It’s All About Love

Today, we will be in Mark 12 verses 28-34. I am very thankful for Rev. Lee to have come to preach for us last week as we celebrated 78 years of gospel ministry to our community. I am looking forward to the next 78 years, although I will not be around to celebrate that with the ones who are here. Maybe 50 or so.

The passage we will be looking at today is on love. I have been looking forward to being able to preach this text for some time now because this is one of the most important texts for us as a church and as Christians to this day.

Mark 12:28–34 ESV

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.

Prayer

There have been some very heated debates over the years. Ford vs. Chevy. Apple vs. Android. Michael Jordan vs. Lebron. Which baseball team was the greatest of all time (of course 95 Braves). Scripture gets debated quite often. In fact, in 1517 in Germany, there began a debate that led to what is now known as the Protestant Reformation. The reformation happened because of doctrines that were being taught in the Catholic Church such as purgatory(a pass through place to earn your way into heaven) and indulgences (paying money to the church to get dead loved ones into heaven). After being convinced through the study of scripture that they were teaching false doctrine, Martin Luther made a stand. He did not go and burn down a church or cause a riot. He wrote out 95 thesis (statements), and went and nailed them to the door of the church, a practice that was a common form of debate.

The debate before us in our passage today is that of which commandment was the greatest one. The answer to this question could have been any one of the 613 commands that were found in the Old Testament. Yes, there were that many. But the answer that Jesus gave was the right one. I am going to preach through this text, but I want to simply state for us. Jesus is saying that we should love God with all that we have and love others like we should love ourselves.

Let me put it another way. We are to build the kingdom and impact our community. We build the kingdom by loving God with all that we have and we impact our community by loving our neighbors. If you thought our mission statement was something that was really elaborate and meticulously planned out, you are wrong. It is the great commandment. Love God, love others. As simple as that. What’s love got to do with it? Everything. It’s all about love.

Main Point: Love God first and you will be able to love others

As we go through our passage, we are going to take some time to truly define what love is and look at how our love must be shaped by our view of God. If you truly love God, you will have real love for others. If you do not love God, the love that you have for others is not real love. My prayer is that by the end of the sermon, that will be more clear for you. So with that in mind, it begs the question…

Question: Do I really love God with my whole life?

If real love only comes from God and for me to understand that I need to love God with everything that I have, then do I really and truly love God with everything that I have.

There are two distinction in our text today that deal with love and our spirit behind our love. The first is that…

Our Faith Must be Rooted in Love

In the context of what is going on, there are several people who are throwing questions and scenarios at Jesus. They are trying to stumble him and question him, but nothing is sticking. Now he is approach by a scribe. A scribe would have been like a religious lawyer. We know that lawyers are good at debating and trying to twist things to get the outcome that they desire. So he might would have thought that he would be able to catch Jesus in some sort of opinionated mistruth here with his question.

Mark 12:28 ESV

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?”

Which one is the most important? So we have 613 different commandments found in the Old Testament law, give or take depending on who you ask (some may take something as a command where others do not). But within these commands, we have different categories. We have cultural/civil laws, ceremonial laws, and moral laws.

With ceremonial laws, they were given to a people in a specific time to follow for them to be able to get back into a right standing with God. This would include laws that would govern their worship, sacrifice, purity, dietary regulations and would govern the festivals they were to observe. These laws were given to be able to distinguish themselves as a people who were set aside by God to be different.

Leviticus 19:19 ESV

19 “You shall keep my statutes. You shall not let your cattle breed with a different kind. You shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed, nor shall you wear a garment of cloth made of two kinds of material.

This is a common example. Most of us are wearing clothes with mixed material right now. Are we breaking God’s law? No. This law was not given to us but to the Israelites to set them apart from all of the other pagan nations around them. When understanding laws and commands, context it key.

But then we come to the cultural/civil laws. These were given to navigate through things in culture that they would be facing. Are they good laws, absolutely. All the laws are good laws, they just don’t apply to all people of all time. For example, has anyone dealt with an ox goring someone lately?

Exodus 21:28–29 ESV

28 “When an ox gores a man or a woman to death, the ox shall be stoned, and its flesh shall not be eaten, but the owner of the ox shall not be liable. 29 But if the ox has been accustomed to gore in the past, and its owner has been warned but has not kept it in, and it kills a man or a woman, the ox shall be stoned, and its owner also shall be put to death.

This is why it is necessary to understand the commands that we read. Not all of them apply to all people of all time. But, some do. And that is where we get the category of moral laws. The moral law includes regulations on justice, respect, and sexual conduct, and includes the Ten Commandments. So the command to honor your father and mother are moral. Or the command to not kill would be moral.

Those are 3 categories of commandments in the Old Testament law. But then you can break them down even more because we have certain commands to do things and certain commands to not do things. We are command TO honor our father and mother. But we are also commanded NOT TO murder. What I don’t want you to get caught up in or get discouraged in is thinking that this is burdensome and how to go about keeping all of these laws. Because we cannot keep them all. That is the point of the gospel of Jesus. We will come back to that soon. But right now, Jesus was asked a question. What is the greatest commandment, out of all of the Old Testament commandments, which one is the greatest.

