What Does it Take?
- Ashland Church of Christ
- Feb 10
- 14 min read
Guest Pastor J Cook
February 9, 2025
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Transcribed by Turbo Scribe
Good morning. I'd like to thank you all for your hospitality to Janie and me through these last few months. It's meant a lot to us.
We just want to thank you for your kindness to us and your patience with us. I see our world as relationally being broken. I mean, you look around and it seems that almost everything and everybody is fragmented in some way.
I was talking with my sister-in-law who was helping us pack yesterday. She was talking about a family who hadn't talked to their son or their daughter in such a long time that they had pretty well divorced one another. And they were fragmented and they were no longer together.
You see all the time where husbands and wives, they call it quits and they're fragmented. You see children and their parents many times that same way. You look at many churches and they're fragmented.
They don't necessarily, you know, exactly believe with everything the same way that they do. Then they somehow find a way to ostracize you or themselves to go ahead and part and break fellowship with you. We live in tough times.
The truth is that you look at our United States. Have you ever seen it more divided fundamentally than it is right now? I know I'm 70 years old and I've never seen it with such extremes on both sides. We are divided and fragmented.
My sermon today has to do with what does it take for us to get it back. In a church, what does it take if we're divided somewhere? What does it take to get that back? In our love for Christ, what does it take to get that love that we once felt? How do we get it back? In our marriages, same thing. So I'd like to start off with a story.
Bob was a successful businessman and he was rich. He had money sticking out his ears. And he was sharp most of the time, but he was in trouble, big trouble.
It was his 25th wedding anniversary and he forgot. You just don't do some things. Forgetting your wife's 25th anniversary with you is just not one of them.
So she was ticked off, as you might imagine. He had a means to go ahead and buy her a nice gift. So she said to him, I want you to know, and I mean business, that tomorrow, if you don't have something sitting out in that driveway, it'll go zero to 200 in less than five seconds, then you might as well know that you're in a big, big trouble than you really think you are.
And so he got up the next morning, left early. She woke up finally and curiosity got the best of her. She put on her robe and went out to the window to look.
Sure enough, there is this gift box with a big bowl on it out in their driveway. And she hurries out there and picks it up and takes it in. She unwraps it, and you can imagine her shock when she found that he bought her some bathroom scales.
Bob hasn't been seen since last Friday. Webster's Dictionary says this, Romance is a feeling of excitement and mystery associated with love. A feeling, I want to point that out.
When Webster's defines love, it says it's an intense feeling of deep affection. Romance, we can all say when we felt it, it's intoxicating, it's addictive. A poet once put it this way, he said, Romance is the glamour which turns the dust of everyday life into a golden haze.
What is at heart with all these sentiments? What's at heart is the fact that we equate love predominantly with feelings. Feelings, you got to feel in love. How many times have I counseled with couples? And in counseling with those couples, I find that many times you'll hear one of them, most generally the woman, she says, I love him.
I'm just not in love with him anymore. What's she saying? She's saying that there's a feeling that has been lost. Is that love that's lost? Here's a question for consideration.
Back in 1964, the Reitz brothers came up with a song that we've all heard before. You've lost that love and feeling. Remember that? If you're younger, you probably won't remember when music was really good music.
You probably won't know what we're talking about. They'd say, bring back that love and feeling. Now it's gone, gone, gone.
Are you going to sing with me or not? Here's the question. If it's gone, gone, gone, can it be gotten back, back, back? Let me give you the brief answer to that. When it comes to romance, the answer is no, no, no.
Now you might think that that's kind of a peculiar way of looking at it. But the honest truth is, if you're looking at love as just being these warm, fuzzy feelings that we have, you're going to find out that quite honestly, those will dissipate. Time Magazine several years back did a thing on Valentine's Day about love.
And it asked, is this romantic love, is it something that can be maintained? And it tells you that there's this thing that called romantic love that has a shelf life of somewhere around two years. And in that two years, it's got this erratic ricocheting of testosterone, estrogen and dopamine. And that subsides.
You no longer have these intense feelings that you once had. And I know that that's one of the reasons that today we talk about something that we want so desperately for us to have again. Wouldn't it be nice if you had those romantic feelings for the rest of your life? It would be great, wouldn't it? I know the only person in the room that probably has those feelings is my wife, Jamie.
She's shaking her hand. Here's my contingency. The butterflies that mutter, the quickening of respirations, those times when your heart beats out of your chest, can all be explained pretty easily by basic biology.
I really could. I could radically improve everybody's marriage and their relationships if I can convince them that love and feelings are not necessarily the same. But quite honestly, they're something that, as time goes on, can be replaced with a much deeper thing called love.
And as a result of that love, you love again. And do you have good feelings? Yes, you do. They're not the same necessarily.
They're not as intense. They don't make your belly do flips and that kind of thing. But nonetheless, you look back on it, and it's so much better.
It's so much more in-depth than the romantic love that just answers or comes periodically. I mean, think about it, guys. When you were nervous even to take your hand and hold her hand, or when you were nervous to put your arm, you know, yawn and put your arm around her, you remember that? I mean, do you remember how she'd look at you and you'd wonder how in the world you were ever lucky enough to get such a girl? I mean, you felt like you could move mountains for this woman.
