River Church NOLA
2026 Oct 11
  • Victory In Jesus
  • Rest On Us
  • Evidence
  • Build My Life
  • Intro
    Boudreaux and Clotile were sitting on the porch on their fiftieth anniversary. Clotile had been quiet for a long while, and finally she said, “Boudreaux, in fifty years you hardly ever tell me you love me.”
    Boudreaux took a sip of his coffee, thought about it, and said, “Chère, I told you I loved you the day I married you. If anything changes, I’ll let you know.”
    [Pause for the laugh.]
    We laugh because most of us have been Boudreaux at some point — and all of us have been Clotile. We’ve said the big words at the big moment and then assumed they would carry the relationship on autopilot. And we’ve been on the other side, wondering whether the people we love still see us.
    So before we open the Bible, let me ask you to do something.
    Hook

    Think of one person who loved you when you were hard to love.

    Maybe a grandmother who kept setting a plate for you when you weren’t showing up. A coach who wouldn’t give up on you. A friend who answered the phone at 2 a.m. A spouse who stayed in a season when you weren’t easy to stay with.
    Got a face in mind? Most likely the reason that person comes to mind isn’t what they felt. It’s what they did. (Mama) They made a choice, and then they kept making it. That’s what we’re going to talk about today.
    We’ve spent this whole series on Values That Last — the things worth building a life on.
    Choosing My Standards, Accepting Responsibility for My Life, Developing Trust, Living a Balanced Life, Showing Respect, Fairness, Living pure in a polluted world and Honesty.
    And we’ve saved the biggest one for last, because Jesus himself said it was the biggest one. Some religion scholars came to him with what is really the ultimate values question: of all of God’s commands, which one matters most?
    Mark 12:29–31 NLT
    29 Jesus replied, “The most important commandment is this: ‘Listen, O Israel! The Lord our God is the one and only Lord. 30 And you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength.’ 31 The second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ No other commandment is greater than these.”
    Jesus didn’t hesitate of flinch. Number 1 - Love God with everything in you. Number 2 - Love people.
    Paul says the same thing in two different ways.
    1 Corinthians 13:13 NLT
    13 Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.
    Galatians 5:14 NLT
    14 For the whole law can be summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
    Love is the value God values most. And yet it’s the one we struggle with most. Love often moves from exciting, to exhausted, to expired. So how do you build a love that lasts — in a marriage, with your kids, with your parents, with the people at work, with the neighbor who lets his dog do its business in your yard?
    God gives us two simple steps: know what love really is, and then act like love acts.
    Let’s look at these.

    I. Know What Love Is.

    Love may be the most misunderstood word in the English language. I can say “I love my wife” and “I love boiled crawfish” in the same breath, and you’d hope there’s a difference — but the word doesn’t tell you. We have one word doing the work of a dozen.
    And most of what we learned about love, we didn’t learn from Scripture. We learned it from songs, mocies, and stories.
    Think about the typical holiday romance movie.
    Big-city woman goes back to her small hometown. Meets a handsome guy in a flannel shirt who runs a Christmas tree farm. They argue, they bake something, it snows, they kiss in the town square. Ninety minutes, start to finish. And in the entire movie, nobody ever loads a dishwasher, pays a bill, or apologizes for something they said when they were tired.
    It’s great entertainment. It’s terrible theology. And a lot of us carry two big misconceptions out of it:

    Popular Misconceptions

    Love is just a feeling.

    Love produces wonderful feelings — but if love is only a feeling, then when the feeling fades, love is gone. And feelings always fade on an ordinary Monday.

    Love is out of my control.

    Love is like diarreaha… you just can’t control it.
    Listen to the way we talk. We “fall” in love — like you were walking down the sidewalk and stepped in a ditch. “I couldn’t help it.” The problem is, if you can fall into love by accident, you can fall out of it by accident too. And that is exactly the story a lot of people tell when they walk away.
    So

    What does God say love is?

    1. Love is a matter of choice.

    Jesus commanded us to love. You cannot command a feeling. Try telling a tired four-year-old, “Stop feeling cranky.” It doesn’t work. But you can command a choice — and God does.
    Colossians 3:14 NLT
    14 Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds us all together in perfect harmony.
    “Clothe yourselves.” Nobody accidentally gets dressed.
    Think about a firefighter.
    When the alarm goes off, he doesn’t wait to feel brave before he suits up. He steps into the boots, pulls up the pants, throws on the coat, buckles the air pack — every single time — and then he runs toward the fire. The gear goes on by decision, not by mood.
    That’s what Paul is saying. Every morning you choose what you’ll wear.
    A man in his sixties told his small group he had stopped waiting to feel affectionate toward his adult son. The son had been careless with money and careless with the truth. The father said, “I still pick up the phone on Sunday. I still ask about his week. I still pray for him by name.
    The feeling comes and goes. The call does not.” That is “put-on” love. It looks ordinary. But it is obedience.
    Make the same kind of choice about love: “Today I’m putting on love — before I walk into that kitchen, that office, that classroom, that cell block.”

