The Staircase Is Complete — Now Climb It

Dardanelle Missionary Baptist Church — Dardanelle, Arkansas

Pastor Chuck Trusty — Sunday evening service, August 30, 2026 The Staircase, grand finale · A3 D16 · 2 Peter 1:5-11

► Watch this lesson on video (51:00)

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This is the grand finale of our series of lessons on the staircase. The staircase is complete — so now we are supposed to climb it.

This morning Jesus stood in front of the church at Ephesus and said one word: remember. Remember, because a church can keep everything and still lose love. A church can put that transmission in neutral. This evening Peter shows us the other side of the same coin — what happens to the believer who forgets, and stops climbing.

A lot of you may never have driven a standard, but if you have - has this standard transmission ever stalled on the side of a hill and got stuck in neutral? If it is in neutral you cannot keep climbing, and you can only hold the brake for so long. What do you suppose is eventually going to happen? If that transmission stays in neutral, you are going to start going down.

That is exactly the idea. When we stop climbing the staircase, we do not stay where we are. We start coming back down. In terms of the Christian life there is no such thing as staying the same. There is no such thing as static. We are either growing in grace or we are sliding back down.

The one point of our lesson this evening is this:

The staircase is complete — now climb it.

Look How Far We Have Come

We began this journey in the 107th Psalm, and that is where we started talking about godliness.

Remember the wanderers — believers who had lost sight of the landmarks. The fainters, who collapsed because wandering had become normal in their lives. The prisoners, who suffered because they ignored the watchman and ignored the warnings. The drifting heart, who resisted correction quietly — no big deal, just a little drift, just keep ignoring it — until the little drift turned into something about to get serious. The fools, who stepped over the boundary. They did not take a giant running leap; they stepped over one little step at a time. And the storm-tossed, who were simply overwhelmed and at their wits’ end.

And every single one of them, when they got in trouble, received the same answer.

“Then they cried unto the LORD in their trouble, and he saved them out of their distresses.” — Psalm 107:13 (KJV)

That is the foundation of everything. And then Peter told us what to do next. Peter did not say survive. Peter said add. Peter said climb. Peter said build something on top of what God has already given you.

I often quote the third chapter of First Corinthians — the gold, silver, and precious stones, and the wood, hay, and stubble.

“According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise masterbuilder, I have laid the foundation, and another buildeth thereon. But let every man take heed how he buildeth thereupon.” — 1 Corinthians 3:10 (KJV)

“If any man’s work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward. If any man’s work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire.” — 1 Corinthians 3:14-15 (KJV)

A child of God who builds wood, hay, and stubble on his life instead of gold, silver, and precious stones will be saved, yet so as by fire — which means he will lose everything except the salvation of his soul. And the reason he loses everything is that he never really added anything. He never built anything of value on his saving faith.

If we stop at faith and never add anything to it, that is the same song, second verse, of the staircase we have been climbing all these weeks. Saved, yet so as by fire, because they stayed at the bottom.

Sixteen lessons ago we were wanderers at the bottom of the staircase. Every step since has brought us closer to God’s way and God’s will, closer to what God designed us for. So which step is each one of us standing on tonight? Are we still at the bottom, or have we made some progress toward the top?

Eight Steps, and What Each One Built

“And beside this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge; And to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness; And to godliness brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness charity.” — 2 Peter 1:5-7 (KJV)

Step one is faith. That is the foundation. Faith is the decision we make to trust God with our eternity. Every step that comes after rests entirely on our decision to put our faith and our confidence in Jesus Christ. That is one reason we can say salvation is a choice — we are saved by faith, and faith is a choice we make to put our eternity in the hands of Jesus rather than trying to work and earn it ourselves.

Step two is virtue. Virtue is the courage to act on what we believe. Virtue is not faith sitting on a shelf. Virtue is faith that gets up and actually does what God says.

Step three is knowledge. Knowledge is first cousin to understanding. It is understanding what God has said. We do not drift in ignorance — when we begin to drift it is never really a case of “I did not know any better, or I do not know where the straight and narrow is, so how was I supposed to know?” Knowledge is what turns virtue into wisdom. It is what turns the courage to act - into acting in the right direction, and that is the evidence of wisdom instead of foolishness.

Step four is temperance. The best way to describe temperance is simply self-discipline — the self-discipline to live by what we know. Temperance is knowledge with a backbone.

Step five is patience. Patience is long-term temperance. It is the endurance that holds us steady when everything begins to go south. And when everything goes south we are tempted to do what? Chunk the whole mess. “Why am I wasting my time serving God when it seems He has forsaken me?” The endurance of this step is what keeps us from following through on the temptation to quit.

Step six is godliness. Godliness is the daily ordering of our lives around God’s priorities instead of around our own.

Step seven is brotherly kindness. That is the warm, genuine family love of the household of faith — brothers and sisters, not strangers.

Step eight is charity. Charity is the capstone. If you look on the website you will find the picture we used for the charity lesson — the stones of an arch all set in place, and the one right in the center is the capstone that holds everything together. Charity is God’s love shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit — and shed abroad literally means poured in.

And this kind of love reaches friends and enemies alike. Now when I say enemy I am not talking about foreign countries we may or may not be at war with. The enemy is the one next to us. Who then is my neighbor? When we see somebody in need, that is our neighbor. That is the one we are supposed to love — the one whose interest we put above our own, regardless of our personal feelings toward him.

When God says to love our enemies, He is not telling us we have to feel good and warm and fuzzy about the individual. He is telling us to treat that individual as though he were a friend. Treat him as though you did enjoy his company. That is the commandment.

And notice something about all eight of these steps. Every one of them is a decision. Every one of them is a decision we make to add. First Corinthians three says build upon the foundation — that is a decision we make to follow through and build, or a decision we make to ignore and make light of.

What Peter Promises

“For if these things be in you, and abound, they make you that ye shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.” — 2 Peter 1:8 (KJV)

Notice two conditions: these things must be in you, and they must abound.

They must first be in us. It is like a piece of rental property that has an occupant — somebody living in it, taking up the space. These things have to occupy our lives. And they must abound, which means to overflow, to increase, to multiply. If these things occupy our lives, and if we do not shove them off into a corner where they are barely noticeable but let them overflow, then we will be neither barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Barren. Going back again to First Corinthians three and being saved yet so as by fire — barren brings a picture to my mind of going to heaven with hardly anything on at all. Basically naked. Nothing to cover us, nothing to give us any kind of glory, exposed completely and totally for what we are — self-centered and selfish. “Yes, God, I am saved. But I love me more than I love You. I love my way more than I love submitting to Your way.”

If that is us, and we have none of these eight steps in our lives, then our lives are barren in regard to the things of the Spirit. To be barren describes a field with no life in it at all. Nothing is growing. Now that does not mean we lose our salvation. But it does mean we can be a spiritual babe in Christ, and remain a spiritual babe in Christ, and never grow into what God desires us to be.

Unfruitful. To be unfruitful is like carrying the bucket with us but never putting anything in it. It is like carrying a basket that always stays empty. We can be active without adding these things — we can carry the bucket everywhere we go, we can carry the Bible everywhere we go. But if we never open the Bible and let what it says soak in and have an effect on our lives, then we have carried an empty bucket our whole life long. That is what it means to be unfruitful.

Three Kinds of Field

There are three kinds of field a farmer could have.

The fallow field. We do not often use the word fallow. A fallow field is not a dead field. It still has dirt in it. Rain still falls on it. The sun still rises over it every single morning. But nothing is growing, because nobody has worked it, nobody has planted anything in it, and nobody has tended it.

Can you picture a saved, born-again child of God who never does anything in terms of spiritual work? They have their underwear on and that is about all. Nothing covers what they are by nature. They are seen by the condition of their heart — and if that heart is worldly, they do not resemble Jesus Christ at all. As far as anyone passing by is concerned, this field shows no evidence of belonging to anybody.

If somebody looked at the description of our life, is there any evidence at all that we belong to God? Or does most of the evidence say, “I am independent. I am a runaway slave. I serve myself”?

The busy field. Plenty of activity. You might be carrying an empty bucket in both hands. This field has been plowed. It has been watered. The rows are laid out straight as an arrow. Real work has gone into that field. But there is no harvest. It is like a sail raised on a boat with no wind in it. We hear the truth, but no decision is ever made in the heart because of the truth we heard.

The rows are straight as an arrow, the watering is done, everything looks right. But no decision has been made to let this Book change us. Our buckets are empty. The seed never goes in, and at the end of the season there is nothing to show for all the work — nothing to show for all the worship we supposedly offered, nothing to show for all the time we claim to have spent reading the Book. Not one decision made to change the direction of our life. Not one seed of the gospel planted, because we did not allow it.

And that is why the staircase begins with faith. Faith is a decision. We decide to put our eternity in God’s hands. We decide to humble our hearts before Him. We decide to put God first and self last. We decide to treat the person we do not really care for as though we did care for him, and we do not let our prejudices blind us to how we are supposed to treat people.

