We all want to feel like we’re in the right - like we’re taking the moral high road.
Somehow, we think that attaching a Bible verse to what we do makes us in the right.
A young pastor had rung a parishioner's doorbell and was waiting to be received,
but no one came to the door.
He sensed that someone was at home, so he kept ringing.
As a final departing act he wrote Revelation 3:20 on the back of one of his calling cards and stuck it under the door:
"Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in"
Two days later the pastor received his calling card back in an envelope with a brief note attached that simply contained the text from Genesis 3:10:
“I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.”
We’re looking this morning at some verses that have been misused a lot.
They’re the Great commandments - to Love God and to love others.
These commands have been used to justify more of a laze-faire approach to obeying God
And they’ve also been used recently by politicians to guilt people into policies that are horrific.
Here’s some billboards that describe what I mean.
billboards
The first rainbow billboard is using Matthew 22:39 “Love thy neighbor” to justify letting the LGBTQ agenda to become accepted as mainstream in our culture.
The second billboard give Texans the opportunity to seek an abortion in California.
You can see in the zoomed in picture in this next slide the verse that’s quoted at the bottom.
zoom in
It reads, “Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no greater commandment than these.” Mark 12:31
Since we’re dealing with Jesus’ teaching I’m going to address these misuses at the end of the sermon
For now, Is it as simple as this? If you tack a Bible verse onto an issue, does it make it right?
Is what the Beatles told us true?
Is love all we need?
* 34 But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. 35 And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”
* 37 And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
A GREAT QUESTION COMES FROM SOMEONE TESTING JESUS.
* 34 But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. 35 And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him.
Jesus understands the modern day cancel culture - asking questions to see if you can be canceled for your answer.
This is both a legitimate question and an attempt to get Jesus to trip up and say something controversial.
When we read that they gathered together, it’s likely an intentional huddling together to devise a scheme.
The lawyer who asks the question would be an expert in the OT Law.
And the question that he asks is one that was debated for centuries.
* 36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”
The Pharisees had organized the Mosaic Law into 613 commandments.
248 positive “do’s” and 365 negative “don’ts”
With all of these to keep in mind, they often discussed which were more of the weightier commands.
This is similar to how the Catholic religion divides sins into venial and mortal sins.
Most people think of God’s Commandments as being like a scale.
Our disobedience is placed on one side.
And our obedience is placed on another.
Weightier disobedience needs to be outweighed by weightier obedience.
When a person believes that they need to earn God’s good will toward them, they end up needing to justify how they might sin in lesser ways without being cast from His presence.
But God’s Word is clear that no one is capable to earning a relationship with God
* James 2:10 10 For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it.
* Romans 3:23 23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,
As we see over and over again in these adversarial conversations -
A HELPFUL ANSWER COMES FROM THE SOVEREIGN GOD.
* 37 And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
I’m so grateful for these challenges that come at Jesus during the Passion Week.
We get to hear from the Creator God what is to be the chief command that we should be concerned about.
And we get a two-for.
I have to wonder if this expert in the OT Law realized at some point that the King of Kings personally outlined His will for His Kingdom in answer to His question.
We aren’t told that this group or the crowd is amazed after Jesus’ statements.
From here, Jesus will get pretty confrontational.
The first command could be described as a call to -
LOVE GOD FROM A TRANSFORMED CORE.
* 37 And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment.
Answering the question, Jesus quotes Deuteronomy 6:5 which was part of the prayer that every Jewish man recited twice each day.
This command was often elevated as the answer in the debate about what is the greatest commandments.
It looks couches God’s commands in light of the RELATIONSHIP with Him that His people are called into.
And it expresses the quality that obedience should have to it - obeying out of love.
Warren Wiersbe writes, “To love God is not to “have good feelings about Him,” for true love involves the will as well as the heart. Where there is love, there will be service and obedience.”
Further, Jesus’ quote involves loving God with all of ourselves - all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind
As The New Testament Commentary describes, “The three nouns together indicate the essential nature of man, his ultimate, fundamental loyalty, not just a superficial allegiance.”
These aren’t different areas of ourselves that we’re supposed to check off the list
You could summarize this statement as with loving God “with/from all of your inmost being” - our core.
So, if we say we love God but we aren’t concerned about obeying Him, we don’t love Him.
If we are concerned about obeying God but not out of a love for Him, we’re missing the point.
Jesus follows the greatest commandment with the OTHER greatest commandment.
LOVE OTHERS THE WAY YOU LOVE YOURSELF.
* 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
This second Old Testament commandment also emphasized love
Jesus added Leviticus 19:18 to the #1 list.
Leviticus 19:18 18 You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD.
How much attention do we give to our own needs.
How much effort do we make to provide for our needs?
It’s second nature to pursue our desires and to fulfill our unconscious needs.
God has called us to be so transformed by Him that we set our needs and desires aside thinking about those of others.
We’re told in several places that it’s worthless to claim to love God if we hate others, as in
1 John 4:20–21 20 If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. 21 And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.
Loving others means living sacrificially for the good of others for the glory of God.
Jesus tells us this in John 15
John 15:12–14 12 “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. 13 Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command you.
John describes how Jesus loved us by becoming a sacrifice for us to take the wrath of God for our sins.
1 John 4:11 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.
We love others in response to how God has loved us.
We can’t divorce either of these commandments from each other.
We can’t love others if we don’t love God.
Our relationship with God directs and purifies and gives the power to be selfless in our love for others.
If we try to love others without loving God we just turn others into idols.
We end up doing for them what we need from us so that they will do for us what we need from them.
Our love for God should guard us against replacing Him with a person we’ve made into an idol.
The ESV Study Bible states, “Love signifies a concrete responsibility to seek the greatest good of one’s neighbors”
Loving others means living sacrificially for the good of others.