    2. Love is a matter of conduct.

    1 John 3:18 NLT
    18 Dear children, let’s not merely say that we love each other; let us show the truth by our actions.
    The New Testament writers had several Greek words for love available to them words for family affection, for romance, for friendship.
    But the word they reached for again and again is agape: the self-giving love that acts for another person’s good whether they deserve it or not. It’s the word used for God’s love for us. Agape isn’t first a feeling in your chest; it’s a commitment that shows up in your hands.
    That’s why you can love someone you don’t particularly like right now.
    Look at Jesus in Matthew 23. He looks at the religious leaders and calls them “snakes” and a “brood of vipers.” Nobody hears that and thinks, “He sure feels warmly toward them.”
    But just a few verses later, in the same chapter, Jesus is weeping over Jerusalem: “How often I have wanted to gather your children together as a hen protects her chicks.”
    Same chapter. Same Jesus. He didn’t like what they were doing — and he loved them all the way to the cross.
    Love is something you choose, and love is something you do.
    So the next question is obvious: what does love do?

    II. Act like Love Acts

    God knew we would ask, “Okay — but what does it look like on a Monday?” So in 1 Corinthians 13 he gave us a list. Here’s what love does. Here’s what love doesn’t do. None of this is new information. My prayer is that it becomes new behavior — at your dinner table this week, in your break room, and in the drive-thru line when they get your order wrong.

    1. Be patient.

    1 Corinthians 13:4 NLT
    4 Love is patient and kind…
    Of all the things God could have listed first, he started with patience. You could say love is spelled with four letters — T-I-M-E.
    Part of love is waiting with people — sitting with them in the hospital, waiting on the test results, waiting on the job offer.
    But the harder part is waiting for people. Waiting for them to grow up. Waiting for them to make the decision you knew they needed to make a year ago. Waiting for them to change.
    Anybody here ever made a roux? You know the first rule of a roux: you can’t rush it. You stand at that stove and stir, and stir, and stir — peanut butter, then copper, then milk chocolate. And the minute you get impatient and crank up the fire, you scorch it, and there’s no fixing it. You dump it and start over.
    Most relationships aren’t ruined by one big explosion. They get scorched by a hundred small moments when somebody turned up the heat because they were in a hurry. When love starts setting ultimatums — “If you don’t change by such-and-such a date, I’m done” — it’s already starting to burn.
    Ephesians 4:2 NLT
    2 Always be humble and gentle. Be patient with each other, making allowance for each other’s faults because of your love.
    I wish that verse stopped at “be patient with each other.” But it gets practical: making allowance for each other’s faults. What does that look like?
    It means you don’t sit in the driveway honking the horn because you’re ready for church and they aren’t.
    It means when you’re helping your kid with math homework and they still don’t get it, you don’t grab the pencil and say, “Here, let me just do it.”
    It means you let people finish their own stories. Some of us want the punch line now. Patient love listens to the whole thing.
    And here’s the good news: nobody masters this in five weeks or five years. It’s a lifetime of growth. You won’t be perfect tomorrow and neither will I. But don’t let that make you quit — just keep growing.
    A nurse who had cared for her mother through dementia said the hardest day was not the medical day. It was the day her mother asked, for the fourth time in an hour, where her husband was. He had been gone for three years. The nurse said, “I almost snapped. Then I heard myself answer the way I wanted someone to answer me if my mind ever left. ‘He’s not here, Mom. I’m here.’ And I sat down again.” That is patience.
    The best picture of patience is God himself. He listens to every word of every prayer — even though he knows what you’re going to say before you say it. He never says, “Get to the point.” He waits for us to grow. He waits for us to let go of that sin we keep picking back up.
    2 Peter 3:9 NLT
    9 The Lord isn’t really being slow about his promise, as some people think. No, he is being patient for your sake. He does not want anyone to be destroyed, but wants everyone to repent.
    Some of you, God has been patiently waiting on for a long time. He hasn’t left. He’s still at the stove. And when you realize how patient God has been with you, it gives you a new kind of patience with the people around you.