But now she can't even get you to take out the trash or throw your dirty underwear in the laundry basket. Gals, do you remember how your breath would catch when you would hear his car come into the driveway? Remember how everything he said was either sensitive or funny, witty? I mean, I gotta tell you, in my first five years of marriage, I was the funniest guy in the world. Now Janie don't even smile when I tell a joke.
She says, it's old stuff anymore. It's same old routine stuff, and it's not the same anymore. What happened? Where did those feelings go? We would love to take it back, as we've said.
We'd love to recapture those moments, even the point of divorcing someone else in order to recapture those feelings. That's what happens all the time. For many husbands and wives, they have become nothing more than roommates, romances for children's tales and harlequin romance books.
Neither we grow cynical, or we grow restless and go looking for someone else. Over the years, busyness, unforgiveness, parenting skills and styles, distractions, temptations, and exhaustion will cool the flames of romance. And the question for today, can anything bring that back? And my answer to you is, what you're looking for is not what does come back.
There's this deep thing called love that goes beyond just feelings. It supersedes all of that. It's love.
One of the great groups of the 1970s was Earth, Wind and Fire. Boy, I am aging myself, am I not today? In their 1970s song, After the Love is Gone, they say that. After the love is gone, how can you lead me on and not let me stay around? After the love is gone, what used to be right is wrong and here it is.
Can love that's lost be found? Everybody would like to say, oh yes, surely it does. If not here with this person that I'm with, here, maybe somewhere else it could be found. I know what you're thinking.
Jay hasn't even read his text yet, so this is going to be a long one. No, trust me, the next three passages or points are going to be short. I take my thoughts out of Revelation, the second chapter, verses one through five.
In it, it offers us an outline, if you will, of what can happen if we go ahead and surrender ourselves to what God wants us to be about. Let me pray before I read. Father, just speak through me today, I pray.
I pray that you would help us all to have receptive hearts and minds. Knowing, Father, that you are a God of restoration, I pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen.
What if it's too long? The love is so dead, you can't, I mean, it's in dust. There's no way to recoup it. The truth is in God's word there is.
Revelation, the second chapter, starting at verse one, it says, Write this letter to the angel of the church in Ephesus. This is the message from the one who holds seven stars in his right hand, the one who walks among the seven golden lampstands. I know the things you do.
I've seen your hard work and your patient endurance. I know that you don't tolerate evil people, that you examine the claims of those who say they are apostles but are not. You have discovered that they are liars.
You have patiently suffered for me without quitting. But I have this complaint against you. You don't love me or each other as you did at first.
Look at how far you have fallen. Look back to me and to do the works you did at first. If you don't repent, I will come and remove your lampstand from its place among the churches.
But he intones the problem there in verse four. You just don't love me anymore. You don't love me like you used to.
And you don't love the saints. You don't love your brothers and sisters as you once did. You don't love your family member as you once did.
You don't love your neighbor as you once did. We see this problem in the church. When people are first introduced to Jesus Christ, they many times are on fire.
They have been forgiven of their sins. They have been given the gift of the Holy Spirit. They are new creatures.
The old has passed. The new has come. We know all of that has happened.
And so it changes us. We look at things a little differently. We have a little bit more of a spring in our step.
But as time goes on, something happens. It's called life. They no longer are a part of it.
Their affection is many times cool. They look at other Christians, take for instance, and think, boy, they've got huge flaws, bigger problems than I do. And somehow we think that those things that when we gave our life to Christ, that everything was going to be perfect.
Our bills would be paid. Our marriages would be amended. Our kids would start behaving.
That kind of thing. Christ asks, why don't you love me like you used to do? What's wrong here? He offers some three different simple things, all of them beginning with R. I want you to know that scholars view romantic love as a Western construct. We emphasize its feeling.
We assume that that's all there is to love. We idealize it disproportionately. And we panic if we don't feel it anymore.
And we mistakenly believe that because the feeling is gone, that love itself is gone. The first R that I would have you think about is, he says, remember. Remember what it was like when we first were in love.
Janie and I are moving, as you all know now. We're packing. We're amassing old pictures that we have.
I had no idea that we had that many pictures. And it's one of the most time-consuming things in the world because I find myself stopping and looking at and remembering where we were and how old our kids were. I've got to tell you, it was neat to just look at those old pictures.
It did something internally to me. It made me want to go back to those times to remember what it was like to feel young again. I looked at Janie, and let me assure you guys, she was a hottie.
She still is a hottie. Excuse me. She's vintage wine.
She just gets better with age, you know. Am I out of trouble? The truth is I look and see my kids when they're little and innocent and that type of thing. And I do believe that Jesus is on to something when he says, hey, I want you to remember what it was like.
Remember. Remember the letters that you wrote to one another. Remember the dates that you took.
One of the healthiest things we can do is to do that. Some people refuse to do this. When I do this in counseling, they don't want to do that.
They don't want to do it because they're afraid of how it might make them feel more positive towards the other person. They've already made up their mind. They don't trust that God has something even better for them.
