Sunday message · Love is for Losers series
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Message Summary
Pastor Phillip Santillan launches the series Love is for Losers with 1 Corinthians 13:4–7 and a simple claim: the secret to winning at love is actually losing. Everyone wants to love well and be loved, he says, yet whatever home we grew up in, whether our parents’ marriage was a model, deeply dysfunctional or somewhere in between, all of us carry flawed expectations about love and marriage. When things do not go as hoped, disappointment follows.
Phil points to the often-cited statistic that about half of U.S. marriages end in divorce, to couples who stay married but settle for coexisting without intimacy, and to a culture that calls marriage boring. Feeling forced to choose between single and lonely or married and lame, many settle for living together, but beyond the instant gratification, he says, it is not working. The series aims to give hope that relationships can be strong and healthy, whatever wreckage lies in the rearview mirror. Singles are included, since happiness does not have to come through marriage.
Love is a choice. Culture defines it as an intense feeling and uses the same word for lifelong commitment and a cheeseburger. Its formula of meeting, laughing, feeling chemistry and sleeping together gives enough to start a marriage but not enough to build one on. When trouble comes, the laughter and chemistry fade, and since marriage does not change us so much as reveal who we are, couples decide they have fallen out of love.
Writing not to married couples but to ordinary people in Corinth, Paul describes love that is patient and kind, keeps no record of being wronged and never gives up. Phil says no one actually falls out of love, because love is not something we fall into. If we choose to do loving things, as couples did while dating, the feelings will follow. He jokes that twenty-one seasons of The Bachelor prove the point: put people in situations where they choose to act in loving ways, and their hearts follow.
At its core, love is others-centered, while falling in love is about our own feelings. In Ephesians 5:21, speaking to husbands and wives, Paul says to submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Submission, Phil explains, is not blind obedience or inferiority but putting another person’s needs ahead of our own and serving without regard for what we get back. The reason is that Jesus treated us that way: God took on flesh and allowed himself to be put to death, choosing what was best for us rather than for himself. Sacrifice is never the best choice for the feelings it produces, Phil says, but “sacrifice is always the best choice in terms of the love it produces.” Jesus chose to lose, which is why love is for losers.
Admitting that marriage, his own included, is tough at times but worth it, Phil invites everyone to return with a friend who needs hope for a relationship, as the series explores what it means to choose to lose.