This transcript was generated by whisper.ai. This is day four together of our look at 1st Corinthians chapter 13, we're going to look at verse seven today. We have been walking through these last couple days, very challenging verses. It's very easy in the Bible sometimes to study verses that are about facts of what happened in Old Testament times or what might happen at the end times. They don't challenge us nearly as much. We have a hard time maybe understanding some of those things and it's interesting, but to me the most challenging parts of the Bible are these parts where we're told very clearly, here's what you do, here's some exercises for love. Be patient. I need God's power for that. Be kind, be humble, be unselfish. And then in verse seven there's a fifth exercise for what real love looks like, how it acts in everyday life. Verse seven says love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. So the fifth action of love is you don't give up. You don't give up. Love look at this list, it always protects. Another version says it bears all things. The ideas behind that are there is nothing that love cannot face. It protects in every situation. The other idea behind always protects is love overlooks even the greatest faults. That's what love acts like. It always protects. It always trusts. It believes all things. The idea behind that love trust is you take God at your word. Who are you trusting? Love always trusts. You're trusting God. You can't always trust every person. You can't even always trust yourself. So the idea that love could always trust a person, that's ridiculous, but you can always trust God. You can always take God at his word and because of that you can always believe the best about others, about what God could do in their life. They may choose to have God do that in their life. They may choose not to, but you always believe that they can because of who God is and who God has made them to be. You always trust that God can do something greater in your life, in every person's life because of who God is. That's what love does. It protects. It trusts. It always hopes. Love hopes all things. It hopes under any and every circumstance. What does this mean? Before we even get to the last of this list of four things, always protects. Always trusts. Always hopes. Some people look at this and honestly many questions came out of our research team about this. Honest questions that revolved around the idea of isn't this being sort of somewhat codependent? Aren't you actually lying to yourself? Aren't there just some people who are never going to change? Isn't there a time when you just have to let someone go their own way? Codependent is trying to do it for somebody else and that's not what this is talking about. Nothing in this list that says love always tries to make it work for somebody else. No, this says love always hopes that God's best can happen in somebody else's life. To be codependent is to try to make the choice for someone else or just get so enmeshed in their choices that you cannot see apart from their choices. You can't make the choice for somebody else. Even God doesn't make the choice for somebody else. We have to individually choose to love him and choose to act in love because of our love for him. But here's what you can do. You can choose to keep hoping for them no matter what. I know some people feel trapped by that. They feel like if I keep hoping for someone, that means I've got to try to keep choosing for them. Here's what love means. Love means I keep hoping someone will change even if they're ruining their life with alcohol. Now, some people get into a trap where they feel like love means I keep hoping that they're going to change, but if I keep hoping they're going to change, that means I have to keep going along with it with them. I have to keep agreeing that this is okay. I have to stay in the situation just like it is. Absolutely not. That's not at all what that means. That's not what hope means. If someone is drinking and they're ruining their life, you don't have to be in the trap of thinking I either have to love and stay with them or I have to stop loving and separate from them. Love means that I say this has to change or there will be consequences, but it means I also keep hoping that it can change because of who Jesus Christ is. You see, God did not create us to be independent, living life based on our own love and power He didn't create us to be codependent, living life enmeshed with our need for some other person's love so much that we develop a self-destructive relationship. He designed you, He designed me to be dependent on Him. And when we talk about always protects, always trusts, always hopes, it's not based on your relationship with the other person, it's based on your relationship with God. It's a new way of living. It's a new strength for living. I'm so tired of seeing people feeling like they have to make one of two choices. Either I have to love and remain trapped in a situation that I know is wrong, it may even be an abusive situation, or feeling like I have to not love and escape. The truth of the matter is you can get yourself to a place you need to get yourself to a place of safety in an abusive situation, but that doesn't mean you stop hoping. Now does continuing to hope mean you have to put yourself back into that abusive situation? Not unless they change, not unless change happens. You see, love means I keep hoping no matter what. But love also means I realize that they have to make the choice to hope themselves. They have to make the choice to trust themselves. I never stop hoping though. Once you stop hoping, once you stop believing that God could always do the best in that person's life, there's something that happens to your soul that's very dangerous. So love always protects. It always trusts. It always hopes. And because of that, the scripture says love endures all things. It always perseveres. It faces everything with what somebody has called with triumphant fortitude. It always perseveres. That word persevere, it's got a compelling picture behind it. In the Greek language, one of the pictures behind it is the picture of soldiers who, when an enemy was approaching, would tie their legs to each other as fellow soldiers. That way, if fear overtook them, they wouldn't find themselves running away and leaving their friend to fight the battle alone. They literally bound themselves together so they could fight the battle together. Love perseveres. You might be right on the edge of quitting in some relationship. Love always protects. It always trusts. It always hopes. It always perseveres. Who do you need to decide to bind yourself to? Who is there in your life? I'll face this with you. I'll believe in you. I'll look forward to the future with you. Even when every bone in my body wants to run and hide from this, we're bound together. I'll stay with you and overcome as long as you're willing to stay and overcome. Where is it that you need to make the choice to love? You see, as long as we settle for a world where, well, it just didn't work out, I guess we'll both have to choose not to love. Miracles can never happen. Change can never happen, but I've found if just one person will make the choice to always trust, always hope, always persevere, it invites the other person to make that same choice. And many times, more often than you would imagine, miracles of love happen in that relationship. Now, do you wonder if you can really make this kind of change? And we're talking about love this week, genuine love, the change to love like Jesus loved. I want to remind you that when you look at the early disciples of Jesus Christ, Paul, one of them, the man who wrote these words, they were men who were anything but those you would describe with the word love. John, who wrote the Gospel of John and who wrote the letter of John, which says so much about love. The word love is used more in his letter than any other book in the New Testament. He began as someone who was loud and opinionated and pushy and prideful. But in his later years, John came to be known as the apostle that Jesus loved. And Paul, who wrote these words, Paul, who God used to write the love chapter. Where did he begin? He began as a Pharisee, caught on legalism, caught up in what are the rules, what are the regulations, who can I judge and how can I judge them? And because of that, he got caught up in persecuting the church. He stood by and watched Stephen, the first martyr, die. He went into churches and chased people out. He was intent in his anger on destroying the church of Jesus Christ, the body of Christ that we have read about this last week. And here's Paul, that one who was filled with so much anger. And now he's writing these words. God's using him to write these words about the priority of love in life. John, the apostle, got it. Paul, the apostle, got it. And he's writing to this church and Corinth, Paul is writing and they're beginning to divide over details and he's saying to them, I understand you can go down that road. I've been down that road. There's a different road you can go down. You can go down the road of love. But it's not just something to talk about. What does it mean to love? It means you're patient. It means you're humble. And today we've looked at what does it mean? It means you never give up. That other person might walk out of your life. You keep praying for them and hope that God can do something in their life. That other person may have hurt you deeply, but you keep praying for them that God will not only bring into their life a new influence, but also a new power through the love of Jesus Christ. You pray for your enemies even, Jesus said. The words of Jesus, empowered by the person of Jesus, change the entire direction of Paul's life and they can change your life too. They can change my life too. One day at a time, all the way through our lives. Jesus, we ask that that would be so. By your power, change me, change us to love like you love. We ask this in your name, Amen.