Mark 12:29 ESV

29 Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.

Jesus quotes from Deut 6 here. This is what is called the Shema. This was well known, in fact all of the devout Jews would recite this every single morning. What a wonderful declaration this is too. The Hebrew word for Lord is Yahweh. This is the covenant name that God gave himself to his people. He is the God of his people. For the believer, this still rings true. He is our God. But not only that, he is the only God. The Lord our God, the Lord is one. There are no other Gods, only one God. He is unique in his existence and he is unique in his unity of himself. God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, are one God.

This is foundational to biblical theology. There are things that are basic beliefs to believe as a Christian. The sinless life of Christ, the deity of Christ, the bodily resurrection, the crucifixion, salvation being by grace through faith. And this salvation being offered by the only God. John 14:6 “6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Jesus is God. And what he is saying here is about himself. He is the only God.

Mark 12:30 ESV

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.’

People have defined love in different ways over time. Today, people often think that to love then you have to approve someones actions and accept them for who they think they are. I can love someone without approving of their sinful actions. If I have a friend who goes and runs around on his wife, I can love him while not approving of his sin. If I have a friend who continues to take the Lord’s name in vain, I can still love him while I do not approve of his sin.

The topic of homosexuality and transgenderism is very prevalent today. The community and supporters of those communities, as a whole, believe that if you do not accept their beliefs and approve of what they say that they are, that you hate them. Words like bigot and homophobe get used a lot. Love can still happen without approval and acceptance of sin. The true definition of love is very important.

But then I could say that I love other things. I love baseball. I love professional wrestling. I love bbq. I love black coffee. But do these statements hold the same weight and the love that the bible commands of us.

So what does it mean to love in a biblical way? This word that is used here in the original Greek is “agapoa”. There are many different words in the New Testament that are translated as love. So what does this one mean?This is the same word that is used to describe Jesus’s love for people. It is also the same word that describes God’s love for Jesus. This word means that you take pleasure in something.

In our passage today, this word “love” is used in a sense to help shape our character and our admiration for God. The best way to define love is through example. So to define love in a biblical way, we must look at a biblical example. What better person to look at than Christ himself. John tells us what love really is.

1 John 4:7–11 ESV

7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 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. 10 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. 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.

Love for God is both sacrifice and devotion. And this is what Jesus is saying with what he is telling this scribe. We are to devote ourselves fully to God. Heart, soul, mind, and strength. This is morally, spiritually, intellectually, and physically (repeat). Our whole selves. Complete devotion to God.

So for us, what would this look like? Let’s say you read this and think, “this is nice and all, but I don’t know if I can do that”. What should you do to at least be moving in the right direction?

It begins with looking at your heart, mind, soul, and strength. These are the things that are listed in God’s word, so these are the things we examine.

Do I love the things that God loves?

Do I hate the things that God hates?

Do I love God’s word and desire to know it?

Do I let God’s word read me as I read it?

Do I love God?

Do I desire to know God not just on an intellectual level but on an intimate level?

Do I talk to others about God’s love for me and my love for him?

Do I do things to serve God and please him?

These are all things that we can use as a test to know if we are loving God with our whole selves. This is not an exhaustive list but it is one that will open our eyes to our devotion. How these are answered will determine how much of our devotion we have given to God or if we have given any devotion to God.

But it isn’t just about our devotion to God. Jesus actually adds to the one command.

Mark 12:31 ESV

31 The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

Jesus takes the Shema says it is the greatest commandment, and then adds a command found in Leviticus 19:18 to it and equates them as something that should happen simultaneously. He isn’t dodging the answer to this question from the scribe. In fact he gives a detailed answer on what love should look like. Love God with everything that you have and love others like you should love yourself.

He uses this word neighbor here. I have generally had good neighbors over my lifetime. There was this one neighbor whose kids would cause chaos in between our houses at times by shooting guns in a very close proximity to our house and the one guy who would talk to and argue with himself in his front yard and the woman who would beat up her husband in the apartment next to ours when we first got married and then the other woman who would hallucinate and see people sitting on our front porch all the time. But we have had decent neighbors. I have heard you all tell stories about not getting along very well with some neighbors. Whether it be their opinion about how your house should be or maybe even boundary disputes. But when Jesus talks about neighbors, just like with much of what he teaches, he goes beyond what a neighbor is because he expects much more from us as followers.

In the book of Luke, Jesus is telling a parable about the good samaritan in response to someone asking who their neighbor is. The central part of this parable that he tells is that we are all neighbors but the one who shows mercy to others is the one who is truly a neighbor and we should do the same to others. We show mercy to others. We are to love others like we love ourselves.