So remember, that's the first thing. Do whatever it takes. What do you used to do? Did you used to date? Where did you go? How did you behave with one another? The second one is repent.
He said, turn back to me. This is an important step. Remember, repentance means changing your mind.
It's a logical step. The American mindset is there's no place for logic when it comes to love. I just got to follow my heart.
My heart's always right. The Bible says the heart is deceptive in all of its ways. Repentance doesn't place a high premium on feelings like romantic love.
It's the mindset of doing the right thing. Do it because it's the right thing to do. Do it because I can, with a clean conscience, lay my head on my pillow and not have to apologize and pray for forgiveness.
Think in terms of repentance as being something that, quite honestly, you do when you realize that you've been straying in the wrong direction. Repentance literally means to turn around, to change your direction, to change it back towards God. Feelings only think of what it does for me now, in this moment.
It's erratic. It's sporadic. It changes constantly.
And so repentance says turn back. Turn back to the right, the moral, and the good thing. The final thing is return.
He says in verse 5, do the things you did at first. You ever tried that? If you've been married for any length of time, we get into ruts, don't we? And remember how we acted when we were first married or first dating? Feelings follow actions. Actions are not the result.
You don't do the things because you feel. Like take, for instance, kids. You don't go to school because you feel.
Wake up and say, man, I need to go and get educated. That's a good thing for me. It's a good thing for my future.
You don't do that. But if you start seeing the value in it, then your actions have a way of willingly following. That happens in almost every area of life.
Repentance doesn't take a high premium on feelings like romantic love. It's the mindset of doing the good things in life. What did you do differently when you dated? Remember, you'd go around and fool her and make her think that you're sensitive and kind guys.
You'd make her think that you were polite. You'd go around and break your arm so that you could open the door so that she could get into the thing there, into the car. We talked a lot.
We listened a lot. We started talking a lot, listening in a lot, and that's exactly what we need to do now. Take the time.
It's worth the investment. He was polite. She was attentive.
He had manners. She treated him like a king. You wrote notes together that you're almost embarrassed to read now.
You were thoughtful. You did little things that made a huge difference. That happens in church.
That happens with your families. It happens, the truth be known, that you do the things that you did first. Let me try and point you to something that sounds confusing, but it's really not.
I'm going to say it, and I'm going to make you repeat it after me. You do the things you do because you feel the way you feel. You don't feel the way you feel because you do the things you do.
Now, did that become very clear to you? Wow. You do the things you do because actions follow feelings. Invariably, they do.
You don't jump it and feel the way you feel because you do the things you do. Let's say this. You don't do the things you do because you feel the way you feel.
Say that. You don't do the things you do because you feel the way you feel. You feel the way you feel because you do the things you do.
Do it one more time. Hey, listen. You guys be quiet over here.
I'm not hearing anything from this side right here. You're the majority of people here today. Okay, you don't do the things you do because you feel the way you feel.
You feel the way you feel because you do the things you do. Invariably, if a couple is separated and they start doing the things that they know are the right and good and wholesome, feelings inevitably have a way of following them. Have you prayed for your children by name? If you're not having a good relationship with them right now or estranged from them, what do you do? You have to go ahead and do the things you do and thus you'll feel the way you feel.
I look back, quite honestly, I don't know how all the time has gone, but my wife, Janie, and I have been married going on 42 years. Is that right? 52. Yeah, 52.
I'm sorry. That was my other wife. 52 years.
Now, I know what you're thinking. Do the math. I was five when we got married.
Anyway, I remember her coming down the aisle in Stiles, Iowa, and looking at her and thinking, it doesn't get any better than this. This is as good as it's ever going to get right here, right now, in this moment. The feelings that I had that I was overwhelmed with and I could see in her eyes that she felt the same way.
It's just not going to get any better than this. Then we got married and had a family. I remember looking at each of the kids and then looking at my wife and thinking, it's not going to get any better than this.
This is just as good as it gets. We had a wonderful ministry in Liberty, Illinois. I spent six years there.
I looked around at the people. Everybody was very loving to one another. Everything was good.
I thought, this is it. This is as good as it's going to get. It's not going to get any better.
Then we moved to Jacksonville. Jacksonville had more love and just generally directed at us and towards one another. I thought, boy, it doesn't get any better than this.
It's not going to get any better than this. Now we'll make a move to Rolla, Missouri. It's my prayer that it's going to be the same.
I think it will be. It's not going to get any better than this. It's as good as it gets.
But I know this. There will come a time where we're in heaven. I'll look at my wife because of Christ and what he's done.
I'll say, I'm glad we hung in there. I'm glad we showed a love to one another that was beyond just simple feelings, but commitment, something so much deeper, what my Savior has for me. I'll know this is as good as it gets.
It won't get any better. Let's pray. Thank you, Father, for the time we've had together.
I thank you for these lovely people. I just pray your continued blessing on them as a church, whatever is needed in their church family, that you would add to it through blessing after blessing, knowing, Father, that you are the giver of every good and perfect gift. We praise your name in Jesus' name.
Amen.
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