    2. Be kind

    1 Corinthians 13:4 NLT
    4 Love is patient and kind…
    “Love is … kind.” Kindness is love with its sleeves rolled up.
    It’s taking the grand vows you made at the altar and translating them into dishes, laundry, and taking the trash out when it isn’t your turn.
    It’s taking the hope you felt in the hospital nursery and translating it into a 3 a.m. diaper change.
    A teacher kept a drawer of granola bars and spare pencils. She did not announce it. Kids who came in hungry or unprepared learned where to stand. One of those kids, years later, wrote her a note: “You were the first adult who acted like my bad morning was not a character flaw.” One drawer. One habit. A life moved.
    Psychologist John Gottman has spent decades studying couples — watching how they actually talk to each other. One thing he looks for is what he calls “bids.” A bid is any small attempt to connect. Your spouse looks out the window and says, “Hey, look at that bird.” That’s a bid. You can turn toward it — “Oh, wow, look at that” — or you can keep scrolling.
    In one of his studies of newlyweds, the couples who were still together years later had turned toward those little bids about 86 percent of the time. The couples who ended up divorced? About a third of the time. It wasn’t the grand gestures that made the difference. It was small, daily kindness.
    Down here in the South, we understand this. When somebody dies, before the funeral home even calls, there’s a casserole on the porch. Then a pound cake. Then a ham. Nobody thinks a chicken spaghetti fixes grief. But years later, when that family remembers the worst week of their lives, part of the memory is the people who showed up with food. One act of kindness doesn’t erase the pain — but it changes the memory of it.

    3. Don’t be showy

    1 Corinthians 13:4 NLT
    4 Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud

    Jealousy, boasting, and pride all grow from the same root: insecurity.

    If I’m secure, I don’t need to envy what you have. If I’m secure, I don’t need to boast about what I have.
    We live in the age of the highlight reel. Somebody posts a perfect anniversary dinner with #blessed and #couplegoals — and you have no idea they fought the whole way to the restaurant. Showy love performs for an audience. Real love doesn’t need one. Insecurity is like a drop of water in a gas tank: it doesn’t take much to make the whole engine sputter.
    That’s why God goes out of his way to make his people secure in his love:
    Romans 8:38 NLT
    38 And I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love.
    God knows love can’t grow where there’s no security. So let me ask: what are you doing that’s adding insecurity to a relationship? Maybe it’s something you’re hiding from your spouse. Maybe it’s discipline with your kids that’s so inconsistent they never know which parent is going to show up. Maybe it’s simply silence — it’s been so long since you talked to somebody that neither of you knows where you stand.
    Some of you need to pick up the phone this afternoon. A brother. A sister. A mom or dad. A grown child. And just say, “We’ve had our differences. But I want you to know — no matter what — I love you.” That’s scary. But fear chains us; love changes us. Act in love, not in fear.

    4. Don’t be selfish.

    1 Corinthians 13:5 NLT
    5 or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged.
    Every phrase in that verse is a different form of selfishness:
    Rude — I can be selfish with my words.
    Demands its own way— I can be selfish with my plans. Ever had a plan for the Saturday that nobody else in your family knew about — and then gotten mad at them for not following it?
    Irritable — I can be selfish with my attitude, starting from the minute my feet hit the floor.
    Keeps a record of wrongs— I can be selfish with my memory. Some of us keep a little ledger in the back of our minds, and we pull it out the minute we start losing an argument.
    There’s a story told about Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross. A friend reminded her of a cruel thing someone had done to her years before. Barton didn’t seem to remember it. “Don’t you remember?” the friend asked. And Clara Barton answered, “No. I distinctly remember forgetting that.”

    That’s what love does with the ledger. It chooses to forget.

    Now, here’s the honest fear underneath all of this: “If I start loving unselfishly, they’ll just take advantage of me.” Maybe they will. I can’t promise you they’ll love you back. God has loved every one of us selflessly, and plenty of people have never loved him back.
    Love is the greatest risk you’ll ever take. I know people who will jump out of an airplane, or ride a bull, or bet their whole business on one deal — and they are terrified of the risk of loving someone. C. S. Lewis put it this way:
    “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”
    The alternative to the risk of love isn’t safety. It’s a heart that slowly turns to stone. The risk is worth it.

