Honor God, Honor Others

Introduction

So one day the Pharisees, the Herodians, and the Sadducees all decided they were going to try and destroy the Son of God, the Word of God, the source of truth and Emmanuel, God with us by asking Him really tricky questions… about taxes. And… yeah, that went about as well as you would expect. It worked out well for us though, because through their misguided questioning we received some great clapbacks from Jesus that are are just full of wisdom and grace. In fact its through these questions that we are reminded of the greatest commandment of all.

The Great Commandment

So somewhere in this questioning the Pharisees decide they are really going to stump the Word of God by asking him a question that’s answered word for word in… The Word… of God. Yeah, not a great plan. One of the Pharisees ask Him in Matthew 22:36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” and Jesus replies

Matthew 22:37–40 ESV

And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

The first great commandment coming from Deuteronomy 6:5 which was almost too easy but what we will discuss today is this answer from Leviticus 19:18 is that “a second [command] is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself”.

It’s important to point out at this point that “neighbor” in the Greek meant much more than the people who lived to your right and left, or even in your neighborhood. The word comes from a Greek root meaning “nearby” and colloquially would mean generally a “fellow human being”. Notice that Jesus doesn’t say “love your fellow Jews as yourself” or even “Love your brothers and sisters in me as yourself” but to love our neighbors, our fellow human beings, all those around us, as we love ourselves.

Love Paradigm

So Jesus shared these two commandments and basically made them the lens through which we interpret all of God’s commandments, for on these two commands He says “all the Law and the Prophets” depend. This emphasis on love will later be reiterated in

1 Corinthians 13:1–3 ESV

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is the thing that gives agency to faith, wisdom, generosity, even martyrdom. So why is loving others so important to Christ?

New Office

1 Peter 2:9–10 ESV

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

We are God’s people, and our job is to proclaim the excellencies of Christ who has called us. How can we proclaim this message without ourselves showing mercy as we have received it? Without loving as He has loved us?

Imagine you have a new friend in math class, and this friend tells you about a GREAT math YouTube channel he found. It makes all the concepts so easy, he says he barely even pays attention in class anymore! He says you just have to watch these videos, and your math grade is saved! But then… you notice his last math exam is sticking out of his notebook… with a big old “F” right there at the top, circled and everything. It even has one of those like, pathetically encouraging stickers with like an animal on it that says “ah, you’ll do better next time” that just makes you want to scream.

Are you going to believe what this guy says about his math YouTube guru? Did his example make you want to also learn from the same source? My guess is… probably not.

So imagine if you encounter a Christian who says “Look, there is this guy, Jesus, who is the Son of God and is God and He loves us all SO MUCH that He was willing to come to earth and die for us so that our sins could be forgiven and we could have unity with Him and be made more like Him every day!” and you say to that Christian “wow that sounds great, I’d love to meet someone who loves me that much! Hey, can I just share that I’ve been struggling with some sin in my life though that’s really been weighing me down and I just need to talk to someone about and hey you seem to have faith in this Jesus guy so I just thought...” and then the Christian just starts screaming at you about how could you sin like that and don’t you know that Jesus HATES people who do that and you’d better repent or you’ll go to hell what would you think?

It’d have me like “oh so a second ago Jesus loved me but now that He actually knows me He just wants to condemn me?” I’d think twice before I asked anymore about that Jesus, He sounds pretty dangerous!

In the same way that we can speak in the tongues of angels, but if we are without love we are nothing but a noisy gong,

If we speak truth about sin and life and death but do so without love and compassion for the sinner who is EXACTLY where we have been then we are NOT proclaiming the Gospel we are simply making noise.

Dichotomies

The reason I think this is important today is because everything absolutely everything especially in the age of the internet has become a dichotomy. A dichotomy is a “division or contrast between two things that are or are represented as being opposed or opposites”.

You either thing Lebron is the GOAT or Kobe was.

Honestly you either LOVE that new Star Wars movie and think its 20x better than Empire or you HATE it and it RUINED the franchise FOREVER!

Well you either support Vice President Biden or you HATE POOR PEOPLE.

Well you either love President Trump or you want SOCIALISM.

You either support unlimited access to abortion or you want to control women’s bodies because you HATE women.

You either sing worship songs acapella or you sing for the Devil! Ooo is that one too close to home?

You either fully support homosexual people and provide your explicit and repeated approval for their sexuality or you are HOMOPHOBIC and a BIGOT!

You are either completely straight and don’t even acknowledge the possibility of same sex attraction or you are a SODOMITE and a SINNER

These false dichotomies leave little room left for love. They leave little room for the Christ who healed Mary Magdalene, a prostitute, by casting out demons and then accepted her as part of His followers.

They leave little room for the Christ who seemed to always seek out the worst guy in any given town and say YOU! I’m going to come eat with you tonight, let’s share a meal together.

They leave little room for the Christ who whenever He found a heartbroken, morally bankrupt person desperately in need of drastic lifestyle changes approached them first with love, patience, and empathy.

You see it is the job of the Holy Spirit to convict the sinner of their sin it is the job of the Christian to tell them “you are loved”.

It is the job of the Christian to “proclaim the Gospel to the whole creation” by loving how Jesus loved.

You see the fact is that the truth is very rarely one side is right and the other is wrong. In almost every case there is some nuance that can be explored and understood to help us relate to one another better than we did before.

Next Step

If there is a person in your life who you know is in need of a little love and grace I just ask that you think about that person right now. Have you always shown them love the way Jesus would? Or was it easier to treat them the way that others treated them, even if it was cruel? Have you ever treated someone poorly at school just because other people did? Have you ever treated someone poorly at school just because you didn’t agree with something they did?

As we close in prayer today I just ask that you pray for that person as we pray together. And I hope that as we all begin to get back out into the world over the next couple of months we will do so with a newfound desire to love others well, so that the way we treat them can be evidence of the love that Jesus has given us.

Closing Prayer

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