Thankful for the Great Commandment

Last week, we looked at the passage where Jesus gave his disciples, and us, what we call the Great Commission. Today, we are going to be looking at what we call the Great Commandment. If you will grab your bible and find Matthew 22 we will be in verses 36-40.

The reason I am taking these weeks out and doing what may seem like random sermons is to refocus us. I firmly believe that we are in a new season as a church. If you are like me right now, you have leaves all over the ground. Trees are shedding leaves, but that does not mean that they are dead. Very soon, they will bloom back into their great beauty. The same is happening here. Many of our leaves have fallen off of the branch. But new leaves are sprouting up and our tree is looking beautiful. So we are taking some time looking at why we do what we do as a church.

Matthew 22:36–40 ESV

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.”

Pray.

This passage is a beautiful passage. It is one of the most important passages for a church today. So as we go through this sermon, I want to answer a question that we need to ask ourselves. Why is the great commandment so great?

1. Build the Kingdom

I spent several years working in construction. My job was to build the perimeter rail that goes around the edge of the house where they would nail in the floor joist. If I did not get this right, they would have had a hard time building the house. The floor joist could be in the wrong spot, the rail could have been the wrong length, there are many scenarios that if I did not build the rail correctly, then the house would be messed up.

With that same thought, we as believers must have a beginning point with everything. The question was posed to Jesus in verse 36, Matthew 22:36 ““Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?””. This question came to him from a lawyer that was on of the Pharisees. When he asks this question, our mind may go to the 10 Commandments. But this was not what he was asking. He was asking about the whole written law of Moses. So there is a lot of laws that Jesus could have chosen from. 613 to be precise. So Jesus answered him.

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.

This is a reference to Deuteronomy 6:5 “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” The last part is a little different with the word “might” and “mind”. But this does not take away from the point that Jesus was making. He told the Pharisees that they were to love God with everything that they had. Let’s get to the center of this, love.

What does it mean to love? Well for us to understand how we are to love, we must understand the love that was shown to us first. Romans 5:8 “but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” So even in our worst state imaginable, God loved us so much, that he sent Jesus to the cross. Jesus was beaten, broken, and killed in our place.

We know to what extend God loved us. So what does this mean about our love for him. Well, we should be seeking to love God the same way that he loves us. That is the root of the great commandment. To love God with everything. Jesus gives us 3 ways that we need to love God.

With all our heart - To do something with all of our heart means that there is no giving up. We will not abandon God because God has not abandoned us. This means protecting our hearts from the things that are not of God. This means purifying our own hearts and keeping them clean from unrighteousness. Our heart relates to our will.

With all our soul - This is the battleground for the Christian. Christ was no more tested that he was when he was sorrowful in his soul (Matthew 26:38 “38 Then he said to them, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death; remain here, and watch with me.”” ) Our soul relates to our emotions.

With all our mind - This is where our intellect comes into play. There is an intellectual piece to our faith. But there must be a correct posture. To love God with all of our mind means that we have the right intention behind it. We don’t love God out of an unhealthy fear of hell and damnation. But we love God because of his great mercy that he has shown us.

I want to relate this to our spiritual condition for a moment. We are born with a sinful nature. This sinful nature causes us to not want to love God but to love ourselves more than God. So without considering any other command in scripture, we cannot obey this because of our spiritual condition. But God. This is why we need salvation. We are commanded to love God with everything that we have, but we cannot do this without God’s redemption through Jesus Christ. (gospel presentation)

It is because of the grace of God that we have been saved.

Ephesians 2:4–10 ESV

4 But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, 5 even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— 6 and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7 so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. 8 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast. 10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

The only way we can do these good works that we hear about in scripture is because of the redemption of Jesus Christ. It is because of this that we are able to love God with everything that we have.

I said that this was about building the kingdom. And you may be wondering how this is building the kingdom. It is all about foundation. If we get this wrong, then we get the great commission wrong. If we don’t love the lord our God with all our heart, soul, and mind, then how are we going to be able to make disciples and teach them what Jesus taught. The great commission hinges on the great commandment.

When we love God with everything that we have, we will grow in our knowledge of God, we will grow in our faith in God, and we will grow in our boldness to share our faith. How do we build the kingdom? By making disciples. The first disciple that we need to focus on, is ourselves. And we need to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, and mind.

But then Jesus followed this up with Matthew 22:38 “This is the great and first commandment.” When Jesus said this, what he is doing is elevating what he just said. The question was what is the greatest commandment, out of 613 commands that were written by Moses, which is the greatest?

This is the greatest. Which means that if we get this wrong, then we probably get everything else wrong.

2. Impact our Community

Matthew 22:39–40 ESV

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.”

Love your neighbor as yourself. But Jesus says that this is like the first one. Now this is two different things so he doesn’t mean it in a sense of similarity. But of importance. These are both the greatest commandment. Love God, Love your neighbor. But not just to love your neighbor, but to love your neighbor as yourself. You may be thinking that you don’t really love yourself a lot. I know plenty of people like that. I would say that you need to go back to the verses before this and focus on loving God with all that we have. When we love God with everything that we have, we will be able to love ourselves.

