Now I don’t know about you but I doubt the Apostle Paul would be giving out Hebrew high-fives and doing cartwheels just because we ended our hostilities with God.  Paul wouldn’t get fired up because God has gone His way to see over His sovereign schedule and we have gone our way to do our thing and watch the Cowboys.  We have a truce with God.  God is OK with me.  I am OK with God.  Paul would not get fired up about that.  We are talking about something that is deeper, more distinctive and more dynamic than just external, worldly peace.

Peace here can be defined as reconciliation with God, which results in compatibility.  That is why Paul was so excited.  We are reconciled to God through Jesus Christ.  Once we make a faith decision and accept Jesus Christ into our lives, we are reconciled to God and thus we have a compatible relationship with Him.  Think about it.  Seventy percent of the people you know are not in church this morning.  They are not here.  They are at the golf course.   They are at restaurants.  Some are still asleep.  If you ask them if they are at war with God, they would answer no way, that their relationship with God was just fine.  They might be in their neutral corners, but certainly no war is going on.  But see, they do not have that compatibility, that true peace that God brings in a personal relationship.

They are not attracted to Him.  They don’t want to worship Him.  They don’t have the love and the joy they could have with Him.  Yet they are trying to find peace by gaining and attaining and maintaining and sustaining.  They decide that if they get married, then they will have peace.

We peer into a new millenium, everybody is talking about it on.  But they are not only talking about it, they are feeling it.  What is it?  Stress.  On the corporate front there are fewer workers, more work and greater demands than ever before.  On the family front, life is packed with school schedules, soccer games, homework and home improvement.  We hurry and scurry through life at such a pace that we have gotten a lot of things blurry.

we regularly pull 60 to 80 hour work weeks to endure and sort of hydroplane over the weekend that is packed with endless errands, activities and recreational pursuits.  I think if the truth were known, a lot of us are all stressed up with no place to go.

The Bible says there is a place to go.  Over the next few moments we are going to discover what it says about how to handle the stranglehold of stress.  Notice I said, the stranglehold of stress. The word stress in Latin is pronounced “strict-us” which means to draw tight.  And it is amazing the lengths that we will go to in order to deal with stress.  Some of us try to express our stress through anger.  Have you heard about the road rage going on these days? People freaking out behind the steering wheel of an automobile.  I have read about it on the freeways, I have also heard about it in the parking lots of our church.  Not only do we express our stress through anger, we try to numb it through overeating, overcompeting and cheating, cheating ourselves, others and even God.

If you are feeling anxious and stressful in this hour, the Bible says in Proverbs 12:25, “An anxious heart weighs a man down.”  Have you ever been waiting for an elevator, you push the button and the light comes on.  And even if the light is on you push it again.  And you push it again as if the elevator would hurry.  Why do we do these things?

They just know and she knew.

So let me let you again follow me along in Scripture.  Judges 16:19‑21.  “Having put him to sleep on her lap, she called a man to shave off the seven braids of his hair, and so began to subdue him. And his strength left him. Then she called, ‘Samson, the Philistines are upon you!’ He awoke from his sleep and thought, ‘I’ll go out as before and shake myself free.’”

And this next little section is one of the saddest and most tragic verses in all of Scripture.

“…but he did not know that the Lord had left him.”

A tragedy of what might have been.  He did not know that the Lord had left him.

“Then the Philistines seized him, gouged out his eyes and took him down to Gaza.  Binding him with bronze shackles, they set him to grinding in the prison.”

What does sin do?  Sin blinds, it binds and it grinds.  Here is Samson, I mean his whole problem was the lust of the eyes.  “I saw a Philistine woman.  She looks good to me.”

Now his eyes are gone.  What is Samson’s problem?

“I want to be free.  Forget the Nazarite vow, forget the grapes, forget wine, forget the carcass.  I just want to be free.  I will do what I want to do.  I will open a can when I want to open one up.”

In the search for his freedom, what happened?  He got bound.  And then the biblical body builder is doing the work of an animal, going around and around and around grinding grain for the Philistines to eat.

Samson, totally dejected. Don’t you know as he was going around and around in that mill he was thinking about the wasted potential?

In today’s session, though, I want us to identify a language that we all speak.  The funny thing about it is that most of us don’t realize that we’re speaking it.  In fact, I didn’t really realize I was speaking it until I got into it this week in my preparation for today’s message.  This language is called, I’ve already told you what it is, the language of love.  The language of love.  What’s your love language?  What kind of language, when you want to express love, do you use?  That’s the first question we’re going to address.  What kind of love language do you use?  In other words, when you feel love towards someone, what’s the next thing that you do?  What’s the next step that you take?

I want to very quickly identify seven languages of love, and you might want to write these down if you possibly can.  Seven languages of love, and think about yourself, what language do you identify with, do you use to communicate love?  The first language is the language of touch.  I’m talking about physical affection.  For many people, when they feel love, their next step is to put their hand on someone’s hand, to put their arm around them, to give them a high five, to hug them.  A couple of years ago, I was in the home of a young couple who had been visiting our church and they were asking me questions about the Fellowship of Las Colinas.  We had a great conversation, even had a cup of coffee together.  As I was leaving, I extended my hand to the man to tell him “thank you” for offering up his home to me and as I extended my hand, the man kind of brushed it aside and said, “Ed, we’re huggers.

