The Great Commandment
Notes
Transcript
Good Morning!!
Please keep the SBC Convention in your prayers the next 3 days as we meet to conduct the Lord’s business.
A Roman Catholic, a Methodist, a Presbyterian, and a Southern Baptist were all out fishing together on an ecumenical fishing trip. They got into an argument on what denomination Jesus would be. The Roman Catholic said no doubt he would be part of Mother Church. The Presbyterian said, "No, no. When you consider all that John Calvin did for the Christian faith, there is no question he would unite with the Reformed tradition." The Methodist said, "No, no, no, no. When you consider all that John and Charles Wesley did for the Christian faith, there is no question he would unite with the Methodist conviction. The Southern Baptist looked perplexed for a few minutes and said, "Boys, I don't think he's going to change."
Today we are going to be in Mark 12:28-34.
Last week we saw the Sadducees try and trap Jesus with their question about marriage and the resurrection, which they don’t even believe in. They came up with the story about a woman who went through 7 brothers and then she died, and they wanted to know who’s wife she would be. Jesus told them that they do not understand the Scriptures and they do not understand the power of God. Jesus told them that there will not be marriage in heaven. It will not be needed. No one will die and there will be no need to make new children. That is the main reason God gave us marriage in the beginning. We were to get married and populate the earth. That need won’t be there in heaven. We will also have a perfect relationship with everyone in heaven. We won’t need a spouse, we will have all who are in heaven that we will know and they will know us. It will be prefect. Jesus ended by telling them that God is not the God of the dead, but He is the God of the living. He refenced when God spoke to Moses through the burning bush. He said that He was the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob. He used present tense, He was talking about them like they were still alive, because they were. They were walking with God every day. Even though they had passed away hundreds of years before this event at the burning bush. They were alive, just not on earth. They were with God! Jesus told them that they were greatly mistaken. They had a bad theology on the resurrection.
Today we are going to look at a question one of the scribes asks Jesus. He is going to ask Jesus what is the most important commandment? Jesus is going to answer them and after this exchange, none of the religious leaders are going to try and trap Jesus. He has foiled all the plans of all the major religious sects in Jerusalem. We saw the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Herodians, and now the scribes.
Please stand as we read God’s Word.
28 And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, “Which commandment is the most important of all?” 29 Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ 31 The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” 32 And the scribe said to him, “You are right, Teacher. You have truly said that he is one, and there is no other besides him. 33 And to love him with all the heart and with all the understanding and with all the strength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself, is much more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” 34 And when Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” And after that no one dared to ask him any more questions.
After Jesus had answered the Sadducees, they were arguing with one another. Jesus had answered their question with the truth, with scripture and they didn’t like it! We see this scribe seeing that Jesus had answered them well, asked his own question. He asked what is the greatest commandment?
The rabbis had determined that there were 613 commandments in the Pentateuch, the first 5 books of the Bible. That is what Pentateuch means, 5 books. They had come up with one law for every letter in the 10 commandments in Hebrew. They had further broken down the commandments into affirmative and negative. There were 248 commandments that were seen as affirmative and 365 that were negative. They then divided them further into heavy and light categories. The heavy ones were more binding than the light ones. The big problem was that the scribes and the rabbis could not agree on which ones were heavy and light. So they wanted to see if Jesus had come up with His own theory on which were which. They were hoping that He would reveal His own unorthodox and unilateral beliefs about the commandments. They wanted Jesus to incriminate Himself. He didn’t!
Jesus answers first by stating the most important thing in the Bible, who God is! He tells them the first part of the Shema. It comes from Dt 6:4-5
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.
The word Shema means “hear”. That is what they called these verses. This would have been their John 3:16. Every devout Jew would have know this and they would have recited it multiple times a day. Again Jesus answers their question with Scripture. Jesus is telling them that the most important thing even about the commandments is to know who God is. There is only one God. He is not a God that was made by man, He was the God who made man. He is the creator of all things. We have to truly know God and who He is, before we can do what Jesus tells us to do next as the most important command.
We are to love God. That’s it, that’s all, love God. That’s easy. NO
We have to love God with ALL YOUR HEART and with ALL YOUR SOUL and with ALL YOUR MIND and with ALL YOUR STRENGTH!!
We are to love God the way He loves us.
We are to love Him with all that we are.
We are to love God like we have never loved anyone before!
Everything in us should yearn for Him who created us. The one who sent His Son to die so that we can live. If we love our spouses more than we love God, we have failed.
