Greatest Commandment

The Greatest Commandment. Our Foundation in understanding Love

Everybody loves something.

Growing up there was a sound my sister and I loved to hear almost more than anything else.

The recorded music on the ice cream truck would stop us in our tracks more than almost anything else. During summer the ice cream truck would drive through our neighborhood and make stops. We loved that truck so much that we got to know the lady who ran the truck, so much so that when she retired, she gave my sister the hat that she wore every time she worked.

My sister loved the ice cream lady so much that one afternoon we were driving home and we were nearing our driveway and we heard that beatiful sound ring in our ears. My sister, who is younger and at the time was maybe 5 or 6, unbuckled her seat belt (if she was wearing one, it was the 80s) and opened the car door as the car was still moving to get out to get over to the ice cream truck. She was committed!

Love is always connected to possibility

When we love something or someone it is always about possibility. To love is always about taking what is and moving it toward what could be.

For my sister in that car, it wasn’t that the car was moving or that she could get hurt, it was that there was the possibility of ice cream.

Because love is possibility It is the constant reminder there is life beyond and past us. That we participate in a world that is much bigger than us. 

Love rightly ordered leads us to God Himself 

If you have ever experienced love. Like jump from a car love then you are well on your way to understanding the love of God. 

But love needs some kind of object. No one loves love. People love something. Love is an idea on the move. It is always attached to something.

And if your love is attached to the right thing, then love remains something good and can lead to loving God and others well.

But sometimes our loves become attached to lesser things. Things we think we need to love or things that have promised to love us but then cannot make good on those promises.

And when those things don’t give us what we hope or love them for, that love quickly deflates and becomes anger or bitterness.

Usually when we are angry or sad or bitter or jaded or frustrated it is because something that we love has not delivered on what we had thought was possible

Our love is leading us somewhere. When we act on love it can lead us to God, the source of all love and it can lead us to care and support others in love, or if we aren’t intentional about what our love is connecting to, we can become angry or bitter. Spurned because what we loved did not love us back.

We have to understand what love is, what we do with it, and most importantly, where it comes from.

And that is why this passage this morning is so important, so foundational to our lives. Because it shows us what love is and what it is for.

The passage we are looking at this morning is sometimes called the Great Commandment. Even Jesus says that the Law and Prophets depend on these two statements. The work of the church depends on these two statements.

Just like if you drill down deep enough into the earth you find oil, ultimately if you drill down deep enough into the life of a Christian, you find these two commands at work. They are inescapable. We have to look right at them this morning and ask ourselves how we are doing at loving God and loving others?

But first we have to define terms. The idea of love is so wild and hard to manage that we almost have to define it anytime we bring it up. What do we mean by it?

To love is to do what’s best for the other person regardless of what it costs you by acting with both delight and wisdom.

We love when we do what’s best for another (God or others) regardless of what it costs us. And we enact that through both delight and wisdom.

We do what’s best for another by delighting in them. We love them for who they are and that they are.

We do what’s best for another by showing wisdom. We love them for who they can become in Christ.

To love is to act in delight and wisdom for bettering another.

If we are going to talk about loving God and neighbor, we have to make sure we know what that means. And to really know what love means, we need to look to God first. We know love because God first loved us.

God loves with everything so that we can love God with everything

Matthew 22:34–38 ESV

But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” 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 the great and first commandment.

We need to linger here for awhile. Jesus tells us to love God entirely. To love God with all of who we are, heart, soul, and mind. To love God with everything.

How do we begin to understand how to love God when on our own we will struggle and haggle with our own attempts for love. On our own it feels strange and impossible. How will we ever have enough?

We think that we have to muster up enough love to love God.

We often think of choosing how to love God in the same way that we would order off of a menu. Think of going to a restaurant and sitting down and looking over a menu. You have a hundred options of meals you can get. And you can get any combination of those items. You can get steak or chicken with soda or wine. You can get dessert or not. Or two desserts. We think that loving God with all of us is that we choose how we love and get to choose from a menu of sorts. I’ll take this and this and this and not this. I’ll choose to love this way but not that way.

We say God ill love today but its hard tomorrow I love you with this relationship but not with that one .

Or it creates a sort of anxiety in us. Are we ordering the right things? Are we doing it right? What if I got the wrong thing? We have been taught by our culture that we get to choose off any menu we want and whatever we choose is right. But it creates a sort of decision fatigue and anxiety. If it is up to us to get it right and love right, then it will be easy to always think we aer missing out and doing it wrong.

