Love

Pray

Some tests we love, and some test, well, not so much.

Some test are just fun.

Let’s have one now -

This side of the church vs that side.

You each need a buzzer noise.

Practice those.

Good

What colour are aircraft Black boxes?

Bright Orange

Before Mount Everest was discovered what was the highest mountiain in the world?

Mount Everest of course!

Other tests are less fun, but really helpful - some of our children, and some of the youth here, may have just done some tests in June and July to determin their next educational steps.

But other tests are set up to trap us, normally becasue someone hopes to catch us out to make us look stupid, or to get an avantage over us.

Let’s try this type of test?

Tim Willers (Joe Klaprott, Greg Smidt), when’s your wedding anniversary?

Chris Sharp (Victor, Bob) - What are the date of births for all your chidlren?

And it’s that type of test that arrives at Jesus’s door step in this passage.

He’s already had a test to catch him out from the Sadducess, one of the 2 main Jewish teaching groups, and now it’s time for the Pharriseas, the other group, to try and catch him out.

Jesus, not being married or have chidlren, meant they would have to try and bit harder than we did with (TIM?GREG?).

So they got together in a holy huddle and came up with a plan.

Matthew 22:34–35 NIV

Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question:

Matthew 22:34–36 NIV

Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

The Pharisees loved the law of God.

They loved to lord their purity and piosness over the other Jews by boasting about how good they were at keeping the law.

Infact,

they were so keen to keep the law of God

that they went through all the detail of the OT laws given to Moses

and added all sorts of other laws past along by oral tradition

until they had a list of 613 rules to follow!

That’s a lot.

And this question is pretty clever if you want to embarass or discredit someone publically.

Obvioulsy some laws are greater than others,

not in the sense of whether they should be kept of not,

but in terms of the impact or level of sinfulness of the act.

So, do not murder is obvioulsy a greater command than the one in - that says ‘do not boil a kid in it’s mother’s milk’

A baby goat kid that is, not a real kid, that would be pretty bad!

And so, becasue Jesus is rocking the boat,

he’s already challeneged some of their interpretations of the laws they have,

and he’s a threat to thier public credibility,

they try this question out on Jesus.

What is the greatest commandment?

SO what will JEsus say

- is he going to say something that some of the Pharisees will try and pick holes in?

Is he going to say something that the Phariseea like,

but then might damage his public reputaion.

matt 22 37-40

Matthew 22:37–40 NIV

Jesus replied: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

and before they have time to think about his rather brilliant reply,

that was hard to argue with,

Jesus then asks them a question in the next verse and so ends up embarrassing them rather than the other way around.

Pause

Sadly the Pharriseas never quite comprehend the answer Jesus gives

- for if they had, it may have shown them somehting important.

In short the point Jesus was making to the Pharisees, and us today, is that - following a strict set of rules is not what God desires in itself -

what God desires is for us to love him,

and to therefore love others.

Get that right says Jesus, and all the law of the OT

- and well everythign the prophets ever said for that matter

- will flow naturally from it.

Love God and love others.

SImple.

So, we’ll spend the rest of our time,

thinking about what that might look like for us this next year.

We’ll cover it in 2 points

1 - Love requires All you have!

1 - Love requires All you have

2 - Love for All requires effort!

1 - Love requires All you have

This point is fairly simple.

When Jesus says

Emp - all

Matthew 22:37 NIV

Jesus replied: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’

He is not implying you need to neatly subcatagorise yourself into 3 parts, heart, soul and mind as if you are somehow made up of 3 peices.

On the contarray - what is being emphasied is the word ‘ALL’

Everything about you needs to exude love towards God.

Not just your thought process, or your feeling, or your actions or even just your motivation of heart.

But all that you are, is to Love all that God is!

Perhpas a negative way to say it is that if you say or even think you love God,

but do nothing for or feel nothing towards him, isn’t really an option.

The best example of what true love is of course comes from God himself.

That’s why 1 john 4v19 says

1 John 4:19 NIV

We love because he first loved us.

God the Father didn’t just half-heartedly love you as if that would be enough.

No, He loves you with all of his heart,

all of his soul

and all of his mind.

He gave you all of his son,

to give us all of eternity with him,

He gave up all of his life

to die for all of your sin

to rise again to show you and share with you all of his glory.

