Person of God in Culture of Self 016

Becoming A Person of God in a Culture of Self

Restoring the Savor of Our Salt Series       Message # 16

I’d invited you attention today to Mark chapter 12. We’re working today on our final message in the series Restoring the Savor of Our Salt. You have endured, and today we’re done.

We’ve been talking about the fact that our lives are either shaped by the culture around us, or they are shaped by the Word of God. And we’ve also been talking about Romans 12:1-2, and the fact that we all need to do the hard work of climbing out of the culture’s mold and climbing into the mold of the Word of God. Letting the Bible change my mind, shape my heart, shape my thinking and my values.

Romans 12:1-2 says, “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. 2  And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.”

With that as a backdrop, I want to ask you to think with me about Mark chapter 12. We’ll be reading from verse 28 through 34. And we’re talking about becoming a person of God in a culture of self absorption. Becoming a person of God in a culture of self.

Mark chapter 12, beginning in verse 28. “And one of the scribes came, and having heard them reasoning together, and perceiving that he had answered them well, asked him, Which is the first commandment of all? 29  And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord: 30  And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. 31  And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these. 32  And the scribe said unto him, Well, Master, thou hast said the truth: for there is one God; and there is none other but he: 33  And to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the soul, and with all the strength, and to love his neighbour as himself, is more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices. 34  And when Jesus saw that he answered discreetly, he said unto him, Thou art not far from the kingdom of God. And no man after that durst ask him any question.”

Newsweek Magazine sometime back carried a brief review of some books that had been written by Donald Trump. I want to read what they had to say about those books. The title of the little article was, “It’s so Incredibly Wonderful Being Me, Part 3.” Here is what the writer from Newsweek said. “A lot of famous octogenarians [referring to eighty-year-olds] get roped into writing an autobiography, but at the tender age of 51, New York City’s mega-deal maker and real estate developer, Donald Trump, has already published his third autobiography. And then they gave us a few extras from those autobiographies. Here are the highlights. From the book entitled, Trump: The Art of the Comeback, he says, “Greed is good.” Second quote from a different section: “I have only one regret in the woman depart—that I never had the opportunity to court Lady Diana Spencer.” From another part: “Henry Kissinger used to hang on my every word.”

From his second book, Trump—Surviving At the Top, “Avana never stopped loving me. You can’t be too cocky. I am a survivor—a survivor of success.”

From another book The Art of the Deal, “I don’t do this for money. I fight what I feel I am being [explicative deleted]. You don’t have to be a genius to run a monopoly. I aim very high and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing. The dollar always talks in the end.”

And then my favorite quote: “Making choices is a lot easier when you have to answer to only yourself.”

Donald Trump, I suspect, based on those books and based on his approach to life, should be the poster boy for self-absorption. He should be the poster boy for narcissism, for self-promotion, for self-love. And I suspect he should also be the poster boy for terrific personal emptiness.

I believe that Donald Trump has inside of himself a huge spiritual vacuum, and that every one of us have inside of us a terrific spiritual vacuum. Science teaches that a vacuum must be filled. In the physical world, a vacuum must be filled. Something rushes in there to fill it. And in the spiritual world, a vacuum must be filled. Something goes in to fill that vacuum.

The question for each of us to answer is, what is going in to fill my vacuum?

Donald Trump is trying to fill the vacuum inside himself with himself. He is saying, I am in terrific pain, something is missing here. I know what I can fill that vacuum with: I can fill it with me.

The reality is that Donald Trump is the poster boy for self-absorption, but he is not very much different than the entire culture in which we live. That there is a huge movement in our culture to try to fill the vacuum within ourselves with ourselves.

The French mathematician and philosopher named Blaise Pascal said, “There is a God-shaped void inside each one of us and we are ill at east until we find our rest in Him.”

Let me ask you to think about it another way, and that is to say, if you take this God-shaped void inside your soul and cram something besides God into the void, it is going to start by making you anxious, and it’s going to end up by making you miserable. If I take this void in my soul and put something in there other than the Person of God, first of all, it will make me anxious. And finally, it will make me downright miserable.

Here is the question I want to ask you to think about today as we look at this passage in Mark chapter 12. The question is: if I were going to try to find God into the void of my soul, how would I go about that?

If I am anxious enough or miserable enough to say, I am ready to try and see if God will fit in this void in my soul, how would I go about that.