    5. Don’t quit.

    1 Corinthians 13:7 NLT
    7 Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.
    Galatians 6:9 NLT
    9 So let’s not get tired of doing what is good. At just the right time we will reap a harvest of blessing if we don’t give up.
    Some of you are thinking, “That’s beautiful on a wedding program. But I’m tired. I’ve been trying for years. Where am I supposed to get the power to never give up?”
    Remember Jesus gave two commands, in order. We’ve spent most of today on the second one — love your neighbor. But the first one is love God. And here’s what we miss: the first one is the power source for the second.
    Picture a pirogue on the bayou. When the water is still and you’re heading downstream, you can pole that thing along just fine. That’s how most relationships start — the newness, the emotions, the excitement carry you. It’s downstream and it’s fun.
    But sooner or later you turn into the current. A diagnosis. A layoff. A teenager who slams the door. A marriage that’s gone quiet. And now you’re pushing that pole into the mud with everything you’ve got, and you’re not going anywhere. Actually, you’re drifting backward. Some grew up watching our parents do exactly that — poling against the current for thirty years, staying together but never really loving each other. And we decided, “I’m not doing that.” So when it gets hard, we just climb out and look for a new boat. And then that one hits the current too.
    Before you quit — and someone may be close, in a marriage, or with a child, or with a parent — consider that there’s a motor on the back of that boat you’ve never cranked. The key is this:
    1 John 4:19 NLT
    19 We love each other because he loved us first.
    1 John 4:10 NLT
    10 This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.
    You don’t love people in order to get God’s love. You love people because you already have it. Every day I catch myself climbing back out with the pole, trying to make love work in my own strength. And every time, I have to remember: that’s not where the power is. The power is in God’s love for me — a love I didn’t earn, can’t lose, and will never run out of.
    Closing story: I get to to
    Let me Wrqp up with his.
    In 1990, Robertson McQuilkin was the president of Columbia Bible College and Seminary in South Carolina. He’d led it for twenty-two years. He was respected around the world. And his wife, Muriel — a gifted teacher, artist, and radio host — was slowly disappearing into Alzheimer’s disease.
    As the disease progressed, Muriel became frightened whenever Robertson was out of her sight. So she would leave the house and walk to the campus to find him — a mile round trip. He wrote that she would make that trip as many as ten times a day. And sometimes at night, when he helped her get ready for bed, he found that her feet were bloody from the walking.
    Friends and board members urged him to put her in a care facility and keep doing the important work God had given him. But Robertson McQuilkin stood up in front of the school and resigned. He told them that he had promised, forty-two years before, “in sickness and in health … till death do us part.” And then he said this: Muriel had cared for him fully and sacrificially all those years. If he took care of her for the next forty years, he would never be out of her debt.
    And then came the line people still quote: “It’s not that I have to. It’s that I get to.”
    For years he fed her, bathed her, dressed her, and sat with her. Eventually Muriel lost the ability to speak in sentences. She could only manage a few words. But he wrote that there was one sentence she could still say, and she said it often: “I love you.”
    Muriel went home to be with the Lord in 2003, after a twenty-five-year journey through that disease. And Robertson McQuilkin kept every one of his vows.
    [Slow down here.]
    Here’s what I want you to see. Muriel couldn’t earn that love. She couldn’t pay it back. She couldn’t even remember most of what he did for her. All she could do was receive it — and say, “I love you.”
    That’s exactly where every one of us stands before God. We can’t earn his love. We can’t pay it back. “God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners” (Romans 5:8). Jesus walked the road to the cross — and his feet bled too — not because he had to, but because he wanted you. All you and I can do is receive it, and say back to him, “I love you.”
    And when you have been loved like that, it changes the way you love everyone else. The dishes become “I get to.” The difficult parent becomes “I get to.” The patience, the kindness, the forgiving, the not quitting — it stops being a burden you push and becomes a love you pass on.
    Close

    Love is a choice.

    So this morning I want to give you two choices to make.
    First, some of you have never received God’s love for yourself. You’ve been trying to push the boat. Today you can simply receive it. You might pray something like this:
    “Father, thank you for loving me before I ever loved you. Thank you for sending Jesus to show me how much you love me — even to the cross. Today I choose to receive your love and your forgiveness, even though I don’t deserve it. I trust you with my life. I want to follow Jesus. Teach me to love you, and teach me to love others the way you’ve loved me. In Jesus’ name, amen.”
    — Prayer of Response
    If you prayed that for the first time, check that off on your connection cards — that’s the most important decision you’ll ever make.
    Second, for those of us who already know his love: think back to that face you pictured at the start — the person who loved you when you were hard to love.
    Get the Commitment
    Now think of one person in your life who is hard to love right now. Before you leave today, decide one action — one act of patience, one kindness, one phone call, one record of wrongs you’ll tear up. Write it down in your notes. Not because you have to. Because, by the grace of God, you get to.
    [Close in prayer.]

      • Mark 12:29–31NLT

      • 1 Corinthians 13:13NLT

      • Galatians 5:14NLT

      • Colossians 3:14NLT

      • 1 John 3:18NLT

      • 1 Corinthians 13:4NLT

      • Ephesians 4:2NLT

      • 2 Peter 3:9NLT

      • 1 Corinthians 13:4NLT

      • 1 Corinthians 13:4NLT

      • Romans 8:38NLT

      • 1 Corinthians 13:5NLT

      • 1 Corinthians 13:7NLT

      • Galatians 6:9NLT

      • 1 John 4:19NLT

      • 1 John 4:10NLT

River Church NOLA
robert@riverchurchnola.com
504-578-8317
https://riverchurchnola.com
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