What good would it have been for God to think about loving us with his mind

but do nothing about it.

Or what irony it would be for God to have heart felt emotional love towards us,

but not engage his thoughtful mind to save us in love!

No, instead he gave his all because he loves us with all that he is.

And so, if we have accepted his love towards us,

we ought to be able to love Him in response with all that we are.

And the second command is liek it, Love your neighbour - with an equal amount of ALLness!

Love requires ALL you have!

I’d encourage us all to reflect on what we do,

deceisons we make this year,

and ask ourselves,

is this the way to love God and love others with all that I have?

Am I honouring the love God has shown me,

by loving him all out, in return.

When we decide whther to pray or not,

Come to church one Sunday or not,

When we think about how we use our time, or spend our money.

We we ocnsider our emotions,

When we decide what to fill our minds and heads with.

And if we’re not loving God - remind yourself first of his great - ALL giving love for you.

---

Some of us here might realise that we don’t really love God all out.

Work, money, chidlren, spouces all come first.

God, His word, prayer, church all come a close second, or eighth!

Well if that’s the case, don’t dispair.

Come to the the God who loves you with all he has,

Ask him to forgive you by the death of his All loving son Jesus.

Remind yourself first of his great - ALL giving love for you.

And find that you can live a life of all out love to him in return - because he loved you first!

Secondly then, and based on the second greatest commandment:

2 - Love for All requires effort!

Did you notice the link between the 2 commandments Jesus uses. He says the second one is like it. They are related if you like.

Did you notice the link between the 2 commandments Jesus uses.

He says the second one is like the first.

They are related if you like.

They are alike becasue to love God involves loving others,

and loving others shows our love for God.

He means they are alike becasue to love God involves loving others, and loving others shows our love for God.

makes it clear again, v19-21

1 John 4:19–21 NIV

We love because he first loved us. Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.

1 john 19-21

The kids slot last week looked at this passage last week

and Zeph asked us a question about this second greatest commandment when we got home.

You know the second commandment

Matthew 22:39 NIV

And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’

matt 22

Does that mean we only have to love people next door?

Oh no, we are all quick to reply.

By saying your neighbour, Jesus means everyone - All people.

Zeke, then chipped in,

Well how are we supposed to do that - there are too many people!

And I think he has a point.

JEsus didn’t say love everyone in the world - even if that was his implication.

It becom

Both questions end up giving us an excuse not to really love anyone we might find it hard to love!

Saying we are to love everyone makes the command to arbitrary.

Everyone is clearly an unacheivabel goal, so we use it as an excuse to sidestep certain people:

For example

The noisy literal neighbour

The customer service agent who wont give us what we want

The drunk person on the bus,

The collegeue who always talks too much

The guy who smells a bit funny.

Becasue there are so many people, we don’t focus on any of them

- especially those who are hard to love!

Becasue there are so many people we don’t focus on any of them - especially those who are hard to love!

So we exclude anyone we like being a neighbour by simply allocating them to the catagory of - too many poeple in the world to love everyone.

So, I think we ought to take this command more at face value.

The Pillar New Testament Commentary: The Gospel according to Matthew 1. Attempts to Trap Jesus, 22:15–46

All the commandments were God’s, and therefore all were to be treated with full seriousness. But obviously some commandments were more important than others; the command to do no murder is more important than that which prohibits boiling a kid in its mother’s milk (Deut. 14:21).

OUr neighbour -is not an abstract idea of a person - our neighbour is a real person, -

and it certainly includes the people you don’t like.

The Pillar New Testament Commentary: The Gospel according to Matthew 1. Attempts to Trap Jesus, 22:15–46

Jesus was asked for but one commandment, but he goes further and adds “a second” that, he says, “is like it.” Wholehearted love for God means coming in some measure to see other people as God sees them, and all people as the objects of God’s love. Therefore anyone who truly loves God with all his being must and will love others, and this is expressed in the commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” a commandment that is repeated in the Pentateuch (Lev. 19:18, 34).

It includes the literal neighbour who plays annoying music or has loud chidlren.

As the achedemic year starts, then I do want to remind us that

It is the old lady a few doors down that you can’t quite bring yourself to invest time with,

It is your boss, your co-worker and your staff.

eighbour - not the person next door, but definetly a real person, no abstract epople. - it includes the peple you don’t like.