He treasures you.”  And he says, “No, he doesn’t.  He doesn’t.”  I thought, “Is this young man lying to me?  Was his father lying to me?  Is there a lack of love in this relationship?”  The answer is “no”.  There was love in the relationship.  The problem was in the expression of love, in the language of love.  The father was tuned-in to highbrow classical when his son needed “Young Country”.  The language of love.  That’s a problem that we all deal with, isn’t it?  In marriages, amongst friends, parent/child relationships, at the marketplace.  We want to express love and we express it in a language that we understand, but more often than not, the person receiving it doesn’t speak our same love language and it’s like you’re talking to someone from a foreign country.  Problems occur.  Questions arise.  You think relationships are in trouble when most of the time it goes back to the language of love.

I Corinthians 14:1 tells us two things that we ought to do.  Take your Bibles and turn there.  I Corinthians 14:1.  I’ll only read the first two words, two radical words.  If you have a highlighter and a pen, circle these words, underline them.  “Pursue love.”  Pursue love.  Track it down.  Improve in your capacity to love.  If we’re serious about improving our capacity to love, we are going to have to pursue love and that’s what this series is about, “What’s Love Got To Do With It?”  Last week we talked about how God wired all of us up differently, that we are unique and we learned that different is not bad, different is different.  We talked about how we’re wired up differently relationally, how we solve problems, we make decisions, our basic orientation to life, and for this message to really penetrate the way the Lord Jesus Christ wants it to penetrate my life and your life, I encourage you to pick up the tape of our first session as you exit.

He says, “Consecrate yourselves,” consecrate yourselves, get right, get right, get right, and get right.  God wants us to get right.  R

Romans 12:1 & 2, let me take the sticker off my shoe.  It says we’re to “present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.”  In a little while we’re going to receive the offering and in a real way we should crawl up, but don’t do this literally, in our minds, crawl up into the offering plate and say “God I offer my life to you as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable.”  God’s plan is always going to be pure.  It’s always going to be holy.  It is always going to be about being set apart.  It is not going to be all messed up and dirtied up by the world, by immorality and anger and lust and greed.

But you’ll see here in Joshua 3:5 it says “for tomorrow,” I love that, “for tomorrow the Lord will do amazing things amongst you.”

That’s what I love about dreaming God’s dream because only God’s dream tethers today to tomorrow.  When I dream God’s dream it tethers my today to tomorrow.  I have engagement.  I have anticipation and I have this thing called momentum.

Are you dreaming God’s dream?  “Well Ed I don’t know if I am or not, brother.”  Well just log onto yesterday.com.  Yesterday.com will help you to look back and if you see that your dream, this dream that you’re doing is not about the advancement of the gospel, then it’s not God’s dream.  But if you log onto yesterday.com and go it is about the advancement of the gospel.  I see God developing it although I don’t know right now where I’m going or I know I’m not going to know exactly which way to go until I continue to walk in faith.

This past spring I was in a boat with a good friend of mine and we were cruising the surf line in the Gulf of Mexico.  I was looking towards the beach and I saw some gorgeous houses built right there on the water.  I was talking to my friend about the houses and I looked and noticed that the waves were breaking beneath these houses.  So I said, “Mark, what’s up with that?  Why are the waves breaking beneath the houses?”  He smiled and said “Ed, when the people built these homes they had no idea about the erosion that would take place over the years.  When they built the homes, the beach and the surf were like 100 yards away.”  He said, “Now the waves are right there at the houses and the next big storm will totally wipe out these structures.”  I said, “Wow.”  And I looked at all the renters and vacationers sipping their morning coffee on the decks of these gorgeous homes yet I knew that they had no idea that the next storm, the next big set of waves would wipe them out.  They were looking at erosion.

As we look at our culture we see the waves of moral erosion, the waves of relativism, pounding against the very foundation of who we are and what we believe.  Think about the corporate corruption that’s out there, the scandals at Enron and WorldCom.  Even matriarchal Martha Stewart has been targeted for insider trading.  Can you believe that?  Martha Stewart.  Think about the media erosion that’s out there.  We have television shows like Will & Grace that applaud homosexuality.  We have shows like Friends that glorify Rachel getting pregnant out of wedlock.  Think about the entertainers.  Think about a lot of the music that we listen to these days.

That’s what God desires. And throughout the Bible we have this beautiful covenant thing going on. And it’s reflective in the marriage because Jesus said, “A marriage is a symbol of Christ’s relationship, his passion, his love, toward the church.”  How does Jesus love the church? Selflessly and sacrificially.

And speaking of that whole vibe, if you have your Bibles, turn to Ephesians 5:25.  It says, “Husbands, love your wives just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” Do you know the apostle Paul spent twice as many words talking to husbands as he did wives? That’s interesting.

Love. What is love anyway?  Love is from God. True love is from God. It really is. And love is a decision. It’s all about commitment; yet our world says love is something else.

There are three types of love that marriages are built upon.  These are very, very important to get down.  The first is agape love.  Say agape with me, “Agape.”  That’s unconditional love.  That is the kind of love Jesus has for the church.  We don’t deserve it.  We’re self-centered sinners.  We’ve committed all these moral turnovers.  God is holy, he is pure.  Why would God send Jesus to love us irrationally and unconditionally?  Because of this agape love. Marriage should be all about agape love.

There is another type of love: phileo.  Say it with me, “Phileo.”  You’ve heard of Philadelphia. That’s the city of brotherly love.  This phileo love is the companionship thing. It’s the friendship thing.  That’s got to be in play in marriage.  So we have agape and we’ve got phileo.

Now we have something else called eros love.  Say eros with me, “Eros.”  We get the word erotic from eros. That’s the passion, that’s the fire.  That’s what it is.  Think about eros as kindling.