The fruitful field. Peter says the complete staircase produces a third kind of field — worked, planted, tended. And when the harvest comes, the harvest is real, because a decision was made to put seed in that field. They are fully clothed, and every bucket they can get their hands on is full.

Let every man take heed how he buildeth thereupon. You can see how that connects straight to the staircase in Second Peter.

So which field describes our life this evening — the fallow field, the busy field, or the fruitful field?

What Peter Warns

“But he that lacketh these things is blind, and cannot see afar off, and hath forgotten that he was purged from his old sins.” — 2 Peter 1:9 (KJV)

Blind. Not physically blind — spiritually blind. And again, we are not talking about losing salvation. We are talking about losing sight of what is important. Unable to see God clearly. Unable to see our own condition accurately.

Cannot see afar off. This is the word behind our English word myopic. Nearsighted. The long view is gone. And here is the key: eternity is no longer in the picture when the daily decisions get made. Well, if eternity is not in the picture, what is? What is motivating those daily decisions? Whatever I can see right here. The here and now. That is not the way a Christian is expected to live.

Hath forgotten that he was purged. This is the sobering one. We can overlook it and think, well, so they forgot they were saved, that is no great matter, they are still going to heaven either way. But that is not what it says. They have forgotten what they were before the grace of God found them. They forgot the pit God pulled them out of.

And when a believer forgets how he was purged from his old sins, some things happen to his attitude. The gratitude, the urgency, and the hunger that drive the climb up these eight steps all evaporate. And then the decision we are talking about becomes no decision at all — which is the transmission put in neutral, the clutch that keeps slipping, the gears that have been stripped out. “I am just not going to do anything.” Well, making no decision is really making a decision.

There is a particular kind of pride you can find in Hollywood movie portrayals without looking very hard, and sometimes in people we know in ordinary life: a man who has been successful so long that he can no longer remember when he was not successful. He forgets where he started, and so he has no mercy at all for somebody who is still back where he himself was not too many years ago.

The moment you and I forget the mercy we received from God, we stop extending mercy and kindness to others.

So what is the one point of our lesson this evening? The staircase is complete — now climb it.

What Peter Calls Us to Do

“Wherefore the rather, brethren, give diligence to make your calling and election sure: for if ye do these things, ye shall never fall: For so an entrance shall be ministered unto you abundantly into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.” — 2 Peter 1:10-11 (KJV)

Give diligence. That echoes “take heed how you build thereupon” in First Corinthians three. Peter’s word means to be in earnest, to be zealous, to make a thing our serious business. In other words — build with a purpose.

Make your calling and election sure. We are not told to earn anything. We are not told to produce anything. We are told to make our calling and election sure — visible, obviously confirmed, so that there is evidence of it in the manner in which we live. The staircase is the evidence. When faith produces virtue, and virtue produces knowledge, all the way up to brotherly kindness producing charity, the whole trajectory of that life — the overall direction of it — becomes visible. And it becomes fairly obvious to anyone watching that this person belongs to God, because the evidence is that they resemble Jesus Christ more than they resemble the world.

Understand this plainly: the staircase is not what saves us. The staircase shows us as being saved.

Ye shall never fall. It says never. It does not say you will fall less often, or you will not fall very much. Never. So what does falling mean here? A person who is climbing is not falling. The staircase itself is the protection. If we are going up, then we are not going down. The moment we stop climbing is the moment the drift begins. I am halfway up a steep hill and I shove it into neutral, and the brakes will hold me for a while — but pretty soon your foot gets tired, and if that transmission stays in neutral you are going back down the hill. When we stop growing in love we do not stay in the same place; we start going backwards.

Now a climber may stumble on a particular step. Peter himself obviously stumbled. But falling here is not the stumble. Falling is letting go of the staircase altogether. We are only human. There are going to be hiccups. We are going to stump our toes. None of us has a monopoly on perfection or anything close to it. Stumbling is not falling. Falling is going all the way back to the bottom. And the way that is prevented is a decision made in our minds and hearts: I am going to continue this climb.

An entrance ministered abundantly. Look back at First Corinthians three. There is gold, silver, and precious stones, and receiving a reward. And there is wood, hay, and stubble, and being saved yet so as by fire. Which one of those do you suppose enters eternity abundantly, and which one enters eternity naked?

Think about a river. I do not care how big the river is — it starts out as a little trickle, a little stream you could hop across. But the river gathers as it goes. Every tributary adds to it. Every mile makes it wider, deeper, stronger. By the time the river reaches the sea it is not the same little stream it started out as.

That is the life Peter is describing. We begin with faith — a small stream, perhaps. But by the time our life reaches the sea of eternity, we have added some things to that faith, so that by the time we get to the end we do not resemble what we were at the beginning.

What would it take to make that climb our serious business — not starting tomorrow, but starting today?

From Psalm 107 to the Summit

The 107th Psalm shows us what a life looks like when the staircase is abandoned: the wandering, the fainting, the captivity, the foolishness, the storms. And every single time one of those people got in trouble they cried out to God, and every single time God answered.

That is where the Second Peter staircase begins. Not at the top — at the bottom. It begins at the cry. It begins at the place where somebody who has been through one of those journeys in Psalm 107 looks up and says, “God, I want a little more than survival. I want to climb. I am interested in the gold and the silver and the precious stones. I want to forget all about the wood and the hay and the stubble.”

And Peter says: then climb. Add to your faith, step by step. If we add to our faith step by step we will be neither barren nor unfruitful. We will never fall back down to the bottom. And an entrance into heaven will be ministered to us abundantly — we are not just going to sneak through those pearly gates by the skin of our teeth.

Where does the staircase take us? Faith is what keeps us from the drift, what keeps us from wandering. Virtue and knowledge help the ones who are fainting; they let a man focus on the landmarks again. Temperance and patience keep the prisoner from being taken captive by his own lusts. Godliness is for the Christian whose life is out of order. And brotherly kindness and charity are for the storm — because it is there we learn that we are held by God and we are holding the truth, that we are loved by God, and that we have a responsibility to let that godly love pass through us to others.

Four Questions at the Summit

First — which step on this staircase is the most solid in our life right now? Which one is the most natural for us to climb? Which one comes easiest?

Second — if there is a step that is easy for us, there is also one that is harder. Which of these is the most difficult step in our lives? Which one is where the drift begins? And it is important that we be honest about it, because we cannot strengthen what we will not name, and God will not forgive what we will not confess.

Third — are we barren or unfruitful where we are right now? Are we in a place where there is no growth at all, or a place with plenty of activity but no decision? Because we can hear all this good and wonderful truth, and if we never decide to do anything with it, we are still walking around with an empty bucket.

Fourth — when did we last feel the blessing of the mercy that purged us from our old sins? That thankful spirit we have when we are reminded of what God has done for us — that thankfulness is what fuels the climb. Are we willing to ask God to give that thankful heart back? Remember David: Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation (Psalm 51:12).

Closing

The staircase is complete, and in a particular sense it now belongs to us. It is not just a lesson we sat through, and it is not just a series of things we listened to. Look at it as a structure we can stand on — a framework for the rest of our Christian lives.

And one more thing before we close. Peter did not write this staircase for a perfect people. Peter wrote it for the person who cried out to God from the bottom and then asked, “Lord, what wilt thou have me to do now?”

The answer to what to do now is: climb. The climb is not complicated. It is not fast. It is not particularly easy. But it is sure. Every step upward is a step away from the drift. Every step upward is a step toward fruitfulness. Every step upward is a step toward that entrance that will be ministered to us abundantly.

And when we get to the top of this staircase, that is where God’s love is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. And if God’s Spirit pours His love into our heart, do you know what happens? That love is going to spill out over everybody we come into contact with. It is not going to stay inside us without sloshing over the sides. If He pours it into our heart, it will go through us to others.

Faith. Virtue. Knowledge. Temperance. Patience. Godliness. Brotherly kindness. Charity.

Eight steps. Are we willing to stay on the staircase?

The staircase is complete — now climb it.

Scripture Used

Psalm 51:12 · Psalm 107:13 · 1 Corinthians 3:10 · 1 Corinthians 3:14-15 · 2 Peter 1:5-11 (all KJV)

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The One Thing We Cannot Afford to Lose

Dardanelle Missionary Baptist Church — Dardanelle, Arkansas

Pastor Chuck Trusty — Sunday morning service, August 30, 2026 Understanding Christian Love, the finale · A3 D8 · 1 John 4:17-19 · Revelation 2:4-5

► Watch this lesson on video (47:05)

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This morning we finish a series. Eight lessons ago we started asking a simple question — what is Christian love, really? — and we have been working our way toward this morning ever since. Before we go any further, let us stop and remember where we have been, because the road we traveled is what makes this morning’s destination matter.

Two commandments hold everything together. Love God with everything you have, and love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. If we could actually manage to do that, we would fulfill every law in the Old Testament and every principle in the New. But obviously we are not able to do that.

