male announcer: “In Touch,” the teaching ministry of Dr. Charles Stanley. Next on “In Touch”: “Created to Love.” Dr. Stanley: Have you ever pondered seriously why God allowed you to be born? Well, more than likely you’ve thought about it, but the question is what kind of a conclusion did you come to? Or did you come to any conclusion, or did you just say, “Well, I just guess I was born and here I am, and I’ll make the best of it.
” Well, the reason God allowed you to be born is in order for God to express His wonderful love to you. You may not feel it, you may not even understand anything about the love of God, but that’s why you were created. Not only that He could express His wonderful love to you, but that you could love Him in return.
And you see, when man fell in the Garden of Eden and sin came into this world, it just really fouled up our capacity to understand the love of God, to receive the love of God, and to love Him in return. But that’s why Jesus came: to liberate us from the power of sin in our life, so that you and I could love God Almighty with all of our heart.
And that we could receive His love for us. And that’s what I wanna talk about in this message today, and I want to begin a series entitled “Liberated to Love” and the title of this message is “Created to Love.” And I want you to turn, if you will, to Luke chapter 10. In Luke chapter 10, a familiar passage of scripture, Jesus makes it very clear that you and I were created to be lovers, and you recall this is the incident where they’re asking Him a question about the law.
And in the 25th verse of this 10th chapter, the scripture says: “And behold, a certain lawyer stood up and put Him to the test, saying, ‘Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?’ And He said to him, ‘What is written in the Law? How does it read to you?’ And he answered and said, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.
‘ And He said to him, ‘You have answered correctly; Do this, and you will live.'” Now, I want us to look, first of all, at this whole idea of the nature of love. It’s not my purpose to define love as it is this morning. It’s simply to say that in the New Testament, for example, there are two words for love. One of them is agape love, which is a sacrificial kind of love.
The other is phileo love like we get Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love. Phileo love is an affection, an approval, a friendship kind of love. The other word for love, which is not found in the New Testament, is the word “eros” from which we get the idea of physical love or passion or sexual love. The first two’s found in the scripture, the other one is not.
