Sermon Tone Analysis

Intro

Today is the Superbowl

It has become a day more about gathering than the event itself

Think about it

What are we going to eat?

How entertaining are the commercials

Who’s performing at halftime?

We don’t gather for the game, we gather to be with others

Tuesday is Valentines day

Let this serve as a public service announcement

It is estimated that people will spend $29 billion

That is why Hallmark can have it own channel of cheesy movies

Someone has said that love may not make the world go around but it makes the trip worthwhile.

In whatever age or with whatever group of people, it has been the almost universal belief that love is the greatest thing in life

God’s Word concurs that love is the greatest virtue, but the love which it elevates as supreme is of a much deeper and more substantive kind than that which the world understands and admires.

Today we are going to talk about the greatest commandment in the Bible

Jesus actually shares the top two commandments

Jesus takes the 10 commandments and compresses them down to two

Love God and Love Others

Interestingly, people have grabbed hold of the “Love your neighbor” aspect and use it for all sorts of purposes

In fact, Love your neighbor has become the rallying cry for many ungodly causes

Jesus puts things in order and shows us what we should focusing on as Christians

Jesus declared that agapē love is the supreme divine requirement of men, both in regard to Himself and in regard to other men.

Read Matthew 22:34-40

Transition

The law was very important the the Pharisees

The Pharisees considered Moses to be the supreme human figure in Scripture.

Moses had spoken with God face to face, was the humblest man on earth, and had taken the engraved tablets of the law directly from the hand of God, as it were.

He was also the great deliverer whom God called to lead Israel out of Egypt to the Promised Land.

The scribes and Pharisees were said to sit in Moses’ seat because that represented the ultimate authority in Judaism.

Over the years, the rabbis had supposedly determined that, just as there were 613 separate letters in the Hebrew text of the Decalogue, or Ten Commandments, in the book of Numbers, there were also 613 separate laws in the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses.

Such letterism, as it is sometimes called, was extremely popular and was considered to be a valuable exegetical tool for interpreting Scripture.

The rabbis had divided those 613 laws into affirmative and negative groups, holding that there were 248 affirmative laws, one for every part of the human body, as they supposed, and 365 negative laws, one for each day of the year.

The rabbis and scribes spent countless hours proudly debating the merits of their particular divisions and the ranking of laws

Jesus’ teaching of Scripture was so utterly contrary to theirs, which for centuries had been encrusted by thousands of humanly-devised rabbinical interpretations, the Pharisees were convinced that He must be teaching a message He considered to be greater than that of Moses.

They assumed that His naming the one great commandment in the Law would be sufficiently unorthodox to condemn Him.

Instead Jesus silences them for good by upholding the law and condensing it into two nuggets

I.

The Greatest Commandment vs. 34-40

What is the greatest commandment?

It is to love the Lord God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength

vs. 36-38 Love the Lord

When the Pharisees heard about Jesus silencing the Sadducees, they decided to have another try themselves at entrapping Him, this time directly by one of their own number rather than through their less capable disciples

The particular one of them that they chose to confront Jesus was a lawyer.

The man was a scribe but was called a lawyer by Matthew to indicate his unusual expertise in the Mosaic law

This lawyer, however, also seems to have been a cut above his fellow religious leaders in honesty and humility

In his addressing Jesus as Teacher, the lawyer was probably not being scornful, as the previous questioners had been

he seems to have had respect for Jesus and may have felt somewhat guilty

Jesus responds w/o hesitation

His answer is in accordance with the law and tradition

Jesus quotes the Shema

Shema is Hebrew for hear

It’s named because it begins with Hear, O Israel

Jews would copy the Shema on small pieces of parchment and place them in phylacteries to wear on the forehead or left arms

They would also place them in Mezuzahs and attach them to doorposts

Agape Love

Aheb, the Hebrew word for love used in Deuteronomy 6:5, refers primarily to an act of mind and will, the determined care for the welfare of something or someone

It is the Hebrew equivalent of the Greek agapaō in the New Testament, the verb of intelligent, purposeful, and committed love that is an act of the will

Agape love is a higher form of love

Phileo is the brotherly love we feel for friends and family

Eros is the relationship love we feel for our spouse

Agape is the unconditional, self-sacrificing love that puts the other person first

We are first to Love God like that, then love our neighbor

The order is important

To love the Lord with all one’s heart, … soul, and … mind does not express separate and technical definitions of each element of human nature or a compartmentalizing of love into three or four categories, but rather connotes comprehensiveness.

We are to love the Lord our God with every part of our being

To the Hebrew heart referred to the core of one’s personal being

The term soul is closest to what we would call emotion

Mind corresponds to what is usually translated “might” in Deuteronomy 6:5.

The Hebrew term had a broad connotation and carried the general idea of moving ahead with energy and strength.

Mind is used here in the sense of intellectual, willful vigor and determination, carrying both the meaning of mental endeavor and of strength.

Genuine love of the Lord is intelligent, feeling, willing, and serving

The Ten Commandments themselves make clear that love for and obedience to God are inseparable.

Why do we love the Lord?

Because He first loved us

When we were still sinners God loved us

Our love for him is in response to what He has done for us

God needs to be the object of our affection

Love does not look at itself—it is absorbed in the object of its love.

Love manifests itself by loving persons in the concrete.

The Love of God, 77

David Martyn Lloyd-Jones

There isn’t a part of our life where we hold back that love

The person who truly loves the Lord with all his heart and soul and mind is the person who trusts Him and obeys Him.

That person demonstrates his love by

meditating on God’s glory

trusting in God’s divine power

seeking fellowship with God

loving what God loves

loving whom God loves

vs. 39-40 Love Your Neighbor

After stating the first and greatest commandment, Jesus did the Pharisees one better and added the second as well: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

The Pharisees had no genuine love for God, neither did they have genuine love even for their Jewish neighbor

The word neighbor in the OT meant any fellow Israelite or member of the covenant

Genuine love for one’s neighbor is of the same kind as genuine love for God.

It is by choice purposeful, intentional, and active, not merely sentimental and emotional

Contrary to some contemporary interpretations of this passage, Jesus was not commanding that a person love himself but assumed he already does love himself.

II.

The Son of David vs. 41-46

vs. 41-42