What Jackie
DeShannon Said
Keith
M. McFarren
January
18, 2026
1 John
3:16-24
    As you sit here this morning, are you
happy with how your life has turned out?  Has life been good to you or do you feel like life
maybe hasn’t been quite like you had hoped it would be?  That’s what’s funny about life…things happen
both good and bad.  Life can change in an
instant.  One day we’re flying high…and
the next day we feel as if we’ve been shot down.
    Journalist Christopher Morley said “Life is a foreign language – [and] all men
mispronounce it.
    English poet, Francis Quarles said “Life is a weary pilgrimage whose glory
fills the stage with childhood, manhood, and decrepit age.”
    Samuel Johnson said “The joy of life is variety.”
    Forest Gump said “Life is like a box of chocolates” (never know what you’ll get).
    There are all sorts of quips and quotes and
thoughts about life.  But let’s go beyond
all that and get down to the nitty gritty.   Let’s get down to what Jesus has been telling
us throughout the gospels and what John reiterates this morning.  Life can be many things…but what Jesus and
John both tell us is that “Life is all about love.”
 God wants nothing
more than for love to be the top priority in our life.   God knows
that a life without love is empty and worthless so he puts us into all sorts of
different relationships with all kinds of different people…people we like and
people who like us…and he also puts us into relationships with people we don’t
like and with people who don’t like us.  We
also find ourselves around people that are irritating, and frustrating and people
who get on our nerves, all because he wants us to learn to love all kinds of
people.  
     Can you live life without having relationships
with others?  Can you live life out here
on an island all by yourself?  I suppose
you can. But God wants us to learn how to love all kinds of people because life
without love is not only boring and lonely but it’s also spiritually unfulfilling.  
    That’s why he gave us two very important
commandments to live by:  
·“love
the Lord with all your heart”
·“Love
your neighbor as yourself” (Matt 22:37-40).

    First, we have learn to love God and then
we can begin learn to love others.  And…the
more we learn to love, the more we become like God and that is exactly what God
wants because when it comes right down to it, if we have life but we don’t have
love we don’t have anything.  
    I officiated at a funeral a while back and
I remember a young man in his early 20’s who got up to speak about his
grandfather and he had a very hard time doing it.  He had a hard time doing it not because he was
afraid of speaking in public but because of the impact his grandfather had on
his life.  
    He spoke of his grandfather as a kind and
gentle man but he also spoke of him as being a teacher, a man who took the time
to show him the little things that he will never forget.  A man who taught him how to mow the yard, how
to paint and how to fish.  
    He spoke of a man who didn’t shower him
with expensive or lavish gifts but of a man who offered small, seemingly
insignificant things - things that were free.
What the grandfather offered to his grandson was love.  
    Love, you see, leaves a legacy.  People will long remember you by how you
treated them because love leaves good memories. How you love other people, how
you treat other people, is the greatest impact you can leave behind because love lasts forever.  If you loved others and treated them with
fairness and respect, you’ll be remembered forever by your family and your
friends
    I don’t know about you but when I go to
the hospital to visit some one I have this habit of kind of peeking into the
other rooms as I walk by.  Maybe I’m
nosey, I don’t know, but that’s what I do.
I can’t help it.
    In all the years I’ve been peeking into
other people’s rooms, I’ve never once seen a room piled high with all the
person’s prized personal possessions.  I’ve
never seen a room filled with money or with stocks and bonds or all sorts of expensive
clothes.
    But what I have seen when I peek into
these rooms are rooms that are filled with people.  Rooms that are filled with family and
friends.  What I see are rooms filled
with love.
    When people are sick or when they get to
the point when life here on earth might be coming to an end they don’t surround
themselves with all the stuff that used to be so important to them.    
    What we want when we are sick or when we
are dying is people – the people we love and the people who love us back.  The sad part is, so many people wait until they
are deathly sick or when we are nearing their final moments here on earth to realize
just how important love really is.
    Family and friends, people we love, those
that have helped us form relationships, those are what life is really all about…and
God doesn’t want us to wait to the very end of our lives to realize just how
important our loving relationships really are to us.
    Someday we are all going to be evaluated not
only on our lives, but also on our love.
Someday, we are all going to face God and we are going to be evaluated not
on how we loved ourselves…but on how we loved and treated others while we were
on earth.  
    God isn’t going to say “Tell me what kind of important job you had
or how much time you spent at work or how much money did you have in the bank?”
    God is
going to be more concerned about your character and how you lived your life.  What kind of relationships did you have with
those around you?  How did you treat other
people.  How did you love other people?
     Did you ever watch someone who is really
proud of their car clean it?  It seems
like it takes them forever.  Everything
has to be just so so.  That’s how some
people are with their lawns.  They take
pride in them and they literally manicure them and everything has to be just so
so.  That’s because the more important
something is to us the more time we are willing to spend on it.  
    If you want to know a person’s priorities
look at how they use their time.
    Time is an expression of love and one way we
can express our love for others is through time.  Time is a very precious gift…because you only
have so much of it.  Time, we could say,
is a limited commodity.  
    You can always make more money but you can
never make more time.  So when you give
someone your time you are in essence giving them a part of your life that you
will never ever get back.
    Your time is your life.  That is why it is not enough just to say that a loving relationship with a
wife or family member or a friend is important.
We have to prove that it’s important by investing our time in that relationship.
    Relationships take time
and effort to grow. They have to be nurtured and they have to be cultivated, and
they have to be weeded, but when that relationship reaches full bloom it is love
that is the result of all that hard work.

    Relationships take time and effort, but
the resulting love that comes from all that hard work far outweighs the time
and effort that you put into it.
    Love is not what we say or what we think
or what we do; love is how we give of
ourselves to others.  You can’t put a
price tag on love because in God’s world love can’t be bought.   That’s because in God’s world, love is
free.  
    Love is nothing more than time.  And when you give of your time, you are
making a sacrifice… and if you know Jesus and if you know what he did for you then
you know that a sacrifice in itself is the essence of love.
   In biblical terms, John is known as the Apostle
of love.  That’s because throughout his
gospel, he presents God to us as “love,” a love that can be seen through Jesus’
giving, dying, forgiving and through his grace.

    John tells us that we need to “stop just saying we love each other; and show
it by our actions.  If we are to be like Jesus,
we are to fulfill his commands which means that we are to love one another…  Those who do this live in fellowship with
him, and he with them.”
    The best use of our life is to love others…because
that is what life is all about.  Love
needs be our top priority.  Love needs to
be our greatest ambition.  Paul tells us
in 1 Corinthians Chapter 13 that “no
matter what I say, what I believe and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.”
      There is no better time to begin to love
other people than right now.  If you want
to live a Godly life, the love of God and love for other people has to be our
number one priority.
    Why is now the best time to show your love
to others?  Because you don’t know how
long you are going to be here.  None of
us know.  Life changes in an
instant.  Circumstances change.  People die.
Children grow up.  Friends move
away.  Tomorrow offers no guarantee.
     If you want to live the type of life God
wants you to live it all begins by showing others how much you love them.  Then let that love begin to spread from one
person to another and another and another.
    The best use of life is love…and the best
time to love others begins today.
    Back in 1965, Jackie DeShannon sang a song
that took the world by storm.  The song
was, What the world needs now is love.
The first line to that song was, “What the world needs now is love sweet
love.  That’s the only thing that there’s
just too little of.”
    Take a good look at yourself.  Take a good look at the world around you.  Sixty one years later, those words still ring
true.