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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.