Love - Summer in the Psalms - Sermons - Colin Provart - 6.21.26

**Colin Provart** (0:03)
Good morning, Storyline Church. My name is Colin, and I have the privilege of getting to serve as one of the directors here. And we're going to be continuing on in our series through the Psalms. But before we jump into the Psalms, I want to say happy Father's Day to all the dads that are here with us this morning.
We love you, we want to honor you, we want to honor all the men here by giving you a gift. And I found no gift to be more fitting than some beef jerky on your way out. So again, all men, we have a gift for you, beef jerky on your way out. I know this can be a hard day for some people. Maybe you have a broken relationship with your dad, or you're a dad who has a broken relationship with your kids. And what I'm thankful for this morning is that we have a father in heaven. Like God, of all ways, God has chosen to reveal himself. He has chosen to reveal himself as a father who loves us, who adopts us into his family. And so take comfort in that. But we do want to honor in a unique way, the dads and grandfathers who are here this morning. And so if you're a dad or a grandpa, would you stand? We'd love to honor you. We can honor them.
Stay standing for just a second, stay standing for just a second. We're so thankful for you. We're so thankful for the ways you provide, protect, sacrifice for the sake of your family. You guys are worthy of honor. And before you sit down, we'd love the opportunity to pray for you. And so if you're near one of these gentlemen, or maybe you came with one of them, lay a hand on them, and we're just gonna pray together this morning. Father God, we're thankful that you've revealed yourself to us as a father who loves. As I look out, I'm thankful for these men. The ways that they represent you to their lives, to their kids, to their grandkids, to their community. Spirit, would you empower them all the more? To love you, to cherish you, and for that to bleed to those around them. We're thankful, we see their sacrifice, we're thankful for their sacrifice, and we're thankful for you, providing these men to our church. We pray all this in Jesus' name, amen. Men, we are really thankful for you. This morning, we're going to be in Psalm 103 If you have a Bible, Psalm 103 is where we're going to be. As you turn there, I have a question for you. Do you ever find yourself using a word a little too often? There's a word you use a little too often, so much so that the word has maybe lost its meaning a little bit. I realized I had a problem with this a couple of nights ago. I was at dinner with some friends. I interrupt the whole table. I say, I have a tragic story for you. So I start telling this story, and the story ends with a good buddy of mine moving away from Colorado. They're like, what's the ending of the story? I was like, he moved away. They're like, we thought he was going to die. It's like I had maybe oversold the word tragic a little bit. I think our culture does this as well. To the older generation, let me give you some examples of this. To the older generation, the word iconic means something widely recognized, highly influential, or emblematic of a specific era, idea, or style. To the younger generation, iconic is anything good or mildly influential. Feel like a toxic in the dictionary, it's a poisonous, capable of causing physical harm or death through chemical effect. Now it's slang for something that's just a little bit bad for us. Trauma, a physical wound, that's broadened more to a psychological or emotional situation that can't be coped with normally. You hear people throw around trauma all the time because it's anything that makes us uncomfortable. Or the word literal. According to the exact words, some of you need to hear this. According to the exact words of a text, not figurative, symbolic or metaphorical. Because now it's just a way of saying something emphatically. You've probably heard someone say, I had to wait for my Starbucks drink for seven minutes. It was literally traumatic.
First off, no, it was not. It was not traumatic. Or you definitely didn't use the word literal correctly. But all those words, literal, trauma, iconic, all are really strong words. But when we begin to use them casually in context that don't fit the actual definition of the word, then the word begins over time to lose its meaning and change its definition. The process known as semantic bleaching. Where over time we use words in the wrong context and the word itself begins to change meaning. Semantic bleaching. And I think this has happened with other words as well. And the word we're going to look at this morning or the emotion we're going to look at this morning is love. I think we throw the word love around so casually, that we actually have no idea what it means because it's gone through this process of semantic bleaching. Now, some of you are here this morning. We're going through a series on emotions. Why of all emotions did you choose love on Father's Day? Why didn't you choose like courage, resilience or grit or maybe take a week off of a series through emotions. Let's jump into the book of Judges and study Gideon. Like let's get after it. Because when our culture talks about love, it feels like a rom-com, a hallmark card, a self-care podcast. It can feel soft, not something that should be talked about on Father's Day. Now, I think the reason we feel that way is because we actually have no idea what the word love means. We have no idea what love is, and that has profound implications for us. If we don't know what love is, how can we know what it is for us to love God? If we don't know what love is, how can we know what it is for God to love us? Here's what I want to do this morning. I want to restore a deeply biblical and theological definition to the word love. So much so that you all would leave this room, not just thinking it's acceptable to talk about love on Father's Day, but actually to find it fitting that of all things we could talk about on Father's Day, we might just talk about love. I became a father in the last few years. I became a husband a little while before that in a little window into my marriage. My wife definitely wishes I loved love a little bit more. Like she wishes I was a little bit more romantic. I'm trying to grow in it. There are a lot of things that I say that I love. I love golf.