And as we begin a new acedemic year, it includes your children’s teachers and other parents in your child’s class.

And I know not all of us have chidlren at school here, but, so many of us do, I really htink it’s important to think about who we are good witnesses to Christ in the way we love others in the school environment that I think it’s worth spending a couple of minutes on it.

Schools are a breeding ground for unloving behaviour and attitudes.

self-righteous,

my rights,

my child deserves better,

that parent is a terrible example

This teacher doesn’t know what she’s doing and so and so forth .

You only have to join a class parents whatsapp group for a couple of weeks

(or even minutes)

to realise how malicious and unpleasant people, we, can be!.

Every little detail of a teacher’s actions ripped to shreds by parents.

Every time one child doesn’t get what he wants, the uproar that it creates.

Or spend a little time talking to other parents in the playground

to find out which ‘other parents’ are the cause of all the problems.

Or

But perhaps you don’t need to look outside your own home to find very unloving attitudes towards your chidlren’s teacehrs, school, or other parents.

I wonder what sort of chidlren we expect to raise if they are being raised in this type of environment!

Have you

We are in a culture of rights and demands, but rights and demands are not very high up on the list of greatest commandments!

But Love is!.

If your child seemingly is treated unfairly at school,

then what a great oppertunity to teach them that life is hard,

and you wont alwasy be treated fairly -

but know you can see how much Jesus loved you - for he faced far worse.

It’s not an oppertunity to damage the witness of Jesus’ people by going on the attack!

Whatsapp groups

When Whatsapp groups become malicious, and you’ve tried to poileity but not self-righteously offer some love, perhaps it’s time to leave the group.

Complaints? how to manage it

Better to miss the odd notice, than to be seen to condone malice and hatred.

And who knows,

as you’re asked why you left you may get the chance to kindly say

that you prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt,

to show love,

and be kind even when it’s hard, becasue that’s what Jesus did for you.

Perhaps I’m biased as I come form a large familiy of teacehers - oh - and I’m married to one!

Of course, occaisionally, it may be right to talk to the school, but even that can be done in love.

Complaints? how to manage it

You can assume the best of the people involved in the situation rather than jumping to conclsuions.

You can offer to help be part of the solution.

But on the whole -

i think our tollerance for peple and situations ought to be massively higher than it currently is.

After all, Jesus’s tolleration level was for a miserable sinner like you and me.

Of course all this can be appilied to employers, collegues and actual neighbours!!

But we should remeber, while we should love everyone - and that’s quite arbitary.

We should definelty love the people we are in contact with, - and that requires effort!

Just like Jesus dieing for us required his effort.

Use life to love others like Jesus loves us,

and use hard things to teach oursleves and our chidlren the joy of being able to love

even when life may seem unfair,

or your rights appear to be overruled.

Just like Jesus dieing for us required his effort.

But we shoudl remeber, while we should love everyone - and that’s quite arbitary.

We should definelty love the people we are in contact with - and that requires effort!

Just like Jesus dieing for us required his effort.

We started with a test, and so we’ll finish with a test.

But don’t worry I wont get you to call out the answers this time.

1 - How much does Jesus love you, and how did he proove that?

2 - Who have you not loved this past year? (ignoring, or through attacking) What do you need to say to them and or God ?

3 - Who are you going to make an effort to love this year?

I’ll ask CLaire to email these questions round with this weeks notices,

So you could Make note in your diary for 1 months time to check how you’re doing. -

Pray

The Pillar New Testament Commentary: The Gospel according to Matthew 1. Attempts to Trap Jesus, 22:15–46

Anyone who loves God and people wholeheartedly is not going to come short in religious observances, nor in doing what is proper to other people. In short, when anyone loves in the way Jesus says, there is no need for a host of hair-splitting definitions of when an obligation has been discharged and when it has not. As I have written elsewhere, “Jesus swept aside all such pettifogging nonsense with his revolutionary insistence on the centrality of love and for good measure he added that the teaching of the prophets is included in this command. At one stroke he did away with any understanding of the service of God that sees it as concerned with the acquiring of merit or with an emphasis on liturgical concerns. What matters can be summed up in one word: love.”