Sugar Babies and Soul Food

Do you remember Sugar Babies? They still make those sugary caramel beans. I used to love them when I went to the “Picture Show” at the Colony Theater in Easley, South Carolina. The Sugar Babies tasted great but didn’t nourish me. For nourishment, I ate my grandmother’s Pinto beans, turnip greens, cornbread, and stewed beef. That was “soul food.”

Today, I am beginning to understand that possessions, pleasure, people’s praise, power to impress people, and safety from failure don’t feed my soul. They are Sugar Babies. The love of God is soul food.

Real Love is the love of God, unconditional love that cares about the well being of others without expecting anything in return. Real Love is grace. Imitation love is the praise, power, pleasure, and safety you try to get from other people, and it brings only temporary satisfaction and starves your soul. Real Love flows to you from God through people who have enough of it to give. They give it to you because God is Love and because you need to feel loved. If you try to earn it, you are going after imitation love. If you will give up trying to appear to deserve it and accept it just as you are, Real Love is yours.

More than any other writer in the Bible, John talks about God’s love as Real Love. He says God gave us an image of Real Love when he sent His Son into the world to lay down his life for us. He says Jesus’ example of Real Love is our inspiration for how we will live in the church. Most Christians know John 3:16 by heart. Let’s learn 1John 3:16 – “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for one another.”

Plans for 2012

As I think about New Hope goals for 2012, developing a plan for having more room to grow is at the top of the list. It looks like God is bringing us new hope for healthy growth. We have children and their parents in our programs on both Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights. That reality and three other factors enable us to plan for growth.

· Our church is off to a good financial start for 2012. We finished the year with money to put into savings. We have $13,000 in our Building Fund. (Thank you for your faithful giving.)

· Our Church Council has made plans for getting us a site plan that will provide a vision of where we can go in the future with expanded buildings.

· Thanks to the foresight of founding pastor Tom Kelsey and other New Hope leaders, we have a wonderful piece of property on which to build.

Six years ago, God gave me two life-changing things at the same time: becoming pastor of New Hope Baptist Church and knowledge of the principles of Real Love. In God’s providence, I was given a church to love and the knowledge that “our souls require feeling loved in just as real a way as our bodies require air and food.” Greg Baer’s Real Love Bible Study Workbook and his “Essentials of Real Love Seminar” on DVDs have changed the way I see human sinfulness and the Bible’s assertion that “God is love.” I plan to present what I have learned to the church I love as clearly as I can in a series of sermons. Here is the plan.

January 8 What Is Real Love and Why Do We Need It? 1John4:10; Isaiah 55:1-3

January 15 Imitation Love: Sugar Babies vs. Soul Food

January 22 Getting and Protecting Behaviors, also Known as Sin

January 29 Changing Your Judgment of People

February 5 Getting Love So That You Can Give It: A River of Life Flowing Out of Me John 4:7-26

February 12 The Law of Choice and the Law of Consequences

February 17 What Can Real Love Do for a Church?

February 24 Real Love and Eternal Life

Waiting on the Lord

When Mary and Joseph took Jesus to the Temple in Jerusalem he was eight days old. There they met a man named Simeon. “He loved God,” the Gospel of Luke says, “and was waiting for God to save the people of Israel. God's Spirit came to him and told him that he would not die until he had seen Christ the Lord” (4:25-26). Simeon had been waiting patiently for God to fulfill his promise. We don’t know how old Simeon was, but it is likely that he had been waiting a long time when he finally saw eight-day-old Jesus. Think about it: this man did not give up. If he had failed to wait on the Lord, he would have missed his reason for being alive.

We need the faith and patience of Simeon, because we too are called on to wait for what we want from God. What matters is not how long we have to wait for what we want, but the kind of persons we become in the waiting.

Here are the questions to ask yourself as you think of what you are “waiting on the Lord” to see. Am I becoming more loving? Am I becoming more patient? Am I honestly praying, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven?” Am I trusting God to use me to get his will done?

You may be aware that Billy Graham turned 93 recently. In his wonderful book, Nearing Home, he says, “I was taught how to die, but nobody ever taught me how to grow old.” He writes that his wife Ruth wanted a specific saying on her tombstone. She was driving through an area of road construction once. When she finally came to the end of all the markers and equipment along the road, she saw this sign: “END OF CONSTRUCTION. THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE.” Those words are over her grave. They are about waiting patiently for the Lord. Each of us is a construction project. We need patience to wait on the Lord.