We want the best for ourselves. As believers, internally we are very hard on ourselves. This is because we are to hate our sin because we love God. Loving ourselves is yet another thing that gets twisted today. The world has lied to people and made them believe that if they love themselves, they will do what ever their heart feels like doing. If you want to go and get drunk every night, you love yourself by going and doing that. If you want to go and sleep with every guy or every girl you can get into your bed, then you go and do that because you are to love yourself. This is not love.

You see, the more and more that God reveals his truth through his word to us, the more that we see that love is not approval and acceptance. If I want to love myself, then I must deny myself, not do what I think is best for me. This sounds like a paradox. But lets go back to what Jesus taught about the good Samaritan. If the Samaritan would have done what was best for him, he would have been a terrible neighbor. If I have a bad neighbor and causes all kinds of problems for me and I want to do what is best for me, then I go and burn his house down and then I don’t have to worry about having them as a neighbor.

We must see love through a biblical lens. To do that, we must reject this mistruth that the world teaches about what love really is, because love is not about ourselves. It is about giving our whole lives to God and showing mercy towards others. If we are at the center of love, it is not love but it is selfishness.

And selfish love can mask itself in other ways too. Because there are people who say that they are followers of Jesus and attempt to do these things with wrong motives. You do not follow these commands as a way to get God to love you. The gospel of Jesus is not a works based gospel. No, we follow these commands because we are loved by God and we love God. There is nothing that we will get out of this except for a deeper love for our Lord.

Our faith must be rooted in love.

Religious Doing Does Not get us into the Kingdom of God

If I have heard it once, I have heard it a hundred times. If you were to ask someone how they knew they would go to heaven, the answer would be something to the effects of “I am a good person and I do good things”. I am not advocating that you should not be a good person who does good things, but this is not at the center of Christianity. Pastor and Author Jared Wilson has said that, “the church as a whole does not care if their neighbor comes to faith as long as they act right”. The same could be said about what people do.

But it goes beyond the world and into the church. We want people in the church to “do”. I, personally, want us to do good things. In a few weeks, we will be participating in our “Serve NC” week where we go and do projects around our neighborhood and city. But I would never want you to think that by doing good things that you will earn your way into the kingdom of God. Admittance into the Kingdom of God is not because of what we offer to God but because of what God offers to us.

Jesus gives the scribe his answer and the scribe responds.

Mark 12:32 ESV

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.

The scribe acknowledges that what Jesus says is right. There is only one God and there is no other god like him. But he doesn’t just stop there.

Mark 12:33 ESV

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.”

Now we are getting down to business. To love God with everything you have is far more important than any attempt to get to God. That is what the offerings and sacrifices were for. To pay the payment for your sins. It was the bridge from man’s sin to God’s righteousness. These are outward actions. The outward actions were done so that the inward corruption would be overlooked.

Think about it. This devout Jew, who would have been part of temple sacrifices and burnt offerings is saying that who we are inwardly is of far greater importance that who we are outwardly. Devotion not doing is what is important. The offering system that was established is what would get you to God. Love is what God brought to us. And he brought it to us through the gospel.

Gospel presentation (God, man, Christ, response) (God giving Jesus as our sacrifice)

But there is still a difference in head knowledge and heart knowledge. Knowing it and truly believing it. Or knowing it and truly living it out. And Jesus points that out here with his response to the scribe.

Mark 12:34 ESV

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.

Jesus tells this man that he is very close to God’s kingdom. He declares with his mouth that the most important thing for someone to do is to love God with everything that they have and to love others.

When Jesus tells him that he is close, he is not saying that the man needs to keep trying harder and he will get there. What he is doing is acknowledging that this man has come to the fact that devotion is more important than doing.

Conclusion

Are you far from the kingdom of God or do you understand that devotion is more important than doing?

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength. And love your neighbor as yourself.

I want to bring this back around to us specifically. At Immanuel, we are building the kingdom and impacting our community. We build the kingdom with our love for God and we impact our community with our love for others. Before we gather again, there will be 167 hours that go by. What will this time look like for you?

Will you be intentionally taking time to grow in your devotion to God? I want you to take the questions that I gave to you and ask them daily. Will you be spending time in prayer and in God’s word to see his love for you so that you grow in your love and devotion to him? Will you let this shape how you love yourself by denying yourself, taking up your cross and following him? Will how you love yourself change how you love others by showing them the love that you have received?

If you want to grow as a follower of Jesus, these are very important things to work through. This is not for a baby Christian or for a mature Christian. This is for all Christians. So this is my challenge to you. Love the lord your God with everything you have and love others like you should love yourself.

I want to leave us with a quote from John Wesley and then I am going to pray for us and we will worship God through song.

John Wesley - “We owe all our love to God alone - That is, the whole strength and capacity of our understanding, will, and affections. To love and serve him with all the united powers of the soul in their utmost vigor and to love our neighbor as ourselves; to maintain the same equitable and charitable temper and behavior toward all people, as we, in like circumstances, would wish from them toward ourselves, is a more necessary and important duty than offering the most noble and costly sacrifices.”