We learned that Christian love does not originate with you and me. It comes directly from God. And love is the evidence of salvation — it is not the condition of salvation. Another way to say the same thing: we cannot love until we have already been saved. To try to earn salvation by loving, or by doing, is getting the cart before the horse. There are some things we cannot do, some things we cannot accomplish, and some ways we cannot even think, until after salvation has taken place.

And we learned that love grows through fellowship with God. Last Sunday we talked about the well and the bucket. The closer you stand to the well, the easier it is to get water into the bucket. If we want our love to grow, the best thing we can do is get closer to God — because that is where love comes from. The Bible says God is love. So if we want our love to grow, it stands to reason we need to get close to the source of it.

Now the one point of our lesson this morning. Remember what it meant during Bible times when a teacher said a thing three times: it was not a maybe, it was permanent. So we are going to say our one point three times this morning, to signify that it is not a maybe. You can take it to the bank.

Love is the one thing we cannot afford to lose.

A church can keep its doctrine. A church can practice discipline. A church can be patient and remain in the faith. And that same church can still lose the one thing Jesus said would identify us as His disciples. And I want to throw this out plainly — it is possible that Dardanelle Missionary Baptist Church could be an Ephesus church too. By that I mean yes, it could happen here. And it could happen to you and me.

The War That Never Stops

Before we talk about perfect love, let us be honest about why love is so hard. There is a spiritual war going on that never lets up, and that is one of the reasons love is so difficult to maintain.

“For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.” — Galatians 5:17 (KJV)

Contention. Controversy. Conflict. And what is the result? So that ye cannot do the things that ye would. There is a war going on inside every one of us, every single minute of every single day, and there is no relief from it.

We have used this illustration before — the two dogs, the white one and the black one. There is an old story about two dogs fighting inside a man. One is good, one is bad. A young man asks his granddad, “Which dog wins?” And the grandfather answers, “The one you feed the most is the one that will win the battle.”

So the question this morning is which one are we feeding.

We feed the black dog when we indulge selfishness. When we entertain bitterness. When we rehearse the grievance — when somebody does us wrong and we keep replaying it in our minds and say, “Come here, bitterness. Come here, anger. Sit right down and be my best buddy.” When we actually enjoy those harsh, angry feelings toward whoever it was because of what they did to us. That is feeding the flesh, and the flesh gets stronger for it.

We feed the Spirit with prayer. With obedience to God’s Word. With fellowship among God’s people, with the Word, and with the worship of God. And the result of feeding the Spirit is that love grows. Remember, the Bible tells us God is love. So the closer we get to God, the more our love grows — and the more our love grows, the more we resemble the God who saved our soul.

This Is How God Says “I Love You”

“In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” — 1 John 4:9-10 (KJV)

That is what love is, and that is where it came from. That is its origin.

God’s love is sacrificial and God’s love is costly. He did not love us because we were warm and fuzzy like a teddy bear. He loved us when we were His enemies. Literally — He loved us while we still had the hammer in our hand, driving those spikes through Him on the cross. Somebody says, “But preacher, I was not there.” Oh yes you were. Your sins were there. You were represented there. And if you had been one of those Roman soldiers, you would have done exactly what those Roman soldiers did.

And that love cost Him His only begotten Son.

Now here is a picture of it. We do not typically run in circles where a man gets arrested and has to make bail, but it is all over the television. The idea is this: the preacher gets arrested for something. They put me in jail, and my trial is six months away. So that I do not have to sit in jail until the trial, they let me post bail — I can put up money and go home and wait for the trial.

But suppose the man in that jail has no money. No collateral. Nothing to put up as security. There is no way he can pay his own way out. He is going to have to rot there until his trial comes.

And then somebody walks in. Somebody with no obligation at all to help him. Somebody who is not in debt to him in any way. And that man pays the full bail out of his own pocket, at great personal cost — he sells his house, he sells his car, whatever it takes. And then he trades places with the prisoner. The prisoner walks free.

That is the gospel. And that is literally what propitiation means: a debt that is settled, a sentence that is satisfied, a price that is paid by Someone who did not owe it — Someone who would have been completely justified to walk on by and let whatever happens happen.

“Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.” — 1 John 4:11 (KJV)

Now we are never asked to die for one another, and the odds are we never will be in that kind of situation. But what we are all asked to do is live for one another. We are asked to forgive. “But preacher, you do not know what he said or what he did.” It does not matter. Forgive. We are asked to protect, to sacrifice, to put others first. That is the reasonable response to what God has done for us.

If God has loved us like that — is it not reasonable that we love one another in a similar fashion, and not hold grudges?

What Perfect Love Actually Means

“Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment: because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love.” — 1 John 4:17-18 (KJV)

When John says perfect love casts out fear, most of us hear that phrase and think it means a love so complete and so flawless that it never feels any anxiousness at all. And then we look at ourselves and feel like a failure, because sometimes we still struggle with fear. Sometimes we still struggle with the unknown, and we get those little pangs of “oh my goodness.”

Does that mean we cannot have perfect love because we still feel a little anxiety?

John’s word for perfect here means love that has been brought to its goal. Love that has matured. Love that has completed its purpose.

Think of a halfback handed the football on his own twenty yard line, and he executes the play perfectly and runs it all the way down to the goal line. That was a perfect run. Now does that mean the halfback was sinless? Does it mean he never made a mistake on the football field? No. It means he accomplished the thing he was sent out there to accomplish.

That is what perfect love means. It does not mean sinless. It does not mean flawless. It does not mean without any fault. It means love that is growing toward its goal, fulfilling its intended design.

A wife is designed to fulfill a particular role. A husband is designed to fulfill a particular role. Parents the same way, and children the same way. You can be a perfect wife and still make mistakes. You can be a perfect husband, a perfect parent, a perfect child, and still make mistakes and still have some flaws. The idea of a perfect love is a love that is moving toward the goal it was designed to accomplish.

Think about a child that is growing. We have little ones among us. They are not complete adults yet, are they? You do not look at Wyatt or Claire and say, “There is something wrong with you — you are not a complete adult.” A healthy child is doing exactly what a child was designed to do. Growing. Learning. Maturing.

And a growing love in us as children of God has a noticeable effect. A growing love begins to crowd out fear. It makes those anxious moments of the unknown come less often and last a shorter time. Now we are only human, and none of that is going to disappear one hundred percent. We are in the flesh and there is nothing we can do about it. There is a war, and we cannot do the things we would like to do because our sinful flesh gets in the way.

But the cure for fear in our lives is growing in love — getting closer to God and letting His love crowd out those anxious feelings.

When I was little I was scared of the dark. Scared of the boogeyman, however you want to say it. And the cure for fear in my life as a child was to get as close to daddy as I possibly could. That took care of everything. The cure for the fear and the anxiety we carry as adults is the same thing: get as close to God as is humanly possible.

The Most Sobering Warning in the New Testament

Jesus writes a letter to the church at Ephesus, and He begins it with a compliment.

“I know thy works, and thy labour, and thy patience, and how thou canst not bear them which are evil: and thou hast tried them which say they are apostles, and are not, and hast found them liars: And hast borne, and hast patience, and for my name’s sake hast laboured, and hast not fainted.” — Revelation 2:2-3 (KJV)

Works, labor, patience. Now think about the staircase. Faith. Then virtue. Then knowledge, then temperance, then patience. And then you come to godliness, brotherly kindness, and charity. It looks to me like this church at Ephesus got stuck somewhere between patience and godliness. They got about halfway up the staircase and stopped.

There was a great deal of good that could be said about them. Good doctrine — they tested the teachers among them and rejected the false apostles. Good works — they were active, busy, productive. Good standards — they could not bear evil, and they held the line on teaching the truth. Endurance — patience under pressure, and they had not fainted.

Now one of the definitions of godliness is following God’s order — ordering our lives after God’s design. And if God is love, and we do all these other things correctly, but our life and our church and our attitude are not patterned after love, then we are stuck on that step.

That is exactly the point Jesus was making at Ephesus.

“Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love.” — Revelation 2:4 (KJV)

Have you ever been in an older vehicle where the clutch starts slipping? Everything else about the car can be fine. Poor old Stacy has a wonderful car — still has it. The motor works. It is good looking. It has all the bells and whistles. It operates real good. Everything works except the transmission. And if the transmission does not work, all the rest of it is pointless. It serves no purpose.

That is the idea here. We can have everything that looks good on the outside, but if we do not have love, the transmission is worn out and we are not going anywhere.

And a transmission is one thing we really cannot afford to lose. You can change spark plugs yourself. You can put a fan belt on yourself. But a transmission is more than we can handle.

So the one point of our lesson this morning was this: love is the one thing we cannot afford to lose.

Here is another picture of Ephesus. Call it the trophy case without a family. Picture a house — the prettiest house you have ever seen from the outside. Impressive property. The lawn manicured. Everything looks wonderful. You step through the front door and you see trophies everywhere. Awards on every wall. Plaques, certificates, photographs of one achievement after another. The house is absolutely perfect in every way that you can see.

But the family was gone. The family was nowhere in sight.

