Next Steps - 2

Next Steps - 2

Matthew 22:34-40

Introduction

2 Kings 6-7 carry a very interesting story in the history of ancient Israel. The Northern Kingdom’s capital city of Samaria is under siege by the nation of Aram. That siege, which cut off all support and supplies, lasted so long that it produced a devastating famine.

2 Kings 6:24-29 - 24 Afterward Ben-hadad king of Syria mustered his entire army and went up and besieged Samaria. 25 And there was a great famine in Samaria, as they besieged it, until a donkey's head was sold for eighty shekels of silver, and the fourth part of a kab of dove's dung for five shekels of silver. 26 Now as the king of Israel was passing by on the wall, a woman cried out to him, saying, “Help, my lord, O king!” 27 And he said, “If the Lord will not help you, how shall I help you? From the threshing floor, or from the winepress?” 28 And the king asked her, “What is your trouble?” She answered, “This woman said to me, ‘Give your son, that we may eat him today, and we will eat my son tomorrow.’ 29 So we boiled my son and ate him. And on the next day I said to her, ‘Give your son, that we may eat him.’ But she has hidden her son.”

That’s about as bad as it gets. It finally gets so bad as people are waiting to die, that an unlikely group decides to do something about it. Four lepers get tired of waiting and decide to surrender themselves to Aram. The Arameans may kill them, but, they argue, they’re going to die anyway. The risk is worth it. Perhaps they’ll accept our surrender and give us food.

What they don’t know is that the siege has already ended. God had already defeated the enemy on Israel’s behalf. But no one had heard the good news yet. God had thrown the Arameans into a panic, thinking they were being attacked by a huge army, and had fled so quickly, they left behind their tents, supplies, and food. Only when the lepers get there do they see what’s happened.

2 Kings 7:8 - 8 And when these lepers came to the edge of the camp, they went into a tent and ate and drank, and they carried off silver and gold and clothing and went and hid them. Then they came back and entered another tent and carried off things from it and went and hid them.

It’s party city for them. They have all the food, wine, and wealth they could ever want. More than they could ever need. They even start hoarding and hiding it. That is when they realize this is the most selfish, unloving thing they could do. The entire city of Samaria behind them is in desperate need. They are dying. And these four lepers are living the good life, choosing to ignore the suffering around them. Finally it dawns on them that they should do something.

2 Kings 7:9-11 - 9 Then they said to one another, “We are not doing right. This day is a day of good news. If we are silent and wait until the morning light, punishment will overtake us. Now therefore come; let us go and tell the king's household.” 10 So they came and called to the gatekeepers of the city and told them, “We came to the camp of the Syrians, and behold, there was no one to be seen or heard there, nothing but the horses tied and the donkeys tied and the tents as they were.” 11 Then the gatekeepers called out, and it was told within the king's household.

“We are not doing right…” Duh! People around you are dying and you have what they need to live. Of course it isn’t right to withhold that from them. How mean-spirited, how unloving would you have to be to do something like that? You have to go share it with them. And that’s what they do. They announce the good news throughout the city. The army is gone! The enemy has been defeated! The whole city rushes out to the camp and eat their fill. There is celebration, joy, hope. All because four lepers loved them enough to tell them the good news.

What if they hadn’t told anyone? What if they decided to keep the good news to themselves? Here is the harsh reality: if these lepers stay here and not tell anyone, the entire city dies. They waste away, starving to death. All because no one told them that God had already saved them. All because no one loved them enough to tell them God had already defeated the enemy.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? “This is the day of good news…we are silent.” I know too many churches who could etch that over their doorways. I know too many Christians who have adopted that as their life verse. As Christians, we have discovered the empty camp. We know where to have our hunger satisfied and our thirst quenched. We know the enemy has been defeated and that God has saved. How could we keep that to ourselves? How unloving would you have to be to do such a thing?

TS - today we are ending our short two-week journey into Matthew 22:34-40, looking at Next Steps to take so that our faith will flourish. An expert in the OT law comes up to Jesus, attempting to trap him, wanting to trip him up in what he says so the religious leaders can pounce on him and discredit him in public. Which is the great commandment in the Law? A great question of assessment…what do you think is God’s top priority? What is heaviest on God’s heart right now for his people? Jesus didn’t hesitate…to love him. God’s chief desire from you is your affection for him.

God has already shown such great love to us…he’s been merciful, he has forgiven in Jesus, he has shown grace. No matter what we’ve said, done, thought…in spite of all that, God has invited us into relationship with himself. How incredibly loving! 1 John 4:19 - We love because he first loved us. God has been so loving, the only right response is to love him in return. We didn’t fabricate our love for him, we didn’t muster up enough willpower to love him like he deserves. No, our love for him was drawn out of us by his love for us.

And we are to love him…with ALL our heart…ALL our soul…ALL our mind.

William Barclay - It means that to God we must give a total love, a love which dominates our emotions, a love which directs our thoughts, and a love which is the dynamic of our actions. All religion starts with the love which is total commitment of life to God.

So we are presented with this truth that God loves us and our response is to love him with total devotion. Isn’t it interesting that Jesus did not say that our response is to serve God? Or to fear God? Or to obey God? While we are to do all of those things, all of them are to be motivated by our love for him. To obey him, or to serve him, out of any other motivation ends up empty and lifeless. John Calvin speaks to the uniqueness that Jesus calls for in our love for God by saying “He means by this that only the free service of our wills is acceptable to him.” God is after your heart. God is after your affections. It is the only thing we must choose to offer to him. He could force us to serve. He could force us to obey. But he cannot force us to love. Love must be given, it cannot be taken.