John 15:12–14 12 “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. 13 Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command you.
Don’t look at these commands and see a super-high bar of quality that we’ll never fully achieve.
See in these commands how deeply God desires to change us.
See in them how God can transform our repentant and open hearts when we let Him in to do His work.
It can truly become second nature to obey God.
It’s not going to be our first nature until we’re in heaven -
free from our sinful flesh and standing in His presence
But God can transform us to the point that obedience is like second nature because God has transformed us
Maybe that looks like saying to ourselves,
“OK, this reaction is how my flesh wants to respond to this situation.”
“But how does God want me to respond?”
“I love Him, and I want to follow His perfect will in this situation.”
Maybe it looks like this
“I love this person. So I want to do what’s best for them. I wonder how I can.”
“Oh, maybe I should find out how it is that God has commanded me to live in relationship with them.”
God’s commands lead us to do what’s best and loving for others.
Some take these commandments to love as a justification to disobey God.
It sounds like this -
“I’m just not feeling it today.”
“The Bible may say that, but God’s just not convicting about that. He just wants me to love Him.”
OBEY GOD’S COMMAND TO LOVE GOD AND OTHERS BY OBEYING GOD’S COMMANDS.
* 40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
As we’ve seen before, the the Law and the Prophets is another way of describing the entire Old Testament.
Some Jewish teachers did use these two great commandments to love as a summary of the Mosiac Law.
But Jesus declares that the entire Scriptures depend / hang on these two commandments.
The commands to love God and to love others provide the rationality or reasoning behind God’s commands.
The individual commands that God has declared are expressions of what it means to love God and others.
If we want to know if we love God, we should ask ourselves if we are obeying Him.
Our love for God is displayed by our obedience.
The command to Love God is the summation of God’s commands.
It’s also the motive which all our obedience should flow out from as God changes our hearts.
This is why Jesus told His disciples -
John 14:15 15 “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.
And Jesus tells us that we are to abide in Him and He in us adding this -
John 15:10 10 If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.
If we want to know if we love others, we should ask ourselves if we are obeying God in relating to them.
As Paul writes about our relationships with others in Romans 13:10 “love is the fulfilling of the law.”
Illus - [NASA Mathematicians]
In the movie, Hidden Figures, you learn about all of these mathematicians that were behind NASA’s work.
Specifically launching the first man into space to orbit the earth.
Could if one of those mathematicians said, “I came to NASA to work on space travel not do math.”
They were working on space travel as they were doing math.
And as their calculations started to make sense, they started to see how it would accomplish space travel.
Obeying God’s commands is like doing those calculations.
As God changes us from the inside out, our obedience becomes more and more an expression of love.
As we seek to love God and others more and more, our obedience to God is exactly what does it.
How does someone follow Christ? –
By striving to love God with their whole self, and by seeking to love their neighbor as themselves.
So, we asked the question at the beginning - “Is LOVE all we need?”
I think the answer can be “yes” if it’s God’s idea of love and it begins with loving God from our very core.
And (as Jesus commands) we should then love others as we obey God in relationship with them.
Battery power is pretty amazing in how far it’s come along.
Remember boomboxes?
My boombox used to take more batteries than power tools do today.
And they didn’t last as long.
I’ve thought something to be pretty funny with battery powered stuff as I see it going on.
Much of the idea behind electric vehicles is to lower the emissions that are produced by cars.
The batteries do have an impact on the environment and I’m not getting into which is worse (gas/electric).
But the thought is that electric vehicles are better for the environment.
I suppose the hope is eventually everyone is riding in an electric car or pedaling a bike.
But what I see going on is that, instead of people pedaling their bikes, they’re riding electric ones.
So we have normal cars driving on the roads and people riding electric bikes.
Rather than improving the situation, we have gas cars and battery powered bikes being used
What what thought to be the environmental answer is being used to make the problem worse.
Like with electric vehicles, it’s common for us to treat the Greatest Commandments the same way.
God gives us what is supposed to summarize His commands.
And instead we try to replace obedience to His commands with our definitions of LOVE.
Specific misuses of “LOVE” can be
“But Daddy I LOVE him so I can’t obey God!”
“I don’t LOVE my wife anymore so I don’t have to keep my marriage vows.”
Or as we heard in the VP debate -
“I summarize my political position with the command, ‘LOVE thy neighbor.’”
I want to deal with the source behind these billboards.
To borrow from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, we’re facing the Cali-fornication of our culture.
With regard to loving others, the same twisted, dismissive moral-high-road is being taken.
We told by our culture that LOVE for one’s neighbor means letting them do what they want to whomever they want.
Even if it means killing an unborn child.
Even if it means saddling their child with years of depression, confusion and listless existence as they’re encouraged to dismantle the core of who they are as a boy or girl and remake themselves.
I’m going to get more political here than I ever have.
When God’s Word is abused to justify policies that have such HORRIFIC consequences, I have to speak.
We have two choices in this election.
Neither of them would qualify to be a Messiah, or a pastor, or a church Sunday school teacher.
I wouldn’t feel right hiring either of them for church janitor.
But our election is about what is best for our nation between two candidates.
And all of us should vote
But one of these candidates resembles the philosophy of hell - a demonic philosophy.
And this is why whenever Satan has his way, he’s worshiped through child sacrifice.
The way of Jesus is “I will die that you might live.”
The way of Satan is “You must die that I might live.”
One candidate is gleefully willing to let unborn children die for their ideology
The same candidate is gleefully willing to let the image of God be marred with the transgender agenda
And without even naming them, you know exactly which candidate I’m talking about.
This is evil.
And when God’s Word is used to justify it, we should call it for what it i
