing to be healed but too afraid to try because it’s better off to continually hide than to risk being wounded.

There’s one more way that our lives are wounded and that is by hate. John declares that it is inconsistent and unacceptable for Christians to have hate toward another brother or sister in Christ. (v. 20). Hate is a total absence of love and results in our assaulting the one we hate with our words or with our actions. You can assault someone or be assaulted but never touch someone physically. Dallas Willard says, "We assault others when we act against what is good for them, even with their consent" (Renovation of the Heart, p. 182). If I know I should show you love or give you love and I don’t, then I am assaulting you. It may not look like hate but there are some forms of hatred that are more evil because they are passive rather than violent.

You say, "Bruce, this is just your form of ‘psycho-babble.’ People just need to get over it!" My question is: Have you ever been hurt because someone didn’t do the right thing, withdrew from you when you wanted to be close to them or attacked you by preventing you from getting what you needed? The answer to all of those is yes! Then you know what it is to live a wounded life needing to be healed and made whole.

If our lives are wounded by sin, fear and hate, then what is the result? The result is that our wounded lives shatter our relationship with God, with our self and with others (I John 4:10, 17, 20) John says that our sin shatters our relationship with God to the point that it required the ultimate sacrifice of his Son to repair it. The word John uses is a very dramatic word that describes the degree of the sacrifice of God. It was a word that implies that the deep hostility that God had toward our sin was removed in the death of Jesus on the cross. We too often assume that what was needed in our lives was some minor adjustment. Yet our sin had so shattered any hope of a relationship to God and required justice for those sins that there was only one way out. So, " He loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sin." (v. 10)

Sin shatters our relationship with God but fear shatters our relationship with our self. (v. 16-17). The condition that John describes in verses 16-17 is not something that waits for us in heaven but he wrote it to be lived now. It describes someone who isn’t living in fear of God’s final evaluation of their life because love has driven all fear from their heart. But go back to the first part of verse 16 and you see the problem: Most of us don’t really understand how much God loves us and we have a hard time accepting that. So if we can’t know that God loves us then we can’t accept who we are and we live in fear—fear of God and fear of who we are. As a result, this life of love toward God and others is only a dream so we live in fear, mostly just afraid of who we really are.

Sin and fear shatter our relationships with God and ourselves but it is hate that shatters our relationships with others (v. 20). Again John reminds us that hate doesn’t belong in a believer’s life. The way you and I hate is by withholding love. He says in I John 2:9-11 that it is our hate acted out by withholding love that creates for us a condition of total spiritual darkness. " If anyone says, ‘I am living in the light,’ but hates a Christian brother or sister, that person is still living in darkness. Anyone who loves other Christians is living in the light and does not cause anyone to stumble. Anyone who hates a Christian brother or sister is living and walking in darkness. Such a person is lost, having been blinded by the darkness." (I John 2:9-11) Those last words are so descriptive of the one result of a life that is broken and wounded, lost and living and walking in darkness.

In I John 4:18-19 John describes for us what being whole is like. He says in verse 19, "We love each other as a result of his loving us first." Wholeness begins when we experience God’s love for us spiritually. John would say in verse 9, "God showed how much he loved us by sending his only Son into the world." In verse 10 he says, "This is real love…he loved us and sent his Son…." God’s love experienced and received is our first step toward wholeness. This is not just a salvation experience but also a life experience. Brennan Manning writes in The Ragamuffin Gospel a long list of wonders about God’s power and might but then he closes with this statement, "Creation discloses a power that baffles our minds and beggars our speech. We are enamored and enchanted by God’s power. We stutter and stammer about God’s holiness. We tremble before God’s majesty…and yet we grow squeamish and skittish before God’s love." (The Ragamuffin Gospel, p. 31-32) We can’t experience spiritual wholeness unless we know how real God’s love is for us.

But that is not where wholeness stops; it is only where it begins. Because it is not love received that changes us, now it is love experienced. Instead, it is love given and love exercised that makes us whole. The goal, John says, is that "we love each other." Where does that start? It starts by giving more love than you received. Erwin McManus says, "The most basic definition…for wholeness is 51 percent. You know, where you give more than you take. Not too much more, just a two percent difference" (Uprising, p. 140). You and I know that Jesus gave 100% of himself 100% of the time and it cost him 100% of his life. What if, though, you and I decided that we were going to make sure that we gave just a bit more than we received, that you made a greater contribution than a withdrawal. What would happen is where once there was emptiness it begins being full. Can you give more love to God than you have received? No, but you can show him more and when we exercise love we begin to be whole.

I know this is hard for us to say but we need to be people who do understand what it means to love ourselves. Jesus said that the Great Commandment was to love God, love others and to love our self. John said that as a result of God’s love that love for others needs to flow out of our lives. Unless you come to a place that says, "God loves me then I can love me then I can love someone else." A proper love for yourself makes or brings wholeness to your life. It gets you out of the hole to make you whole. Somehow we need to get to a place that says, "Because of God’s love, I’m all right." And that’s all right.

God’s love gives me wholeness spiritually. Proper self-love brings me wholeness personally. Yet it is exercising love for others that brings wholeness to our relationships. John said in verse 12, "No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us, and his love has been brought to full expression through us." This is a picture of what it means to ultimately be whole: I have experienced God’s love and I am exercising God’s love to other people, which results in His love being "brought to full expression through us."

We live wounded lives because of sin, fear and hate. As a result our wounded lives shatter our relationship with God, others and ourselves. The only hope we have to be whole and healed is by giving more love than we receive. Erwin McManus says, "As contrary as it may seem, the person who gives away the most of himself will have the greatest experience of love. The depth and profound nature of love can only be known in the context of personal sacrifice for others. This is why wholeness comes only in the act of giving rather than the pursuit of getting. We are most whole when we are most free to give." (Uprising, p.146)

In the book The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Mitch Albom tells the story of Eddie, a carnival maintenance worker who dies saving the life of a little girl. In heaven he meets five people who had been part of his life. The second person he meets was captain of his army unit in Vietnam. For the first time Eddie learns the captain died saving his life. As they reminisce about their time together, the captain talks about the significance of the sacrifices each of them made.

"Sacrifice," the Captain said. "You made one. I made one. We all make them. But you were angry over yours. You kept thinking about what you lost. You didn't get it. Sacrifice is a part of life. It's supposed to be. It's not something to regret. It's something to aspire to. Little sacrifices. Big sacrifices. A mother works so her son can go to school. A daughter moves home to take care of her sick father. A man goes to war…"

He stopped for a moment and looked off into the cloudy gray sky. "Rabozzo (a member of their unit who died in captivity) didn't die for nothing, you know. He sacrificed for his country, and his family knew it, and his kid brother went on to be a good soldier and a great man because he was inspired by it. I didn't die for nothing, either. That night, we might have all driven over that land mine. Then the four of us would have been gone."

Eddie shook his head. "But you…" He lowered his voice. "You lost your life." The Captain smacked his tongue on his teeth. "That's the thing. Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you're not really losing it. You're just passing it on to someone else." (Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Hyperion, 2003, pp. 93-94) If you want to be whole you need to sacrifice by giving more love than you receive. It starts with fifty one percent!

Sunday, October 24, 2004

Dr. Bruce Tippit, Pastor

First Baptist Church

Jonesboro, Arkansas

btippit@fbcjonesboro.org