Jesus did not say the church at Ephesus had lost their salvation. He did not say they had lost their doctrine or their teaching. He told them their clutch was slipping. They had lost their love — the very thing He said would identify His disciples to the world. The most important thing they had faded from a priority into a habit, into going through the motions, into a memory of what used to be.

Now there is nothing wrong with memories. You are on your phone or your computer and a little thing pops up — memories from several years ago. You look at it and you get a warm feeling, and everything is fine and dandy. Memories are good. But memories are not reality. That warm feeling you get looking at the memory is in the past. It is not reality.

Three Steps Back to the Light

“Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent.” — Revelation 2:5 (KJV)

Notice what God expects the memory to do. He says remember therefore — He expects this church’s memory to move her. To take her from where she is back to where she used to be. If your memories do not move you, then your memories may make you feel good, but they are basically worthless.

And notice what He threatens: the candlestick. What is the candlestick? It is the authority of a New Testament church to operate as a church in the eyes of God. It is the one thing that makes a church something more than a religious organization. Without God’s stamp of approval — and I am not trying to be narrow-minded or bigoted about this — if God does not approve of this group of people as being a church, then this group of people is not a church. God has to approve that.

A church without love is a candlestick without a flame. It is still there, but it is not giving any light. A church without love is a transmission put in neutral. It is a clutch that keeps slipping. It is gears that have been stripped. It makes a lot of noise and it goes nowhere.

But look at the three commands in verse five. Three steps that will get the clutch fixed. Three steps that put that transmission from neutral back into gear.

Remember. Think back. When did love stop being practiced and start being assumed? Does our memory move us, or does it just make us feel good? You see an old black and white picture from a long time ago, and it is nostalgic, and you get all these lovely feelings. But do we let that memory change anything? Do we say, “You know what, I am going to make my current life resemble that memory”? That is a memory that moves us. But if we look at it, feel warm for a moment, set it aside and go on exactly as we were, that memory did us no good at all. It is like the wind blowing and never raising a sail.

Repent. Turn around. Change directions. To repent does not mean just to feel bad about it — it means to actually change direction. Repentance is not remorse. Repentance is movement. And that is what the memory of the way it used to be was intended to produce in this church.

Do the first works. Go back to what love looked like when it was young and fresh and costly. Serve God. Forgive others. Give. Reach out. Put others first. Not because we feel like it, but because God commanded it. He said if you love me, keep my commandments — and that does not mean merely behaving properly. It means guarding and protecting. Obedience is not just good behavior; obedience is protecting what is important to God. And love, like obedience, is a choice.

A church that remembers, repents, and returns to love gets the candlestick back. The transmission is no longer in neutral. The transmission has been repaired.

And it is never too late to repent. I have heard people say, “Well, preacher, I have gone too far. I have done too much.” No. It is not possible to go too far. It is not possible to get past the reach of God’s love. Not possible.

The Final Measure

“We love him, because he first loved us.” — 1 John 4:19 (KJV)

Our love is our response to God’s love. He went first, and we follow.

“If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” — 1 John 4:20 (KJV)

Love for God is proven by love for people. You cannot separate the two and say, “I love God, but I do not think a whole lot of you.”

And back at Ephesus, Jesus says it again: thou hast left thy first love. Leaving is a decision. When you leave, you get up and walk out. That church made a decision to leave something God says is important.

So love is something that can be lost. Let me be clear — we cannot lose our salvation. But we can lose the priority of love, and we can lose the passion of love.

Love is the evidence of salvation. Love is the proof of fellowship — if we are close to God, we have to have something in the bucket. You are not going to get close to God and keep an empty bucket. It will not happen.

Love is the measure of maturity. “I am mad at you and I do not think I am going to forgive you.” Does that sound mature, or does it sound like somebody who still needs to grow?

Love is the foundation of obedience. The reason we value what is important to God is because we love. If we do not value what is important to God, it means we do not love very well.

Love is the badge of discipleship. Now be careful here — a disciple is not merely somebody who is saved. A disciple is somebody who follows the teachings of Jesus, somebody who takes what Jesus teaches seriously. Love identifies those who follow the teachings of Jesus, because they value what Jesus values.

And love is the mark of a true church. It is the mark of a church with the transmission in gear instead of in neutral.

Love is not a program. There are churches filled with programs — a program for this group, a class for that group, and I suppose that is fine. But love cannot be defined by a program. Love is not a feeling, contrary to the way we have always been taught. Love is not a department of the ministry. Love is the thread that runs through everything God has called us to be and to do as a church.

The church at Ephesus did everything right except the one thing that mattered most. We need to be careful never to make that same mistake.

So for the third time this morning: love is the one thing we cannot afford to lose.

Closing

Before we leave the building this morning, one question at the end of this series.

Is there someone in our life right now — in this church, in our home, in our little circle of acquaintances — that we have been withholding love from? I am not talking about anything dramatic. I am not talking about defiance. Just quietly. Just unnoticeably. Just slowly letting that first love grow cold — the way a cube of ice melts in the cold days of winter, so gradually that you would never notice it happening.

If there is, then after hearing this message and going through this series, we know what to do. Remember. Repent. Do the first works.

Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.

Think for a moment about what God has done for us. Think about His attitude toward us when we were at our worst. He did not withhold His love from us when we were at our worst. And the point is this: when this preacher is at his worst, you are not supposed to withhold your love from him. When you are at your worst, we are not supposed to withhold our love from you.

“Well, I will love you when you start deserving it.”

You are never going to deserve God’s love.

Scripture Used

Galatians 5:17 · 1 John 4:9-11 · 1 John 4:17-20 · Revelation 2:2-5 (all KJV)

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Every lesson is kept on the Lessons page.

Charity — The Portrait Paul Painted (Part 2)

Dardanelle Missionary Baptist Church — Dardanelle, Arkansas

Pastor Chuck Trusty — Wednesday evening service, August 26, 2026 The Staircase, charity · A3 D15 · 1 Corinthians 13:4-8

► Watch this lesson on video (41:57)

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Sunday night we stood at the top of the staircase and asked what charity is. We answered it in one line: charity is love that keeps climbing when nothing comes back. That was the definition. Tonight we do something different. Tonight we watch what charity does.

There is a difference between the two, and it is the difference between Sunday and Monday. It is one thing to say, “Yes, this is what agape is, and this is what we ought to do.” That is fine and dandy. But let us get down where the rubber meets the road. Let us talk about what this love looks like on a Monday, on a Tuesday, on a Wednesday — in the specific and often frustrating situations of a real Christian life. Because someone always says, “Well, preacher — in this particular situation, with this particular person, you mean I am supposed to practice agape love when that happens?”

Yes. That is exactly what I mean.

The church at Corinth was full of gifted people who were also full of problems. There was knowledge there. There was enthusiasm. But the church was divided. It was proud. It was competitive. There were little cliques going back and forth, and it was unloving in some very specific ways. And to that church — not to scholars in a library, but to everyday Christians who were failing at love the same way we all fail at love — Paul writes the most famous description of love in the whole Bible.

“Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Charity never faileth.” — 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 (KJV)

Count them as we go. Fifteen. Fifteen descriptions of what agape does and what agape will not do.

Now understand what Paul is handing us. He is not giving us a poem to hang on the wall and say, “Isn’t that nice?” He is giving us a mirror — a mirror to hold up in front of our own lives, so that this preacher can set his life beside each one of these fifteen pictures and see what is reflected back.

Charity is a mirror to look into. It is not a poem to admire.

I am going to say that again before we are through. And as we walk through these fifteen pictures, I want you to hold one name and one situation in your mind. Pick out a person. Pick out a particular circumstance. And carry them with you through all fifteen. This lesson only works if we get personal — because love is about people, and specifically about the people we are personal with. Held at arm’s length as an abstract, distant thing, it serves no purpose at all.

The First Seven Pictures

One — Charity suffereth long. Paul’s word means long-tempered. It is the opposite of a short fuse. We all know people with short fuses, and if we are honest, sometimes we are the people with the short fuse. Agape does not snap. It does not explode. And it never says, “That is the last time.”

Think about a crockpot. A meal put in a crockpot does not cook in a matter of minutes. It takes all day long. Some meals simply cannot be rushed — it sits there all morning, all day, and by suppertime it has turned into something completely different from what it started out as. Patience is the heat that does the work. Turn the burner up too high and all you do is burn the supper. Agape is long-cooked. And over that slow, continuous heat — that continuous patience — people change who never could have been forced to change.

That is the effect agape has. It will not fix a relationship overnight. But over the long haul, it is a crockpot meal.

Now hold up the mirror. Are we short-fused? Do we snap? Have we ever said — even if only in our minds — “That is the last time”?

Two — And is kind. Longsuffering is what we do not do; we do not snap, we do not explode. Kindness is what we do instead. We lean in. We find the good word to say when the sharp, biting word is sitting right on the tip of the tongue, and it takes all the self-control in the world to keep from letting it out.