And what do we do with that? We love our neighbor as ourselves. This comes from 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.” Love your neighbor as yourself.

When we think of our “neighbors”, who is that? Well, I think the best place to find this answer is in scripture.

Luke 10:25-37

Our neighbors are anyone that we come into contact with. It may be the clerk at the grocery store, it may be the teller at the bank, it may be the person that lives next to you. Anyone around us is our neighbor. And what are we supposed to do? Love them as ourselves.

What does this look like in your personal life? I think there are several ways that we can see this in our life.

actually speaking to people - spark up conversations with others. You cannot love them without making contact

meeting a specific need - maybe they are in front of you at the store and don’t have the money to buy their groceries. Maybe your neighbor needs their yard mowed. (talk about Danny mowing his neighbors yard). Maybe it is covering the power bill for the single mom with kids so that they heat and a stove to cook on.

Turning a conversation into a gospel moment - When you are talking to someone, look for opportunities to bring up biblical truths. But ultimately, we want this to lead to...

Sharing the gospel - Take an opportunity to share the plan of salvation with them. Memorize a simple gospel presentation and use it.

These are all practical ways we can do this in our personal life. But I want to bring this back to us as a church. I said that this verse is the basis for us wanting to impact our community.

Would our neighbors notice if we shut the doors? This is one of the most important questions that we need to ask ourselves as a church. What if we were a church that, if for some reason, we had to shut our doors and the neighborhood around us was in uproar. Because they know that the neighborhood needs us. God did not make a mistake when he put Immanuel Baptist Church at 1309 Old Charlotte Road. It would be a shame for us to not love on the neighbors that God has given us.

I want us to think about something right now. We as a church have a responsibility. We have a responsibility to our neighbors. We, as Immanuel Baptist Church, will have to answer for the impact we have on our community. This is serious. God put us here as a hospital for the sick. There are people right here around us that if they died today, they would go to hell. And we will have to answer for the fact if we have shared the gospel with them. I think of people who live here.

Tay on Arlington

Kenny on Stonewall

Wayne on Palmer

Susan on Coble

We will have to answer for the fact if we have intentionally been loving our neighbors as ourselves. And this is serious. This is why it is right there in our mission statement as a church. Build the Kingdom, Impact our Community. So how do we do this as a church. It will take us doing things like...

serving our teachers at central elementary

going into our neighborhood and serving pies

volunteering at our community kitchen

finding ways to volunteer at events in our community

knocking on our neighbors doors just to check in and build relationships with them.

This is how we impact our community. I want you to notice where none of these things take place. They do not take place here at our church. For years, the church was able to operate successfully with the idea of come and see. We could expect the people around us to come in and visit our church and possibly get connected with us. But we cannot expect that anymore. Our culture has changed, peoples view of the church has changed, and because of this, our methods need to change.

We must adopt the idea of go and tell instead of come and see. This is why we need to have a greater focus on outreach in our community. Outreach is not about getting people in the community to come in the walls of the church. If this is our angle for doing outreach, we will fail, and we will get upset at our community. The goal of outreach is to get us outside of the walls. To be rubbing shoulders with our neighbors, building relationships with them, hearing what the needs are and meeting those needs. Showing people that we care. If you lived in a neighborhood with a church that sat right in the middle of the neighborhood, and you never interacted with a single person from that church, they never stopped in a talked, they never asked you how they could pray for you, they never took time to show you that you were important to them, would you think that they actually cared about you?

And we cannot take the approach of speaking to them one time, maybe even sharing the gospel, and them rejecting it so we shun them and move on. People do not care how much you know until they know how much you care. We have to be building up relationships with our neighbors so that we can impact our community.

Conclusion

Build the Kingdom, Impact our Community. This is why we, as a church, exist. If we are not doing these things, we are no different than the rotary club, or the country club. God did not save us to warm pews on Sunday mornings. God saved us to be soul winners for him. So what do we do with this?

For the believer, you need to find a way to do this in a deeper way. Maybe it begins with a more consistent quiet time with God. Maybe you need to just carve out 10 minutes a day to read God’s word and pray. Some of us, maybe it is finding someone to disciple, to meet with and read God’s word and pray with one another. But for some of us, it begins with finding a way to get into our community here. And here is a way to do that. On November 22nd, we will be taking premade pies to the people that live in our neighborhood. And we need people to do that. It will be easy. You will knock on someones door and tell them that you are from Immanuel Baptist Church and that we just wanted to show our neighbors that we love them and hand them a pie. Simple as that. This is a simple way that we are going to grow our impact on our community.

But maybe this isn’t where you are at. Maybe you are at the point where you just need salvation. I want to tell you that you can have that today. Jesus says in Mark 1 that we need to repent and believe the gospel. The word repent means to make a turn. So we are going in one direction and we turn and go in the other direction. In terms of our salvation, we are headed towards sinfulness and death, so we turn towards life in Jesus Christ. And we believe. What do we believe? We believe in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. (gospel presentation)

I pray that through the sermon today, we have seen why the great commandment is so great. It is so great because of the power that it has. When we live out the great commandment, we will see God build his kingdom and we will be able to impact our community.