Jesus and The Ten

Introduction

They would rather Jesus be dead then the power they had be threatened.

Matthew 26:1–5 ESV

1 When Jesus had finished all these sayings, he said to his disciples, 2 “You know that after two days the Passover is coming, and the Son of Man will be delivered up to be crucified.” 3 Then the chief priests and the elders of the people gathered in the palace of the high priest, whose name was Caiaphas, 4 and plotted together in order to arrest Jesus by stealth and kill him. 5 But they said, “Not during the feast, lest there be an uproar among the people.”

Jesus had just finished proclaiming the end times and answering every challenge of the Sadducees and Pharisees and they wanted to kill him. He had just entered the city during holy week and that was enough. he taught on all things

Text

Matthew 22:34-40 “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.””

The Set up/Background

Matthew, Volumes 1 & 2 The Setting for Jesus’ Teaching

THE SETTING FOR JESUS’ TEACHING

In Matthew 22 Jesus says that love for God is the first and greatest duty of mankind. This text marks the fourth in a series of questions the Jewish leaders put to Jesus, always intent on testing or trapping him. They have asked him questions about his authority (21:23), about taxes (22:15–17), and about the resurrection (22:23–28). Jesus has answered each one, and answered well. In fact, his answer to the last question from the Sadducees was so successful that they resolved to ask him no more. When they heard “that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together” to try one last time to test or trap Jesus (22:34).

Matthew says, “One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: ‘Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?’ ” (22:35–36). This scribe, this expert in God’s law, sounds polite. He calls Jesus “teacher,” but he poses his question to test him. The rabbis did debate this question, so perhaps the Pharisees hoped the question would ensnare Jesus in one of their controversies, for whatever he said, someone would disagree. More ominously, the question invited Jesus to single out one of God’s laws as the greatest. But the Lord God himself had declared and inscribed the Ten Commandments, so that whatever command Jesus chose, the Pharisees could say he annulled or neglected the others.

At any rate, the teachers liked to discuss what commands were weightier and why, so they were ready to argue with Jesus, whatever he said. But Jesus’ reply was neither polemical nor evasive. He replied: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment” (22:37–38).

Often Jesus uses moments of conflict to reveal large truths the key Big Idea: is Loving God with heart, soul, mind, and strength, and loving neighbor as yourself.

Jesus and the Law

The Pharisees and Sadducees wanted to catch Jesus in a error, but Christ’s mind was so focused on this truth that they couldn’t stop him. (34-35)

You know your in for it when somebody sends you their lawyer. They Pharisees send in a lawyer - which in that day was a legal scholar; especially versed in the Mosaic Law. So this man knew his stuff. This was a trap. Their had been much debate over the laws, which laws had to be kept which ones could be down played, how many there were and so on. This was bait. They wanted to kill him and call him a heritick and where willing to do anyhting to do it.

But just as Jesus had done in the shutting down conversation with the saducees about the resurection, a doctrine they didn’t believe in, he shut them down on this.

What this interaction reveals to us is that Jesus knows the law, he knows the law because he wrote it!

(Use the illustration of the White witch quoting the old magic to Aslan.)

litterally the Incarnate word was standing before them

John 1:1 ESV

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

And they didn’t see that, do you see this? When you read the Law of God you are seeing Christ’s very word for us!

How Jesus Teaches us to do the Moral law

Matthew 22:37 ESV

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.

Luke 10:27 ESV

27 And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”

Matthew, Volumes 1 & 2 Rightly Understanding Jesus’ Teaching

We love God with heart and soul when we embrace him in our deepest convictions and commitments.

• We love God with the mind when we understand our past and our present as he does and dedicate our future plans and goals to him.

• We love God with our strength when we dedicate the physical body, its muscles and energy, to him. We love God with our strength if we follow him with a determined will and with moral resolve in the face of adversity.

This is the key to keeping the Law of God this build proper convictions

The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God B. The Heart

The knowledge of God is a heart-knowledge (see Exod. 35:5; 1 Sam. 2:1; 2 Sam. 7:3; Pss. 4:4; 7:10; 15:2; Isa. 6:10; Matt. 5:8; 12:34; 22:37; Eph. 1:18; etc.). The heart is the “center” of the personality, the person himself in his most basic character. Scripture represents it as the source of thought, of volition, of attitude, of speech. It is also the seat of moral knowledge. In the Old Testament, heart is used in contexts where conscience would be an acceptable translation (see 1 Sam. 24:5).