I believe the answer is found in Mark chapter 12:20-34. I want to begin by talking about verse 29, which is the foundational truth of this passage. Verse 29, the foundational truth is this: God is unique, He is alone, He is unlike any other. Verse 29. “…Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord.”

Verse 29 is a direct quote from Deuteronomy chapter 6, verse 4, and this is a praise, a verse that every devout Jew would recite morning and evening. It is called the Shema. And the meaning of this verse is very simply that Jehovah, the Covenant-keeping God of Israel, is alone, He is unique. To put it in our language, you don’t know anyone like God. There is only One God. He is completely different from anyone you know.

The God of the Bible is not like Billy Graham minus the humility. The God of the Bible is not like Mother Teresa without the bad habits. … Did you get that one?

The God of the Bible is not like Donald Trump without sin. The God of the Bible is not like Joan of Arc without mortality. You don’t know anybody like God!

This passage in Deuteronomy 6:4 is saying that the God of the Bible is alone, He is unique, and you don’t know anyone like Him. He has majesty beyond description, glory beyond belief, compassion beyond understanding, holiness beyond imagination. He is just beyond explanation. He is beautiful beyond comparison. You don’t know anyone like God. So the message, the foundational truth that he is trying to drive home before He tells us what He is calling us to do is the reality that God is alone, unique, perfect, totally unlike anyone that you know. And it is foolish to treat God like anyone you know.

The foundational truth is God is unique. He is different. And He goes from that foundational truth in verse 29 to tell us the core command in verse 30. The core command is this: You shall love the Lord your God with all that you are! Verse 30: “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.”

If you took a human being and took away from that person their heart, their soul, their mind, and their strength, you’d have nothing left. The person would be gone! The message of verse 30 is, I am to love God with everything that I am.

He goes even further to say, you need to love God with all of your heart, all of your soul (not just a piece of it), all of your mind (not just a part of it), and with all of your strength (not just a little bit of it). It is illegitimate to love God with part of my mind and reserve part of my mind for other gods, small g.

It is illegitimate to love God with part of my strength, with part of my soul, and reserve part of me for other gods, small g. God’s message to each one of us, we must love God with everything that we are. He deserves our complete devotion.

Have you ever seen a young couple fall in love. They have this incredible devotion to each other. They have this incredible blindness about the faults of each other. Percy Sledge wrote a song years and years ago called, When a Man Loves a Woman. Let me read you some lines. “When a man loves a woman he can’t keep his mind on nothing else. He’d sleep out in the rain if that’s the way she said it ought to be. He’d turn his back on his best friend if he puts her down.”

Incredible devotion, a whole-hearted love. That is a small picture of what God is calling for in our love and in our relationship with Him. He wants that kind of intense, complete, whole-hearted devotion to be directed to Him. And the Lord Jesus in this passage quotes four ways in which He wants us to be devoted to Him.

Deuteronomy 6:4 only had three ways. The Lord Jesus added another one. He begins by saying we must love the Lord our God with all of our heart. In our thinking, the heart is the emotion. In Jewish thinking, the heart was the control center of life. It was the will, the volition. It was the personal choice of our lives. And I believe He is saying to us that our control center, our volition, our very choices in life must be controlled by a love for God. If I am making a huge, foundational decision in life like who should I marry or what should I do for a career, or should I move here or there—it needs to be controlled by the love of God.  And if I am making a miniature decision in my life, it needs to be controlled by the love of God. He needs to control the control center of my very life.

Secondly, the Lord Jesus said, you must love God with all of your soul. In Hebrew thinking, the soul was the conscious self-life. It was the seat of our emotions. He is saying, I should love God emotionally. I should feel an emotional response to God. The problem for us in America is, we have changed our feelings, our emotions, our love into something that either happens to us or doesn’t happen to us. I either fall in love with someone beyond my control, or I don’t fall in love with them. It’s out of my control. That’s American thinking, not Biblical thinking.

Listen to Ephesians 5:25 where the Lord said, “Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church.” The basic message is, I can control who I love. I can choose to love. I am not at the fate of some cupid who makes me fall in love or not fall in love. So God is commanding me to love Him.

The question is, how do I come to love God, or my wife or husband, or my child? How do I come to love anyone that I don’t feel like I am falling in love with?

The answer to that question comes out of Matthew 6:21. I’m going to actually start at verse 19 and read a passage about using our finances which I think answers the question, how do I bring myself to love someone? He said, in Matthew 6:19, “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: 20  But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: [And here’s the key phrase] 21  For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

Or to paraphrase, I love those things that I invest in. I come to love emotionally the things that I have already invested in personally. So if I want to love God emotionally, I need to invest in my relationship with God. If I want to love another person emotionally, if I want to fall in love with someone, then I need to invest in that person. Whether it’s your husband or wife, or your child, or your enemy!