But Jesus didn’t stop there. While no one would have been surprised at his answer, as it lined up with religious teaching for centuries, the next part was revolutionary. Matthew 22:39 - And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus takes the command to love God to its logical and biblical conclusion. If you are going to love God, you have to love the people made in his image.

1 John 4:7-12, 19-21 - 7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. 10 In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us…19 We love because he first loved us. 20 If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. 21 And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.

William Barclay - To be truly religious is to love God and to love those whom God made in his own image; and to love God and other people, not with a vague sentimentality, but with that total commitment which issues in devotion to God and practical service of others.

Before we move on, let’s set the record straight on something. There are some who believe that Jesus is teaching three commands here…love God, love others, love yourself. That our love for ourselves must be the standard we use to love others. That if you don’t love yourself well, then you need to focus on that first. That’s garbage. Listen…even if you don’t like yourself and think little of yourself, you absolutely love yourself with a sacrificial love. Your constant attention on you, your obsessing about you, your constant worry about what others think of you, your succumbing to your stomach’s demands to eat whenever it growls…you love you more than you love anyone else on the planet. And that is Jesus’ point. As you will sacrifice anything and everything to get what you need, do that same thing for others.

God’s chief priority is that we love him and love those made in his image. Notice how Jesus ended…Matthew 22:40 - On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets. That word for ‘depend’ means ‘to hang.’ The entire OT is summed up by, hangs on Love God and Love People.

We introduced a question last week that guides our thinking on this to help us live out what the Lord commands. A question that is the heart of being a Christian: what does love require of me? And we’ve distilled the answer to that down to six simple steps to take, that if you take them, your faith will flourish.

WORSHIP REGULARLYGROW SPIRITUALLYCONNECT RELATIONALLY

We make gathering together with God’s people for worship a top priority of life. There is no substitute for it. No video, no livestream, no resource. This is irreplaceable as part of the foundation of Christian living. Then we commit to grow our faith to maturity. Taking steps to grow is an act of love for the God who has saved us, and love for all the people around us. Becoming a mature Christian is the best thing we could ever do for the people we love. Then we connect with God’s people relationally and recognize that God has designed us all to connect together. This is seen even more when we look at the next step:

SERVE REGULARLY

The Bible uses this image to describe God’s people as The Body of Christ. The image is pretty potent. Jesus Christ is the Head of the Church and each of us are individual parts of that body. Meaning, we each have a dedicated function to serve.

Ephesians 4:11-16 - 11 And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, 12 to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, 13 until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, 14 so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. 15 Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, 16 from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.

The clear role of church leaders is to equip God’s people to serve. And what happens when we serve? We grow spiritually! We mature in faith, we anchor in truth…and notice that last phrase in v. 16 - makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love. Serving regularly is an act of love that enables the church to grow to become even more loving.

We cannot emphasize this enough. Serving others plays a critical role in faith development and faith maturity. Sadly, the majority of Christian students walk away from their faith once they are out on their own. Thankfully, over the last several years much research has been put into the causes for us and the solutions to it. There are three key components for a student to maintain a vibrant faith after High School: 1) they need at least 3 mentors who will invest in them and their faith, other than their parents (we call that Connect Relationally). 2) attend corporate worship (Worship Regularly). 3) Serve Regularly in some capacity. Serving helps anchor your faith and makes it flourish.

GIVE GENEROUSLY

Back to those lepers we started with…God had graciously provided that victory, that food, that wine, that wealth. And they realized it would not have been right to hoard all that to themselves. That would’ve been greedy. Their love for people required that they be generous with what God had provided.

Acts 2 and Acts 4 record that the early church took this to heart. They practiced radical generosity. It directly influenced their ability to reach people with the Gospel. In fact, the pagan community around them, both in NT times and after, sat up and took notice at their generosity. Julian the Apostate, an enemy of the faith in those early centuries wrote, “The godless Galileans fed not only their poor but ours also.” Tertullian, an early church leader wrote that the Christian’s generosity was so profound that the pagan world expressed in astonishment, “See how they love one another.” A philosopher in the second century named Aristides wrote in AD 125 - “They walk in all humility and kindness, and falsehood is not found among them, and they love one another. They despise not the widow, and grieve not the orphan. He that hast distributeth liberally to him that hath not. If they see a stranger, they bring him under their roof, and rejoice over him as if he were their own brother: for they call themselves brethren, not after the flesh, but after the Spirit of God; but when one of their poor passes away from the world, and any of them see him, he provides for his burial according to his ability; and if they hear that any of their number is imprisoned or oppressed for the name of their Messiah, all of them provide for his needs. . . .And if there is among them a man that is needy and poor, and they have not an abundance of necessaries, they fast two or three days that they may supply the needy with their necessary food.”

Generosity changes the world. Because generosity shows love to the world.

SHARE COURAGEOUSLY

The first marching orders from Jesus to his followers are in Matthew 28, called the Great Commission. Go into all the world and make disciples. Acts begins with another commissioning from Jesus…you will be my witnesses. What do witnesses do? They testify! Isn’t that what those lepers did? They see what God has done and they go and testify to that good news all throughout the city. They didn’t just share the food and wealth. They shared the good news of the victory God had provided.

How unloving would they have to be to keep the good news to themselves? Penn Jillette (of the famous duo Penn and Teller) is a confessed atheist. Several years ago, in a video that has made multiple rounds and seen by millions of people, a courageous sharer gave him a gift of a Bible after one of their shows. Penn recorded his thoughts about it, and they are helpful to us today:

VIDEO OF PENN JILLETTE

How much do you have to hate somebody to believe eternal life is available and then NOT tell them that? What does love require of me? It requires much. But that is ok. Why? Because we already know what love is. We already know what love does. We love (him and others) because God first loved us.

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