We fail at this most often with our own children. We forget that our children grow up to be just what they see us be, and just as they have experienced us being with them. Have you ever heard a parent say, “I do not know why little Johnny behaves that way”? Well, I have a pretty good idea. Little Johnny has watched you act pretty much the same way. He is imitating what he sees.

And think of a man coming in out of the field in the middle of July. He has worked hard all day. He does not need a lecture on how hot it is. He needs a cold glass of water, and somebody to say, “Here — come sit down. I am glad you are here.” That is kindness. It meets the moment with what the moment actually needs.

Put it in this building. Somebody walks through these doors who has not been here in six months, or a year. What they do not need to hear is, “Well, what in the world is wrong with you? Why have you been staying away from church so long?” Kindness knows better than that.

And be careful here — a good many of these things we would never say out loud. But we had better watch what we think. We cannot practice agape by going through the motions if the thing is not sincere in the heart.

Three — Charity envieth not. This is probably the quietest sin in a church. Envy lives entirely inside the heart and it rarely announces itself. Read the thirteenth chapter of Corinthians against that congregation and you find it full of envy over gifts, over influence, over recognition.

Have you noticed that nothing makes a man more miserable than watching his neighbour get the thing he wanted? Watching the neighbour’s field come up while his own is still waiting to sprout? And see how hard this is — it is practically impossible. Agape looks at the blessing that landed next door and says, “Isn’t that wonderful. I am glad for my neighbour.” No footnote. No “but.” No quiet resentment dressed up as joy.

This ties straight back to the greatest commandment. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart… and thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” (Matthew 22:37-40). If we are envious in the heart, we are not loving that neighbour anywhere close to the way we love our own selves.

Four — Charity vaunteth not itself. Agape does not brag. It does not need to be seen.

I use farm examples because I was raised on a farm and farming is easy to connect with. When does the most important work on a farm happen? Before anybody else is awake. My brother-in-law Gerald gets up at half past four or five in the morning, and nobody sees him out there doing what he does. But if he did not do it, the farm would fall apart. The feeding, the checking, the repairing — and ninety per cent of the time it is in bad weather, or in cold that makes you not want to go out at all. But it has to be done. Nobody sees the work. Nobody claps. And the farm runs because of the work that was done while nobody was watching.

Agape does the unseen labour without needing the applause.

That is part of why we are not clappers in this church. When somebody sings a special, when the preacher preaches a message, it is not done to be recognised by you. I preach because of the burden God has laid on my heart. When I sing, I enjoy the melody and the piano and the tune — but it is not a performance where I am waiting for somebody to say, “Good job, preacher.” Clapping teaches us to do things for God so that we will be seen, so that somebody makes sure I am appreciated. Agape does not need any of that. We do what we do to please God, whether it pleases man or not.

Five — Is not puffed up. Vaunting is about what we say. Being puffed up is about what we think. Agape carries no secret sense of superiority. “Well, I am the preacher, so down inside I am a notch and a half better than everybody else.” Agape does not let the man who is often at the centre of attention claim any superiority out of it.

Has anybody here ever seen an over-inflated tire let go? A tire with a lot of air in it looks impressive — nice and firm. But air is all that tire is carrying. Let it expand and it pops. The tire that actually carries the load is the one inflated properly, and that is the tire nobody notices. Agape carries the weight. Agape does not strut.

Six — Doth not behave itself unseemly. Agape has manners — not for appearance’s sake, but because the dignity of people actually matters.

I will eat one way at home with nobody watching. I can make a pig of myself, get it all over my chin, and it does not matter — there is nobody there but me. I do not eat that way in somebody else’s home. And not mainly to keep from embarrassing myself, but out of respect for the people at that table. Agape treats every person as a guest in their dignity, and would not dream of trampling it with a rude or a careless word — because to do that is to treat what they value as though it were unimportant.

Hold up the mirror. How bad are we at, “This is important to me, and what you think is important — well, I do not much care”?

Seven — Seeketh not her own. Agape does not put itself first, and it does not calculate what it is going to get back in return for what it gives. “If I am nice to this man, I wonder what I will get in return. What has he got that I want? I had better be nice to him. Now that one over there — he has nothing I want, so I do not have to bother.” That is the mental arithmetic, and agape does not do it.

We saw this very thing a couple of Sundays ago — the chicken platter, and the pause at the table. Everybody looking around to see who ought to have the last piece. That pause is agape at a supper table. And agape carries that same pause into every situation and every room it enters.

The Second Eight Pictures

We are halfway. So let me say it again: charity is a mirror to look into, not a poem to admire. Seven pictures so far. Has one of them shown your face back to you yet?

Eight — Is not easily provoked. The word easily carries the weight. Paul never says agape cannot be provoked. He says it has no short fuse. It assumes the best before it assumes the worst.

A brand new cast iron pan burns everything and everything sticks to it. But a well-seasoned skillet has been through enough fire that hardly anything sticks to it at all. Whatever sets us off in this particular moment — wait a few minutes. I guarantee you it will not be nearly so challenging an hour from now.

Nine — Thinketh no evil. This one happens inside the head. And I have been guilty of this one — so guilty. Agape keeps no running account of the wrongs it has suffered. No replaying the offence. No filing the forgiven thing away for future reference.

I have said words just like these in the past: “I forgive so-and-so, but I will not forgive completely. I will forgive, but I am not turning my back on him. I will always keep one eye on him.”

That put me in mind of a charge account at a grocery store. There are two ways to run a tab. You can write every charge down and never erase one, until the customer is nothing but a list of debts — page after page after page of the ways they have offended us. Or you can settle the account and start fresh. Agape keeps a cleared ledger. The pages are constantly being torn out. It forgives the debt and it does not reopen the account.

I have failed at some of these. I fail at that one badly.

Ten — Rejoiceth not in iniquity. Agape takes no pleasure in anybody’s failure — not even the failure of an enemy. And when I say enemy, I do not mean an enemy in war. This is “love thy neighbour as thyself.” He is not saying love the Iranians as you love yourself, or the Chinese, or the Russians. He is saying love your neighbour as you love your own self.

Has something bad ever happened to somebody, and you thought, “I knew it. I knew it”? Agape does not enjoy being right about another man’s downfall.

There is a kind of person — first cousin to a gossip — who loves to be the one carrying the bad news. They arrive a little too soon and they stay a little too long. And they do not come early and stay late in order to help. They come early and stay late because they want to watch the misery. It is a common picture. It is a sad one.

Eleven — But rejoiceth in the truth. The other side of that same coin. Agape is genuinely glad about the truth. When somebody does the right thing quietly, with no reward in it, agape notices and agape is glad — glad to see this love in a neighbour, glad to see that neighbour doing something for an unfriendly neighbour, behind the scenes, where nobody notices.

Twelve — Beareth all things. The word does not mean to carry. It means to cover — like a roof keeping the rain off. It is raining outside right now, and the roof is bearing: covering us, keeping it all off of us. That is what agape does. When a brother stumbles, agape does not broadcast the stumble. “Did you hear? I saw Brother So-and-so coming out of the liquor store. Can you believe it? I always knew.” Agape does not do that. It is not pretending the stumble never happened. It is protecting the man’s dignity while he is being helped back onto his feet.

And speaking of dignity — if a lady in a dress falls down, when you help her up you help keep her covered. Dignity is not pride. Dignity is being embarrassed about a hole in your britches, and that is perfectly normal. Agape keeps the hole covered, out of respect. How would you like to fall and have the wind take your dress up over your head? It is no great matter, but it is embarrassing — and that is exactly what dignity is. Agape is careful with the dignity of others.

Thirteen — Believeth all things. At first glance you think this means we are supposed to be gullible and believe everything. It is not naivety. It is the benefit of the doubt. Agape believes the best until it is proven otherwise.

A farmer has seen hard winters, and he does not panic over a hard January or a hard February, because he knows spring is right around the corner. He knows it is coming because it always has. Agape sees the spring in the middle of somebody else’s February. When we see another person having trouble — believe the best. Believe the best. And remember: but for the grace of God, there go I. Are you telling me there has never been a February season in your life? I do not believe it.

Fourteen — Hopeth all things. Agape never writes a person off. It keeps hoping, keeps praying, keeps the door open. But notice where the hope sits. The hope is in the God who can reach any person at any moment. We do not lay an inordinate amount of hope on the individual — “surely to goodness he will wise up and turn his life around.” No. Our hope is in God’s ability to reach that person. That is where the hope comes from.

Fifteen — Endureth all things. Agape does not quit when love gets hard. It does not resign when love begins to cost something.

I thought of a fence post. There are fence posts I have seen standing fifty and sixty years — through drought, through flood, through storms and heat, and they are standing yet. Not because they were never tested, but because they were set deep in the ground. Agape is set deep. The roots go further down than the storms go up.

The Picture That Never Fades

“Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.” — 1 Corinthians 13:8 (KJV)

The Bible does not say charity rarely fails. It does not say charity usually holds. It says it never fails. Prophecies will cease. Tongues will stop. Knowledge will vanish away. Charity never fails.