God has to be first in everything, or we fail. God can’t be something that we do on Sundays and sometimes on Wednesdays! He has to be every second of everyday! That is the kind of love that He requires. If we put anyone or anything above Him, we lose. There can be no one else in His spot. He must be first in all things.
Just think about all that it in tales to love like Jesus just told us to love God.
With all our heart, soul, mind and strength - We have to choose Him. Every second of every day, we must choose God. If we don’t, we will put something or someone in His place. The only way we can do this is if we truly know God, when we know Him, he changes us and changes our hearts so that we can truly love Him.
6 And the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live.
Moses is telling the Jews of a time when a New Covenant would be instituted and that when that happens, God will circumcise the heart so that it will love God will all your heart and all our soul. Without God, we could never love this way!
We have to make He a priority every day!
Jesus next gives him a bonus answer, He tells him the second most important commandment, to love your neighbor as yourself! This might be harder than the first one! Not for the true believer!
When we love God correctly, it produces a love for people! Love for people comes from a love for God.
Jesus isn’t talking about the people who live around you. Those people are your neighbors, but that is not what Jesus is talking about. Everyone is our neighbor! Jesus didn’t say to love your fellow believers, your fellow church members. He didn’t say to love the ones who are nice to you. He said to love everyone. Everyone and anyone we come in contact with is our neighbor. We are to love them.
Jesus is quoting 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.
This is the most often quoted Old Testament text in the New Testament. I counted at lest 9 times it is quoted. It must be pretty important for it to be repeated that many times!
A true love for God will produce a love for people. I don’t believe that a believe can say that they do not like people. It goes against everything the Bible teaches. We are called to love and live out that love for our neighbors.
We can’t just say we love everyone and never do anything with that love. The love that Jesus is talking about here will move us to go and help our neighbors any way we can.
We are called to love the way that God loves us, unconditionally!
8 but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
God didn’t wait for us to love Him first, He loved first. He sent Jesus to die for us while we still hated Him. We must not wait for people to like us first or to treat us well first, we must love them no matter what! The way Christ loved us while we were still against Him.
Love conquers all
7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
John warns us about not loving in 1 John 4:8
8 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.
To say that we love God and we don’t love people is like having a boat and never untying it from the dock. We say we love our boat and we go and sit in our boat but we never untie it and go and use it.
That is ridiculous.
We have to untie our boats and go and use them. Even if that means they are going to get dents and dings. Boats get dirty, they get sweat and mud and dirt in them, if you fish out of your boat, they get fish slime and blood and guts in them. We clean them the best we can at the end of the day and then the next day we untie them again and use them.
God gives us a new heart to love the way He does when we are saved. It does no go to not use that new love we are given. Don’t be like the servant who hid the talent in the ground. Go and multiply the love that was given you by using it and loving others.
We show our love for God when we love others
If we do not love, we do not know God!
How can we not love others when we have been loved so much by God. We must show that same love to everyone!
We see that the scribe agrees with all of Jesus’ answers. I wonder how the other scribes reacted when he said that. They all hated Jesus and here one of their own is agreeing with Jesus.
Jesus tells him that he is not far from the kingdom of God. This scribe was close to having salvation! Probably a lot closer than most of the scribes.
Close is not the same as in! If we die and we are just close to the kingdom of God, we miss out for eternity.
We can’t be happy with just close to the kingdom. We have to want to be in the kingdom. The only way to be in the kingdom is to repent and believe in Jesus Christ as the only Son of God, who died for your sins so that you could have eternal life. We have to repent, which means to turn from our sins. We can’t call ourselves Christians if we are still doing the same sins that we did 10-15 years ago. If we are not sinning less, then we are not turning from our sins. Jesus didn’t die so that we could keep on living in our sins. He died so that we could turn from them and to Him. When we are truly saved, we are a new creation. The old passes away, our old desires are gone and we are given new ones. It is up to us to not go back to our old ways. We have to stay focused on God.
We have to love Him with all that we are.
We have to choose Him every day!
Our salvation is just the beginning, not the end.
We have to choose God every day.
We have to choose love every day.
When we choose God and choose to love, that will produce obedience to His commandments. Obedience is hard when we are not choosing Him.
Have you stopped choosing Him everyday?
Are you loving Him with all that you are?
Are you loving your neighbor as yourself?
Are you in the kingdom of God, or are you just close?
Close is not good enough. We have to be IN the kingdom of God!! Only then do you have true salvation.
If you need to change who or what you are choosing or if you want to be in the kingdom of God, while we sing you pray.
Let’s pray