How Grace and Law work together

You can’t do the good things without Jesus. (give the gospel)

Application

Family

Deuteronomy 6:1–9 ESV

1 “Now this is the commandment—the statutes and the rules—that the Lord your God commanded me to teach you, that you may do them in the land to which you are going over, to possess it, 2 that you may fear the Lord your God, you and your son and your son’s son, by keeping all his statutes and his commandments, which I command you, all the days of your life, and that your days may be long. 3 Hear therefore, O Israel, and be careful to do them, that it may go well with you, and that you may multiply greatly, as the Lord, the God of your fathers, has promised you, in a land flowing with milk and honey. 4 “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 5 You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. 6 And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. 7 You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. 8 You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. 9 You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

Teach your Children Convictions

Jesus would have been taught this as a boy

Matthew, Volumes 1 & 2 The Source for Jesus’ Teaching

Medieval theologians used to say, “Repetition is the mother of learning.” That is, to learn something, we must hear it repeatedly

(v7) teach at every moment

Keep these blessings central to your life (v4-6)

Anti-idolatry, anti-creating a God out of anything

For the

Build them into your home (v9)

Ladies your welcome. I should get a royalty check from hobby lobby

Really just a repetition of the teaching at all moments.

God wants you surrounded by him at all moments. This was given to a nation of people who could see God every day in the fire that went before them. so He wanted them to bring him into their homes to come.

He

Church

Our friends define our affections, our enemies define our convictions.

What you think about things inside and outside church really define what you actually believe. Convictions are a dangerous and deadly thing.

Matthew, Volumes 1 & 2 Rightly Understanding Jesus’ Teaching

(Matt. 22:37). In other places, Jesus commands us to love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength (Mark 12:30; Luke 10:27)

Matthew, Volumes 1 & 2 Rightly Understanding Jesus’ Teaching

In short, we should love the Lord with all our faculties. If we (unlike the ancients) regard a sense of humor as a faculty, then we should love the Lord with our humor. We eschew coarse and degrading humor. We laugh with people, not at people. We ridicule what is ridiculous and evil and laugh with joy at what is excellent and noble. In these ways we love God (and neighbor) with our humor.

This is true of all things. You must remove from your life that which is base and course. I am reading privately the biography of Walt Disney and many theaters wouldn’t show his skeleton cartoon in the 1920’s because it was to morbid. The problem is that we’ve become to desensitized to that which is actually wrong, We have our convictions in the wrong places.

Loving God actually requires deep convictions about him and his word.

This is a problem that moderns have the lack of proper convictions. We don’t take stands on what is important, but on what isn’t. Satan loves when we Christians pick at each other over silly things, we baptist are infamous for our color of the carpet wars. He hates when we say Drag queen story hour is wrong and an affront to God. Or that Mandatory Woke training will make us more divided and weaker as a nation. Satan would rather have us shooting each other then seeing the real enemy at the door.

To love God is to put your thoughts into the right order in submission to his son.

Culture

How to love neighbor

Galatians (Mentor Expository Commentary | MEC) License and Law

What does the Bible mean when it commands us to love our neighbor as ourself? It does not teach us to love ourselves, nor especially that we must learn to love ourselves before we can learn to love others, as pop-psychology masquerading as biblical teaching would have us believe. Rather, this verse assumes that we already do love ourselves. This is true even if we don’t like ourselves very much. In fact, it is even true of the person who commits suicide. Loving ourselves has nothing to do with feeling good about ourselves, and everything to do with serving ourselves. The Bible is urging us to show the same care and concern for others as we naturally do for ourselves. We feed ourselves, clothe ourselves, house ourselves, rest ourselves, bathe ourselves, entertain ourselves, and so on. There is a sense in which even those with what the gurus of psychology call ‘low self-esteem’ indulge themselves with pity. Similarly, what could be more self-centered than to take one’s life, leaving the rest of the world to pick up the pieces? The loving of oneself is not a command to follow but a problem to correct. Paul warns of the difficult last days when men will be ‘lovers of self’ (2 Tim. 3:2). The aim of the command is to get selfish, self-serving, self-loving people to love and serve others to the same degree as they love themselves. The law and the gospel agree that this is an important element of God’s will for His people. We were called by Christ to love one another, and we are called by the Law to love our neighbor. Who is my neighbor? Funny you should ask. Our neighbor, as the Parable of the Good Samaritan shows, is whoever crosses our path (Luke 10:30 ff.). We are commanded not so much to love our neighbor as be a neighbor, or behave in a neighborly manner towards whomever we encounter.

How to Love Country

If we are to love God with all of our Strength and Our neighbor as ourselves we need to look at how we are investing in our culture. America needs the love of Jesus. She needs to return to her first love or we will run out of Deuteronomy 6:3

Deuteronomy 6:3 ESV

3 Hear therefore, O Israel, and be careful to do them, that it may go well with you, and that you may multiply greatly, as the Lord, the God of your fathers, has promised you, in a land flowing with milk and honey.

I’m not calling America the promised land, or some special nation more special then any other. I am saying when you keep the loving of God and neighbor you get the blessings of God thrown in.

We must give God every square inch of this land and these people around us. We need to look at what local missions we are doing and how to do more, pray about your passions and who you’d like to see us reach locally, and internationally. We have a contingent of Brits with us I believe that is God giving us one clue as to missions outreach. Before the Pandemic I was an associate pastor at a church down in North Port and we had a large contingent of Ukrainians and Russians. We were actively talking to a Russian missionary family to send over a team to do some work with him. This is the way, we find an opening and we go to serve God and love our neighbor.

We always give locally towards children I believe that is another clue from the Holy Spirit.