True Love Waits
Many of us first heard the phrase “True Love Waits” as a command about what we were supposed to do for God. Control ourselves. Behave correctly. Prove our devotion. Wait faithfully.
But Acts 7 turns the phrase around.
True Love Waits is not first about what we do for God. It is about what God does for us.
Stephen retells Israel’s story as a repeated pattern. God moves toward people, calls them, rescues them, stays with them, and waits for them, while they repeatedly miss, resist, or reject what God is doing. God does not coerce intimacy. God waits for covenant to take root in the heart and flower into desire.
The sermon’s central idea is that one of the greatest hindrances to our spiritual lives is that we do not know how to live loved. We can spend years trying to improve ourselves, fix our lives, manage our failures, or become more spiritual without ever learning to receive the love God is already giving.
True love waits because love refuses to control. God keeps moving toward us, even while waiting for us to yield to love.
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Resources
Acts by Beverly Gaventa
Acts by Willie James Jennings
Sermon Video
Acts 7:1-4
Then the high priest asked Stephen, “Are these charges true?”
2 To this he replied: “Brothers and fathers, listen to me! The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham while he was still in Mesopotamia, before he lived in Harran. 3 ‘Leave your country and your people,’ God said, ‘and go to the land I will show you.’
4 “So he left the land of the Chaldeans and settled in Harran. After the death of his father, God sent him to this land where you are now living.
Acts 7:9-10
9 “Because the patriarchs were jealous of Joseph, they sold him as a slave into Egypt. But God was with him 10 and rescued him from all his troubles.
Acts 7:25
25 Moses thought that his own people would realize that God was using him to rescue them, but they did not.
Acts 7:35-36; 39
35 “This is the same Moses they had rejected with the words, ‘Who made you ruler and judge?’ He was sent to be their ruler and deliverer by God himself, through the angel who appeared to him in the bush. 36 He led them out of Egypt and performed wonders and signs in Egypt, at the Red Sea and for forty years in the wilderness. 39 “But our ancestors refused to obey him. Instead, they rejected him and in their hearts turned back to Egypt.
Acts 7:51-53
51 “You stiff-necked people! Your hearts and ears are still uncircumcised. You are just like your ancestors: You always resist the Holy Spirit! 52 Was there ever a prophet your ancestors did not persecute? They even killed those who predicted the coming of the Righteous One. And now you have betrayed and murdered him— 53 you who have received the law that was given through angels but have not obeyed it.”
John 15:9
I have loved you the same way the Father has loved me. So live in my love.
John 4:10
Jesus replied, “If you only knew the gift God has for you and who you are speaking to…
Song of Songs 7:5
Your head crowns you like Mount Carmel. Your hair is like royal tapestry; the king is held captive by its tresses.
Sermon Quotes
Nothing else but God’s intense, unslaking desire for humanity makes sense of the biblical story, from the calling of Abraham to the Incarnation of God in Christ, even to Jesus’ death nailed to a cross. Of course, the covenant can only really work if love is strong on both sides. The recurrent tragedy of biblical history is that human love and responsiveness to God repeatedly weakens and fails. - Ellen Davis
From Abraham to Moses, Stephen is telling a story of two, of God and God’s people and the drama of divine desire where God, like a feverish lover, navigates at the site of their resistance and rejection, waiting, always waiting for the result that only comes from yielding to love. God waits for covenant to take root in hearts and flower into desire.- Willie Jennings
The emphasis is almost exclusively on what God will do whether his people make right choices or not. - Flemming Rutledge
In the Acts of the Apostles, Stephen’s comments about Abraham focus almost entirely on God’s promise. Stephen attributes to Abraham but a single action, that of following God’s commandment to move from Mesopotamia to Haran (7:3–4). - Beverly Gaventa
Discussion Questions
When you get caught in a self-defeating spiritual cycle, where do you usually end up: 1) burned out, 2) apathetic, or 3) less convinced that God can actually change things for you? What does that cycle tend to look like in your life?
Stephen ends with the accusation, “You always resist the Holy Spirit.” What does resistance to love look like in your own life? When you feel exposed, ashamed, disappointed in yourself, hurt, or afraid, do you tend to move toward God, withdraw, become controlling, work harder, numb yourself, or do something else?
Can you really hear Jesus say, “Live in my love”? Not change for my love. Not improve to increase my love. Not succeed so you do not lose my love. Simply, live in my love. How does your instinct to improve yourself, pay your own debts, or fix the parts of yourself you think are unacceptable keep you from actually living loved?
Could God actually be moved by your beauty, captivated by who you are, and delight in your presence enough to be “held captive” by it?What in you resists being seen by God that way?
Ellen Davis asks whether God could be “bound to us in the genuine need that love creates.” Could your absence actually leave something missing in God’s experience of love? Could God genuinely long for your presence, wait for you, and feel the ache of your distance?