 Love for God is not like ordering from a menu but is more like being taken to the kitchen to try a 3 course menu of the chefs choosing. Take the same restaurant and instead of sitting down to the table the chef greets you at the door and invites you into the kitchen. The kitchen is sacrosanct for a chef. It is where they do their work. So for the chef to invite you there is a big deal.

The chef has you sit down and tells you that he has just gotten some produce and items today from a local farmers market and he wants to use them in a recipe that he has been working on. So he prepares it as he talks to you about what he is making.

You are personally served each plate by the chef. He makes an appetizer that perfectly pairs with the main entree that perfectly pairs with dessert. The chef takes time and exhibits the fullness of his skills and chooses from that skill set the meal he knows will be best in this setting.

This is what it means to love God. We are not just told to love God with everything and then figure out how to do that like picking the right items off a menu.

We are brought in by the chef himself and are showed exactly what the meal looks like. God shows us how to pick by showing us the best expression of what the menu offers. God’s love is based on the reliability of His own promise and ability. And then we are shown what His promise and ability is like. We are able to love God in both delight and wisdom because He has shown us what love is.

We love God by knowing how God has loved us. God’s love in our lives is transformative. It changes us as we interact with Him. So to love God is to first understand God’s love for us.

Listen to this verse

1 John 4:7–12 ESV

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

To be told to love God with everything has first been demonstrated and shown to us as revealed in Christ. So loving God with our heart, soul, mind and strength can feel impossible, But it is not impossible in Christ. He has invited us in, shown us what God is like, and has given us His Spirit to love God with.

So how do,we act with love through those 2 ideas delight and wisdom

In Delight we say, God you are worthy to be worshiped for who you are

We love God because God is good and has invited us back into life with Him! We love God for who He is

In Wisdom we say, God I will apply your words to my life

Wisdom says, we work to apply what God has said into our lives. To love God with everything is to act with Gods wisdom in the world, how do we apply what He has told us in our daily lives?

Loving God with everything shows us how to love others as ourselves

Matthew 22:39–40 ESV

And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

We are called to love God and love all those who are not God. This is the life of the Christian.

And we are called to show God’s love to our neighbor.

Your neighbor, as a definition, is whoever you are closest to at any given point.

We are called to exemplify the already given love of God to others. Jesus tells us to love others as ourselves. And this is pretty self evident. If you got up this morning and fed yourself and dressed yourself and cared for yourself, then you have exemplified what self love is.

We naturally care for ourselves and we are called to show that kind of love to others in our lives. There are people we come across who need care, and love, and concern and compassion. There are people that need delight and wisdom. There are people who feel like nothing, who feel invisible, who feel lost and who feel least.

And you can love them in delighting that they are who they are.

Delight says, I love that you have made it this far

They are created in the image of God and Christ has died for them. You can delight in God’s workmanship in their lives.

We are called to communicate the goodness of God in the world and that God is the origin of every human’s life. He is the center of every person’s desire. Delight shouts to the neighbor, “you were created by a God who loves you deeply and who calls His creation good.” If you have never been called good, know that God made you with purpose and as a product of His work.

We often don’t hear that because we live in a broken world, a world stained and marked with what the Bible calls sin, a disobedience to God and a selfishness toward people. Where we choose our preferences over anybody elses, including God. This is why love is not just delight but delight and wisdom.

Delight is a declaration of what is true about God

Wisdom is an orientation of how to live that out

There are people who are wandering, who are confused, scared, lost. And they need wisdom. In the way that you would work over a problem you are having, we are called to take that kind of care with others.

Wisdom says, I love that you can move forward.

There are people who are longing to hear from God, wanting to know that there is something more out there, asking if God really cares.

And God has sent out His church to answer that question with a loud, yes!

Wisdom is the ability to navigate the brokenness of the world. Wisdom is not yelling or pointing fingers but it is being able to point out the obstacles in our way.

Imagine you are driving down the road and you see someone on the side of the road waving their arms wildly. You stop and ask what is wrong and he says that a tree has just fallen on the other side of the hill up ahead and if you keep going you are going to crash right into it. The person warning you has information that is intended to keep you safe. Wisdom allows you to make forward movement without crashing.

Love is the most real and true thing you will ever act on. Jesus commands it, embodies it, acts on it, and practices it. We are called to understand love from His perspective.

Maybe you are here this morning and you have a picture of love but a picture of love that doesn’t last, or that evaporates quickly. The love of Christ does not dry up. He is trustworthy to show you what love looks like.

Love is the very thing every human needs, but it is only fulfilled through God in Christ. The very source of love, Christ Himself, is the proclaimed head of the church. We want to get this one right and we will work as a church to love God with everything and to love our neighbor as ourselves.