And Sunday night we heard Peter’s promise laid over this same love:

“And to godliness brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness charity. For if these things be in you, and abound, they make you that ye shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.” — 2 Peter 1:7-8 (KJV)

A life lived from the top of the staircase is a life God pours His own nature through, into every relationship which that life touches.

So if somebody who sees us in our hard moments — in our February season — were to read these fifteen pictures of what charity actually is, how many of them would they find in our lives?

Four Honest Questions

First — which of the fifteen pictures is hardest for you? Not hardest in general. Hardest for you, in the relationships you are in right now.

Second — where are you keeping a ledger? Are you filing the wrong away, returning to the page, adding to the list? What would it take to clear that ledger tonight — or even to tear one page out of it?

Third — who have you given up on? Somebody where hope and belief and endurance have quietly faded out. Do you think there is something the Holy Spirit could still do there, if you brought agape back into that room?

Fourth — the mirror question. If somebody who knows you — not your best friend, not your buddy, but somebody who has seen the February moments in your life — read these fifteen things that agape does, which of them would they find in you?

Closing

Charity is a mirror to look into. It is not a poem to admire.

Now somebody says, “Well, preacher, I did not find hardly any of that in me.” And the devil will be right there saying, “Then you have every reason to be discouraged. You are nothing but a failure.”

But that is not what God’s word says, and that is not what these fifteen pictures are for. So you failed. Guess what — we all do. Do not sit and wallow in your misery. The staircase is standing right there for us to climb. Do not be discouraged.

Just start. Not tomorrow – but today… The entire purpose of these 15 pictures – is not to discourage us – but to point us in the direction we need to go…

Scripture Used

1 Corinthians 13:4-8 · 1 Corinthians 13:8 · 2 Peter 1:7-8 · Matthew 22:37-40 (all KJV)

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Every lesson is kept on the Lessons page.

Charity — The Capstone of the Staircase (Part 1)

Dardanelle Missionary Baptist Church — Dardanelle, Arkansas

Pastor Chuck Trusty — Sunday evening service, August 23, 2026 Part 1 · Step Eight, the summit of 2 Peter 1:5–7 · A3 D14

► Watch this lesson on video (44:28)

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The One Point

Charity is the love that keeps climbing when nothing comes back.

We Have Arrived

Well — we made it. We are here.

Take a breath before we go any further, because this moment deserves it. We have been climbing this staircase together for a long time, week after week, step by step, and tonight we set our foot on the eighth and final rung.

Look at where we have been. Faith — the decision to trust God completely with our eternity. Virtue — the courage to act on what we believe. Knowledge — the understanding of what God has said. Temperance — the self-control to live by what we know. Patience — the endurance that holds steady when self-control gets hard. Godliness — the daily ordering of our lives around God’s priorities. And last Sunday, brotherly kindness — the warm family love of the household of faith, the love that climbs one step past our own front door.

And now, charity. Agape. The crown of everything Peter has been building toward. Everything below us was preparation for this.

This morning we settled where love comes from: love grows when we stay close to its Source, and we talked about the well and the bucket. Tonight the staircase finally reaches the very top.

Now, this is part one. Wednesday will be the second half.

I have noticed you have noticed that I keep saying the one point of this lesson is, and that I say it three times. Do you remember the significance of a teacher in Bible days saying a thing three times? If he said it three times, it was permanent. That is where I got the idea.

So: charity is the love that keeps climbing when nothing comes back.

An Honest Word First

We have all loved somebody who loved us back. Every one of us has done that.

But have we ever kept on loving when nothing at all came back?

On a personal note, your preacher is not very good at this. I am going to be honest with you. I have spent my whole life managing to have affection for people who at least do not hate me. But cross that line to the enemy, cross that line to those who despitefully use you, and I have struggled with this my entire life.

And I will tell you one reason I have been so lax about it. I got to thinking, and I cannot remember anybody ever going into any real depth to teach me what it means to love those who persecute you. What does it actually mean to love your enemy? I did not know — not until I looked into it.

The Text

“And beside this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge; And to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness; And to godliness brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness charity” (2 Peter 1:5–7).

Peter’s word for charity is agape. For the young ones with us this evening: agape is love that gives and keeps on giving when nothing at all comes back.

It is easy to love Mama and Daddy, a brother or a sister. But what about the person you have watched be mean to your mama or your daddy?

I have known preachers’ children who, when they got a little older, forsook church altogether. Why did you do that? Because I saw how the church treated my daddy, and I do not want any part of it. It takes a real human toll on us when we are persecuted, when we are treated badly, and worse when those we love are treated badly. Agape is loving in spite of all that.

Why “Charity”?

Where did that word come from?

In 1611 the King James translators reached for an old word they knew — charity — and they did it on purpose. In English, love gets used for everything. I love my truck. I love pizza. I love my wife. We all love God. All one word.

But charity, in the way it was used a long time ago, meant an outpouring entirely and completely for the good of another. No self-interest. No conditions.

And I might add — if our love for somebody depends on conditions, it is not really this kind of love. I am not saying that is easy. I am saying it goes against the definition. Agape does not expect anything back.

The Campfire and the Sun

Last Sunday’s love, philadelphia, is like a campfire. Loving those who love us back. A campfire is warm — think of a teddy bear, that warm fuzzy feeling, or a puppy. It is close, it is comfortable, and it is shared. But we have to be near a campfire to feel it. And the warmth is real, and necessary, and something we enjoy.

Agape is like the sun.

The sun does not choose whom to warm. It rises on the just and the unjust alike. It shines on the field of a man who despises God, who despises the farmer, who is cantankerous and hates everybody. It shines on his field exactly as it shines on anyone else’s.

And the sun does not shine because of anything anybody down here does. It is not that if I fail to do something, the sun will not shine on me. The sun shines because of what the sun is.

Now think about that. That is agape. It loves not because anybody has earned it, but because the God of love poured into us cannot help being poured out to somebody else.

Where Agape Comes From

Here is something the world will never understand. Agape is not produced by any form of human effort.

Every other step on this staircase is something we add. Faith is something God gives, but we have to turn our bowl right side up to receive it. Same with virtue, knowledge, temperance, patience — these are decisions we make and struggles we face, and when we humble ourselves God helps us achieve them. We do the climbing.

But listen to what Paul says.

“And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us” (Romans 5:5).

Shed abroad literally means poured in. It is like filling the bucket — we go to the well, we dip the bucket, and the water gets in the bucket. Agape comes from outside of us, from a Source greater than we are.

This morning we learned to stay close to the Source. Tonight we see why we were told to.

“God is love” (1 John 4:8). Three words. Now think about that. If God is love, then what could possibly motivate us to resist the very thing that is the essence of God? Why would we push against love, when the Book tells us that is what God is?

The Well That Has Been Dug

I do not suppose the young people of this generation have much experience with drilling wells. I remember growing up, nobody had a water bill. Everybody lived out in the country and every house had a well and a pump house. If the well went dry, you drilled another one. And there were older wells too — holes dug a long time ago with picks and shovels.

But here is the thing. A well is no good until it has been dug — that is, until the dirt has been removed that separates us from the water.

And no amount of digging produces the water. The fact that you dug a hole is not what put the water down there. The water was already there before anybody moved the first shovelful. The digging only removes what stands between the surface and the water.

That is what the staircase is. The staircase is the digging. Every step we take removes something that was blocking the flow — the laziness, the ignorance, the impatience, the pride, the self-focus.

And when the climbing is done, what we find at the top is not something we produced. What we find is a well that reaches the living water — the living water being Jesus. That water was always there, with things between us and it.

Digging a hole does not make water appear. Digging gives us access to it. We cannot dig our way to agape. But we can dig until we reach it.

The Capstone

Somebody will ask, “Preacher, what happens to all that climbing if the top step never gets reached? What if we stop? What if we fail before we ever get to agape?”

“And above all these things put on charity, which is the bond of perfectness” (Colossians 3:14).

Paul’s old word for bond means a ligament — a tie that holds the whole frame together.

The Bible speaks of stones: cornerstones, keystones, capstones. Most of us have probably never seen a real capstone, though we have seen them on television. It is the stone at the very top of a stone arch. You have a bridge, or the mouth of a tunnel, and the stones are set in a curve and tapered just enough that they will not fall through. And the last one at the top, the one that locks everything in place — that is the capstone.

Charity is the capstone. It is what holds all the lower steps together.

Take a stone out two or three feet up from the bottom and the arch will shift. It will not come all the way down, but it will go crooked. It will not be what it was intended to be. It will be weakened. But take out the capstone at the very top, and what happens? The whole thing falls. It will not stand without the capstone.

So if we take agape out of the staircase — out of our lives — look at what happens to every step underneath it.

Faith without agape turns into religious performance. Virtue without agape becomes pride — look at me, look what I have done, look how virtuous I am. Knowledge without agape becomes arrogance — look how educated I am. Temperance without agape becomes legalism — no, you have to do it this way. Patience without agape becomes stubbornness — I am not changing, because I think I am right. Godliness without agape turns into a set of rules. And brotherly kindness without agape becomes a social club — the big feel-good churches, where everybody is made to feel good.

