We are Lovebound

We are Lovebound
We are lovebound because we are bound FOR love.
It is what we were created for. It is purpose for which we were made.
Sin and selfishness has got us off track with the idea that loving ourselves and living for ourselves is the road to maximum pleasure and fulfillment in this life.
There is this deception that if I live out of love for me, then there is freedom to enjoy life.
But godly love begs to differ.
What if I were to come up here and start tying you with this rope?
And you’re thinking, “what are you doing?!” And I answered, “Giving you your freedom.”
How is it, you ask, that by tying me up and binding me with rope, you think you’re giving me freedom?
You’re right, from a worldly perspective. According to the world there is no freedom in that. There is no freedom in being bound.
In the same way, the world sees that being a Christian is binding, that there’s no freedom in it because all of sudden I’m bound and restricting myself from enjoying the good things in life.
But as a Christ-followers, being bound by Love means all the freedom I can possibly experience.
See, when we realize that we were created for this, for love, and we live within the bounds of that purpose, we’ll find that we experience maximum freedom as we start to live in the image and the purpose in which we were created.
God our Creator created us with the purpose to Love Him and worship Him with all that we have, with our entire being, offering everything, and then to love others with a selfless love.
And when we live for this love intended by God, I’m telling you, there is Freedom.
EX: Buddy and Pal. When I was young, my dad took me to the lake and we caught some crawdad. I took them home and put them in an aquarium with rocks and water.
I got sad one day when I came home to find Buddy had escaped from the tank! And I was about to give up when I could not find him anywhere.
All of a sudden, from behind the bookshelf, comes buddy crawling back. And I watch to see where he goes and guess where he goes?
He goes straight to the aquarium. And he starts crawling at the tank. Why?
Because that’s what he was created for! For the water… it’s the air he breathes. He’s desperate for it! Without it HE WILL DIE.
But for a time he felt that the environment I put him in was “restricting”. He felt that if he could just get outside those bounds, he would experience ultimate freedom, only to be found desperate for what he was created for.
Friends, we may have this idea that being bound is restricting. That being bound by a commitment to spend our whole lives not for myself, but in a way where I’m Loving the Lord with all that we got, giving him my dreams and my hopes out of “Love for him”, is too binding.
And not just that, then I gotta love others with the same kind of intensity?
But I’m telling you, it is what we were created for, and there is an exhilarating freedom in it that the world has yet to experience.
We were created to live within those bounds, and as Christians, it’s the goal we’re bound for.
To be loved by God, and to Love him back. To love others.
The world tries to break from it’s creator, refusing to be lovebound, and thinks it is free.
But this is what we were created for. This is life.
And though sin had us disoriented from our goal, living outside our purpose, through Christ we are back on track and we are bound FOR love, just as the Creator intended.
We are lovebound.

we are lovebound
Not only are we bound FOR love, but we are also bound BY love.
Actually, speaking of love, I just got married a few months ago.
Some of you guys who were at the New Life praise rally got a chance to meet her? She’s great.
In fact, she’s here with us tonight. Can I introduce you to her?
You’re thinking “Greg, that’s a dummy”. Don’t call her that!
I love her, and she loves me. We’re perfect for each other!
Well, you’re not gonna buy it, cuz as much as I claim to love her, you know there’s no relationship there. Because you understand that a relationship has to be a two-way thing, or it doesn’t work.
God has loved us with an incredible, intense, unfailing love. While we were sinners, God loved us.
And yet in this relationship, there is an expectation of us.
He asks us to Love back. To love Him back with all our heart, soul, mind and strength.

How many of us here have heard the pastor preach… or perhaps you’ve found yourself proclaiming the same things… when we want to bring a person to Christ, we assure them that Christianity is not about rules and regulations, not about do’s and don’ts, but it’s a relationship with Jesus!
I’m sorry, but I feel like I need to take a stand for the truth, because I feel that if we are not careful, we will deceive people into Christianity.
Yes, IT IS A RELATIONSHIP. We got that part correct.
But as much as this might turn the world off or turn the world away, the truth is that there are rules and there are regulations in the Christian life.
Just as we are bound FOR a life of love, the Bible goes so far as to say that we are bound by Love. We are bound by the commitment to LOVE.
We MUST love. It is not just ideal, it is commanded of us.
It’s not an option in the life of one who is committed to follow after Christ.
Jesus taught that the greatest commandment given to us by God is to love the HIm with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. And the second greatest is an outflow of the first: Love your neighbors as yourself. Love them with a selfless love.
God first gave this command to the Israelites in the thousands of years before Christ was born.
And he tells them that this rule should never leave them. They were to tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on their foreheads.
And so the Jews would literally Bind them on their hands and Bind them on their foreheads to remind themselves daily that we are BOUND by the commitment to LOVE.
It is not an option.

Church, do you realize that we are the credibility that Jesus has on this earth, to the fact that GOD is Love.
Christ is no longer physically here to demonstrate a godly love, the kind of love this world yearns for and is desperate for.
But his love must go on, and he is still able to make his personal love known, and it’s THROUGH HIS BODY. His disciples.
Christ told his followers in John 13 that he’s not going to be with them much longer, for he’s going to die and be raised to the Father, but he says “Here, a new command I give you. Love one another. Just as I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this, all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
If we are the body, and we are not bound by the commitment to LOVE the Lord and to love each other as ourselves, the world has absolutely no reason to love Christ, or want a relationship where they can experience the fullness of His love for them.
If we are not bound by the commitment to love, then how will the world know of the one who is LOVE, if not by his body and not by his disciples?
We are lovebound.
We are bound FOR love. We are bound BY love.
Brothers and sisters, will you love? With everything? Will you love the Lord your God? With everything? Will you love your brothers and sisters? With everything? Will you love the lost and the hopeless? With everything?