If I want to love anyone, I need to invest in them and in the relationship. If I give them time, if I give them energy, if I give them prayer, if I give them gifts, if I am investing in them, my heart follows that investment. That’s the way God wired life to work. God is calling me to love God with my emotion, with my response of my heart.

Third issue. The Lord Jesus said, I want you to love God with all of your mind. With all your intellectual ability, with all of your attitudes, with everything you think about, I want you to be a person who loves God. This is a crucial issue for us as believers, because the reality is, what we think about controls both our actions and our feelings. What we think about controls our actions and our feelings.

One person put it this way: our lives are controlled by our currently dominant thoughts. Proverbs 23:7 puts it this way: “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.”

I am controlled by the way I think, and the question for me is, am I thinking in ways that demonstrate love for God or am I thinking in ways that demonstrate hostility toward Him?

The fourth issue, the Lord Jesus said, I want you to love God with all your strength—with all of your physical powers, with all of your energy, with all of your drive. With all the desire inside of your life I want you to be a person who is loving God.

I think he is saying, similar to Romans 12:1, we are commanded to use our bodies in a way that demonstrates love for Him. To avoid immorality, to take care of ourselves physically, to avoid using our physical power to harm other people, to use our physical energy to serve other people. He is calling me to love God with my very physical energies. He is calling me to be a person who heart, soul, mind and strength—the sum total of my life—is directed toward God. To be a person who is loving God with everything that I am.

To those of you who are parents here, I want to take a very short sidetrack and say to you that I think children desperately need to see you loving God with all that you are. Your children desperately need to see your life directed toward God.

One man talks about deciding to climb a mountain. It was spring, and he had on his tennis shoes. He didn’t realize that he was going to encounter about three inches of snow on the mountain. He started up the hill and had a miserable time. He could barely stand up. Over to the left of him he saw some steps where someone else had gone up before. He made his way over and got in those tracks and started climbing the mountain in those tracks. Whenever he put his tennis shoe right in the track they had made, he was fine. If he got out of that track, he couldn’t even stand up, let alone climb. He went all the way to the top of that mountain stepping in the steps of someone who had already been up there.

I believe God is saying to us, we need to be stepping up toward God, and our children need to see our tracks leading up toward God. Our children need to see us living lives of Godliness. Seeking God and living for God. Being men and women of the Book and of prayer, and of ministry to others. Faithful in worship. Our children need to see our tracks leading up to God, loving God with our whole heart. Being people who are in a regular pursuit of God. I’m not talking about some pharisaical exhibitionism that says to them, look what a spiritual person I am. I’m talking about a daily pursuit of God that they witness and absorb. They see our tracks leading up to God.

I want to say this whole message in one slightly different way as we close today. The entire thing that the Lord Jesus has been saying, the greatest goal of our lives is to make God the center of my life. To make God the center of my intellectual life, the center of my emotional life, the center of my spiritual life, the center of my physical life. To make God the center of all that is going on within me.

One writer put it this way: “God must be the goal of my life, the core focus of my life, the direction of my life, the source of my life, the reality of my life, the hope of my life, the joy of my life, the fulfillment of my life, the refuge of my life, the meaning of my life, the Father of my life, the stability of my life, the protection of my life, the resting place of my life, the controller of my life, the guide of my life, the love of my life.”

My life must be centered on God. I must be loving Him with everything that I am.

I have one very simple application and that is this: I want to challenge you to go home, get alone some place, find a piece of paper. Make a little box in the middle of that paper. And inside that I want you to write one word—one word that is going to represent who or what is going to be the center of your life. You can write God in there if you want Him to be the center of your life. If you are going to let yourself be the center of your life, you can put that in there. If you have something else that you are going to pursue, put that in there. And then put that somewhere where you are going to see it every day to remind yourself, this is the thing, this is the person, this is the being that I have decided to be the center of my life. Whatever word you put in that box, let that be the thing that you are going to try to fit in the vacuum of your soul.

God’s message to us is, there is only one thing that fits in that place in our soul. God Himself is the only thing that fits. If I try to put something else in there, first it will make me anxious, and then it will make me miserable.

God is calling me to love Him with my entire being, with everything that I am.

—PRAYER—