But set agape in its proper place, and every stone in the arch finds the purpose God cut that stone for.

Once again — and count this one — charity is the love that keeps climbing when nothing comes back.

What the Top Step Adds

I want to be clear about what this step adds to last Sunday night’s step, because it is important not to confuse them.

Philadelphia loves a brother. Agape loves an enemy. Philadelphia is warm to the familiar; agape reaches out for the stranger. Philadelphia is the love inside these walls; agape is the love that goes over the walls.

Now, I want to point out something. When God commands us to love one another, and when He says love your enemies, He is not telling this preacher, you have to have a warm fuzzy feeling and genuine affection for the people who are mean to you. What He is telling us is: behave in the best interest of those who are being mean to you. You do not have to like them. You do not have to feel warm toward them. But act in their best interest. That is what the commandment means.

Besides — can you command somebody how to feel? Do you suppose God could command us to like blue more than green? No. But He can command us to act in the best interest of our enemies. And that is the idea.

“But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5:44–45).

To me that is the most difficult passage in the whole Bible to actually put into practice.

And there is our sun again. God’s sun rising on the evil and on the good. Agape blesses the very people who curse God’s love. The same sun that grows their food is the same sun that grows ours.

And notice the reason the Lord gives: that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven. He is not saying we do this in order to earn salvation. He is saying we do it because that is what our Father does — and if we are His children, we carry His nature.

Agape is not just a commandment. Agape is evidence of who our Father is.

The Inheritance

When a child inherits his father’s eyes — and we Trustys all have what look like clothespins hanging on the top of our eyes — the child did not choose those eyes. He did not earn them. He never went out and practised having a particular kind of eyes. They came with the birth, because the father’s nature went into the child.

When we are born of God, the Father’s nature goes into us. And agape is part of that nature. It does not come naturally to the flesh; it comes supernaturally to the new creation. When we are born from above, we are made a new creature.

So every time we love somebody who has not earned it — the difficult person, the hostile neighbour who is noisy at six in the morning or at midnight, whichever is least convenient, the church member who hurt us and most probably hurt us by accident, the fellow at work who gives us fits — every time, we are showing the family resemblance. We look like our heavenly Father.

Now somebody says, “Preacher, the resemblance is starting to fade in my life.” If the resemblance looks faint this evening, that is not proof that we are not saved.

A child grows into his father’s likeness, and so do we. I am about six foot five. My dad, I believe, was six foot three. When I was born, how many years did it take me to reach six foot and resemble my father in height? A long time. So do not get down in the dumps because you have been saved twenty or thirty years and still feel you fail to resemble God in loving those who do not love you back. I did not reach six foot overnight. You are not going to reach charity overnight. Growth is slow on purpose.

The Promise at the Top

“For if these things be in you, and abound, they make you that ye shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 1:8).

This is the promise that has been waiting for us at the top of the staircase. Two words — barren and unfruitful. Not one. Both.

Barren means nothing is growing at all. If we do not climb the staircase, nothing is growing — not love, nothing. Not lost, understand. Just nothing growing.

Unfruitful refers to motion without production. Going through the motions, busy, busy, busy, and bearing nothing, with nothing spiritual to show for it.

Peter says the full staircase prevents both.

And the fruit he is describing is not a feeling. It is not a warm fuzzy. The fruit is what our life produces in the people around us.

Have you ever had a neighbour, a friend, an acquaintance who turned his life over to Jesus because of something he saw in you? Have you known a family restored because of how love was expressed in that family, through and in spite of the hurt? A church member who stayed in the faith because somebody loved him with agape right when he was hardest to love?

A life that cannot be empty is a life that has climbed the staircase. A bucket that has been dipped into a well with water in it will not stay empty.

Four Honest Questions

Is there one name — inside or outside this church — that our love has quit climbing toward?

First. Does our love depend on whether someone deserves it? If it does, that is not agape. That is a middle step. And there is no shame in being on a middle step. I finally grew to six foot five; I had no reason to be ashamed when I was five foot three. I am still growing. I stayed on the middle step most of my life and I still struggle with the charity of it. Every one of us started lower. But do not mistake a middle step for the final one.

Second. That name we just thought of — what would agape do for that person this week? Not warm feelings. We may never feel that. A choice. A decision to act for their benefit, expecting nothing in return.

Third. Are the steps under us solid, or are they wobbly? Faith, virtue, knowledge, temperance, patience, godliness, brotherly kindness. A capstone has to have an arch underneath it, or there is no place to put it.

Fourth. Have we ever asked the Holy Spirit to shed the love of God abroad in our hearts? Not as a doctrine, not help me learn a teaching — as a daily reality. Lord, let that love flow through me today. God is not withholding it. He is waiting to be asked.

What Agape Looks Like

Go back a little. Everybody knows the bad things King David did. Suppose you were the child, the son or the daughter of Uriah, the man he had killed. That was pretty bad.

Agape says: King David, I forgive you. I am never going to have a warm feeling in my heart when I see you. But I am going to act in your best interest, and I am not going to hold it against you.

And agape is God looking down at this preacher with the hammer still in his hand, after driving the nails into the hands and feet of Jesus — which is exactly what I would have been doing if I had been there. Agape says, Preacher, I forgive you. And if I had it to do over, I would sacrifice myself again for you, knowing just how guilty you are.

Supernatural love. Of course it is supernatural.

The Close

For the third and final time: charity is the love that keeps climbing when nothing comes back.

The eighth step is not the destination, and this is where so many Christians fail. The top step is the starting point. We did not climb that staircase to sit at the top and admire the view and say, well, I finally got there. We climbed so that we could see further. So that we could go further. So that we could bring more people up with us than we could ever manage to push up from the bottom.

Charity is not a trophy. Charity is a tool — the most powerful tool God ever put in a believer’s hands.

So if we are saved, that is wonderful. But salvation is not the end. It is the beginning. And if we treat the beginning as the end — on your mark, get set, go, the gun goes off, and we stand there on the track handing out high fives — we have not run the race. And nobody gets a prize who does not run the race.

Wednesday we open 1 Corinthians 13 and see what agape actually looks like in the daily situations of a real life. It is one thing to understand what the capstone is. It is another thing to know how to set it.

Scripture Used

2 Peter 1:5–7 · 2 Peter 1:8 · Romans 5:5 · 1 John 4:8 · Colossians 3:14 · Matthew 5:44–45 (all KJV)

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The Source of Love — and His Footsteps

Dardanelle Missionary Baptist Church — Dardanelle, Arkansas

Pastor Chuck Trusty — Sunday morning service, August 23, 2026 Understanding Christian Love · A3 D6–D7 (merged) · 1 John 4:7–8

► Watch this lesson on video (40:31)

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The One Point

Love grows when we stay close to its Source.

The Thread

Two Sundays ago we stood at the well. Love flows one direction — from God, through us, to our neighbour — and we are only the bucket. Last Sunday, morning and night, we stepped back onto the staircase and learned that brotherly kindness is family love that climbs one step past our own front door. And tonight, Lord willing, that staircase reaches its very top step: charity.

So this morning, before we stand at the top of the staircase tonight, we come back to the love series and settle the two questions underneath every step of that climb. Where does this love actually come from — and how does a man get more of it?

Here is the question we are going to answer. If real love does not come to us naturally — and it does not — then where do we go to get the love God commands us to have for one another? He does not only command us to love one another. He commands us to love our enemies. Now wait a minute. How in the world are we supposed to manage that?

The Text

“Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love” (1 John 4:7–8).

John puts both halves of this morning in one breath. Where does this kind of love come from? It is of God — that is the source. And who walks in it? The one that knoweth God — that is the nearness.

Source, then closeness. That is the whole lesson, and now we will prove it.

The only way to fill a bucket with water from a well is to put the bucket in the well. If we never get the bucket close to the well, the water that is in the well will never get in the bucket. If we ever want to grow in Christian love, it is not going to happen while we keep our distance from God. The only way to grow in love is to get closer and closer to Him.

The Word Itself

John’s word for this love is agape — love that gives without needing anything back. For the youngest ones in the room: it is not the love we fall into naturally, the way we naturally love our own families. It is the love that picks up a towel and washes feet.

You remember when the Lord washed the disciples’ feet. I am going to chase a rabbit here — that is not a third ordinance given to the church. All in the world it was, was an illustration of humility. The God-man who had the power to speak worlds into existence knelt down and washed the feet of sinners. He washed the feet of the man who was about to deny Him. And what prompted it was the kind of love God has toward those who do not love Him back.

Mark this. The Bible never asks us where we feel this love. It tells us where this love lives. It is of God.

Truth One: It Is Not in Us by Nature

We are factory-set for selfishness.

Think about what that term means. An automobile comes off the line with certain settings put in at the factory. Well, at our factory we were set for self — set to put self above everybody else. Nobody ever had to teach a toddler to say mine. Watch the little ones. Somebody has a toy and it is mine, mine. Nobody taught that. And nobody had to teach you and me how to be selfish either.

