The Command to Love
Notes
Transcript
Anecdote on rules, tyrannical governors, enforcing curfews..
We grew up with rules,
As children:
Wash your hands before you eat.
Always Brush your teeth.
Clean up before going to bed.
These are rules that sound obvious to us as grown ups but we have to repeat to our kids when they were younger. The responsibility is more on the parents to keep reminding their kids and to train the,
As they grow into adulthood, the rules that children have to obey change that they have to take more responsibility for their actions.
You want them to make sure to keep the house clean.
there are rules of behavior when they have their friends over.
Sometimes parents impose curfews, to make sure they are home safe at night.
Rules have been a part of us:
Now there are new rules that the government imposes on us because of the coronavirus, there are restrictions everywhere on church gatherings, restaurants, sometimes it gets crazy...
In states like California, governors have issued curfews and lockdown orders that the people and small business owners are protesting and resisting these rules because they have become an overstep or an overreach by the government and has become a violation of their freedoms.
Some rules imposed by government leaders are unwelcome and may be troublesome.
But, what if those who impose these rules, parents, government officials like governors or the president for that matter, take the rules or the commands to the next level and require that you not only follow these rules but that you have to love him.. love me with everything that you got..
What would that look like? I think that would be utterly selfish, insecure, self-serving and just simply weird.
Even for a parent…it will be profoundly disturbing if you tell your kid you have to love me with your entire being!
Why? you don’t want to coerce.. you want that to be an act of free will,, being loved is not something that you command, it should come naturally!
The question then is this, why do you think God commanded us to love Him? Actually it is called the
The Greatest Commandment
Or according to Jesus the most important commandment.
Background… also in Matthew 22.
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.”
Let us put our thinking caps on.
Why?
Possible answers:
1. God deserves to be loved and He is the ONLY Being that can demand love.
Let us tackle the part that God is the ONLY Being that can demand love.
Jesus quoted Deuteronomy 6, the part that has become the Jewish prayer called Shema or Listen.
29 Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.
I love Mark’s version over Matthew because He mentions this first part while Matthew does not.
The Lord our God, HE IS ONE. He is the One and only God!
Yes it is true, Because God is God, the only God, He is entitled to anything, after all He is God.
However, does He need to be loved?
Love was present and at work in its perfection in the Triune God - Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
God has been present in eternity, He existed before man was created. He is all-sufficient, complete, perfect and not lacking anything.
What about the part that God deserves to be loved.. Yes God deserves our total love and devotion, absolutely.
But there seems to be a contradiction in this, if He deserves to be loved and God commands us to love Him, does it mean that He demands that we reciprocate His love?
If that is the case then God’s love is somewhat conditional. He loves because He wants us to love Him back.
We know that God’s love is unconditional, The Bible says that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
If we are faithless, He remains faithful..
2. Loving God is contingent to a relationship with Him, and therefore God wants man to have a relationship with Him.
In other words, God is not after just you loving Him but rather the relationship with you that makes truly loving Him possible.
Look at the degree by which we are commanded to love God:
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.’
This is one more reason I like Mark’s version better than Matthew’s. Matthew stopped at mind, Mark added “strength”.
We don’t just love Him by keeping Him in our thoughts, or by our will, or by our commitment, we actually have to act on that love.
You should love the Lord with all of you. How is this possible?
When you became a follower of Jesus, something changes in you..
17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.
How can we love God with all our heart?
We can love God only out of a new heart.
19 And I will give them one heart, and a new spirit I will put within them. I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh,
Grace...
5 and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
Remember that God is the One Who loved us first.
19 We love because he first loved us.
It is God Who:
Initiated our love for Him.
Gives us the desire to love Him.
God gives us the power to love Him.
3. Loving God enables you to love others.
31 The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”
In fact, true love for God enables you to follow all of His commands.
Loving God enables us to love people.
Ramon, that is not true, the world knows how to love and the majority of them do not believe in God much less love God. I don’t necessarily have to love God to love my children or to love my spouse...
When God commands us to love our neighbor, we are to love someone other than members of your family, we are even told to love our enemies.
We are to love others.
We are to love others the same way God loves them.
God’s love is how we can love on people we do not even know, simply because God loves them. We are to love with that kind of love that God has.
This is the power behind evangelism and missions.
14 For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died;
The love of Christ here that compels us to share the good news, the love of Christ here can be interpreted in two ways: Christ’s love for people and a person’s love for Christ.
Missions - love for people
We can only share what we have.
(In closing…)
We don’t love God because it meets some need in him. God is eternally self-sufficient, absolutely perfect, and lacking in nothing . . . .
If God, then, is not the personal beneficiary of the greatest commandment, then it stands to reason that we must be.
God has commanded us to love him not for God’s sake, but for ours...
Story of “Wild Bill”
"Wild Bill" made a decision. He said, "It would have been easy to blame the soldiers who had killed my family, but in my practice I had seen too often what hate could do to people's minds and bodies. Hate had just killed the six people I loved most in the world. I decided then and there that I would spend the rest of my life - whether it was a few days or many years - loving every person I came in contact with."
Love is what saved Wild Bill.
Even so-called believers have a hard time believing this, there are things in your life Christian that you are so holding to that the love of God needs to replace… struggles..