So if agape were a natural kind of love, John would not have had to command it of us.

Christian love is supernatural — by which I mean it is a love from above. It originates with God. It flows from God. And it is impossible without God. A lost man cannot love the way we are describing. And truth be known, it is a real struggle for a saved man to practice this love with any consistency.

Truth Two: He Moved First

“We love him, because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).

The word that carries the weight in that verse is first. He moved before we did. Our love is never the opening move; it is always the answer to His.

A well does not thank the bucket for the water it contains. The bucket thanks the well.

Truth Three: Love Is Evidence, Never Condition

Love is the evidence of salvation. It is never the condition of it.

Now read that eighth verse carefully — “he that loveth not knoweth not God.” That is not telling us that if I fail to love the way I ought, I must not be saved. It is telling us something else. If we love in a worldly way and do not love the way a Christian should — if we are not growing in love, if we are weak in it — that does not mean we are not saved. It means we are not as familiar with God as we ought to be.

Put a man fifty feet away from you. You can see him and you can probably tell who he is, but you miss most of the details. The closer you get, the more you see. That is exactly the idea about getting close to God. The nearer we are to Him, the more we will value what He values; the further away, the less.

And here is where that lands. God loved each individual person enough to die on the cross for his sins. When we picture the person we would like to choke half to death — not literally, but you know what I mean — and then we remember that Jesus died to pay for that person’s sins, we start to look at him in a different light. We begin to see him a little more the way God sees him. And that is what causes love to grow. That is what I mean by getting closer to the Source.

We do not love our way into the family of God. We love because we have been born into it — “every one that loveth is born of God.” It does not run the other way. We walk because we have legs; we did not grow legs so that we could walk.

So when a saved man fails in love, the phrase “knoweth not God” speaks of distance in fellowship, not of damnation. Cold love is a symptom of a far walk. It is not the symptom of a lost soul.

Dwelling, Not Visiting

“And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him” (1 John 4:16).

The word that does the work here is dwelleth — meno, which means to stay, to abide, to make our home. The simplest way I know to say it is that there is a difference between visiting a house and living in it.

Love does not grow where we visit God. Love grows where we live with Him. It is the difference between God is part of my life and God is my life. Is our wife part of our life, or is our wife our life?

And growth is slow on purpose. Contrary to popular opinion, salvation is the seed going into the ground — not the harvest. Salvation is not a fruit we finally reach up and pick and then it is all over with.

Seeds work underground first, slow and invisible. Then a shoot breaks through. Then a stalk. Then, eventually, fruit. Knowledge grows the same way. Strength grows. Wisdom grows. Love is exactly the same, and nobody can rush a harvest. You can sit and stare at the ground all day and it will not sprout one minute sooner.

Think about school — kindergarten through four years of college and beyond, master’s degree, doctorate. How long does it take? Sixteen years and more, and nobody says there is something wrong with you for it. Some things are intended to take place slowly.

Three truths, one case. Love lives in God. He loved first. Therefore more love only ever comes from being closer.

The Footprints

Let me show you what closeness actually looks like, out in a field a long time ago.

When I was little, I thought my dad was the greatest thing since sliced bread. I practically worshipped Daniel Boone, but I knew without a doubt my dad could take Daniel Boone without much of a struggle.

I used to walk through the field behind him. He had a long stride — steady, purposeful — and I did my best to walk just like him. I stepped where he stepped. I watched where his feet went.

And here is the thing. When I was right behind him — close enough to see the print of his foot pressed down in the grass — it was easy. I still had to stretch to reach, but I could see exactly where he had been and put my own feet in the same places. But when I got distracted, when I looked off somewhere else and fell behind and let the distance grow, those footprints got harder to find. The grass does not stay scrunched down forever; it starts springing back up. And if I drifted far enough back, I could not find them at all.

That is precisely what John is teaching us. Close to God, His character is clear. We see what He values, how He responds, where He is stepping — and walking like Him becomes possible. Not perfect. But real.

Drifted away from God, we are trying to copy footsteps we can no longer see. Do me a favour: pull out a songbook or your Bible and try to read it with your eyes closed. You cannot. And a man who says he wants to follow a God he can barely make out on the horizon is not going to follow Him. “No man can serve two masters” (Matthew 6:24). We will serve the God we are interested in. We will serve the God we love most.

The Campfire

Or take a cool night around a campfire. Right next to the fire we are warm. Step back a few feet and we feel it immediately — not gradually, immediately. Cooler, dimmer, colder.

Now mark this. The fire did not go out. The fire did not change at all. We moved.

And if the warmth of God’s love feels distant this morning — if loving people feels harder than it used to — the question is never what is wrong with God today? That borders on blasphemy. The question is: how far have we moved?

A child can carry both pictures home in one hand. Stay close enough to see the footprints. Stay close enough to feel the fire.

The Mechanics of Staying Near

If closeness is what grows love, then the practices that keep us close are the practices that grow love. These are not rules for the sake of rules. They are the mechanics of staying near the fire.

Prayer, because we cannot walk closely with Someone we never talk to.

The Word, because that is where His character is on display, and we cannot imitate what we have not seen. I do not know about the rest of you, but the older I get the shorter my memory runs. I will pass a car on the road and decide to make myself remember the license plate — six or seven numbers — and five minutes later I could not tell it to save my life. We cannot imitate what we cannot see. If we do not look in the Book, we do not see Jesus Christ; and if we do not see Him, we cannot imitate Him from memory.

Obedience, because every act of it is one step nearer, and every act of disobedience is one step further. Get out on the highway and drive. It does not matter who you are or how long you have been driving, you will not hold the car perfectly equidistant between the lines. You veer a little; somebody comes along and you get back over; you drift toward the centre line and catch yourself. And every so often you hit those rumble strips and they bring you back where you belong. That is what obedience does. It keeps us, as nearly as is humanly possible, between the lines.

The church. Answer me this. We are talking about love — can love exist when there is only one person? I am not talking about love of self. If there is only one person, love cannot exist; the very definition requires at least two. God grows love in us through one another. Nobody grows in love alone.

What Happens When We Do

The solution is never try harder to love. I have been guilty of that — I am going to live a better Christian life, I am just going to strain and grunt real hard. The solution is always to get closer to the Source.

And we can be comfortable and mistaken about even that. Sometimes we pat ourselves on the back because the well is right here and we are sitting beside it with the bucket in our hand — and we never take the trouble to lower the bucket in.

But when we do:

Difficult people get easier, because we start seeing them through His eyes. God died for the man you cannot stand.

Forgiveness gets faster, because we are living in forgiveness ourselves. The Lord said if we do not forgive men their trespasses, our own will not be forgiven. And if anybody wants to answer, well, preacher, I am practically perfect, God does not have much to forgive me for — that man is in trouble.

Patience gets deeper, because we are drawing from a deeper well. Have you ever tried to dip water out of a shallow pan with a big bucket? You can get the bucket in, but you cannot get much water. Patience gets deeper when there is enough water to sink the whole bucket.

Drift Is Fixable

If there is anybody here this morning whose love has gone cold — and I am sure I am not the only one this describes — that does not mean we are lost. It does not mean we were never saved. It means we are guilty of drift, and drift is what we all do. Do not sit there and tell me you have never wandered outside the lines. We all have.

But drift is fixable.

Think about a homing pigeon. No matter how far that bird has travelled, it needs no map to get home. Turn it loose and it heads for home, because the way home is built into the bird.

Every saved person has Someone built in — the Spirit of God — who always knows the way back to the Father. Who always knows: I am past the line, I am on the rumble strip, and here is exactly what I need to do to get back.

We do not need to add a program to the church. We need to be turned loose toward home. Back to prayer. Back to the Book. Back to God’s house. Back to the fire.

Homework

How far are we from the fire this morning? Be honest — and remember that first on the list of the seven things God hates is pride, so we need not go any further than that. How far are we from the fire, and which step back toward it will we take first?

Two things this week, with shoes on.

First, ten unhurried minutes a day close to Him — Book open, and a prayer that is honest about our condition. Confess it, and He is very quick to forgive. And not I will do that on Sunday, preacher. All seven days.

Second, each of us pick the one person we find hardest to love. There is a one person in everybody’s life. Pick that name, and watch what nearness to God does to the way we look at that same person by the time next Saturday gets here.

The Close

The one point of our lesson this morning was: love grows when we stay close to its Source.

Stay close to God, and love will take care of itself. Take care of the pennies and the dollars take care of themselves.

Tonight, Lord willing, the staircase reaches its top step — charity, the love that keeps giving when nothing comes back. And I will tell you plainly, I have many failures in my life. It is easy to love those who love us back. But the single hardest thing we will ever do as Christians is to act in the best interest of those who do not love us at all. I have had people do bad things to me. It is a challenge. God commands this love, and He gives it — if we are willing to be close to Him.

Scripture Used

1 John 4:7–8 · 1 John 4:19 · 1 John 4:16 · Matthew 6:24 (all KJV)

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Every lesson is kept on the Lessons page.