Sermon Tone Analysis

I want to start out this week by saying thank you to all those who helped with the funeral on Wednesday for Boris’ son.

Nearly 100 people came to pay their respects to Ivan San Andrés and the family that mourned him.

A large percentage of those attending did not speak English, and we were blessed to have the pastor of Boris’ other church here to serve as a translator and to share the eulogy, since he had served as Ivan’s pastor.

I will tell you that it was pretty amazing to stand with him on that platform in the sanctuary and listen as he translated the message that I preached to this crowd.

But what was even more amazing is what happened right here in the fellowship hall.

Watching a small group of people from Liberty Spring Christian Church share the love of Christ by serving others was inspiring to me.

And more than a couple of our guests came up to me and said how much it encouraged them to see our church being so generous.

I have said many times in recent months how wonderful it is to see this church becoming known for its generosity and love, and it makes me especially proud to be your pastor when I hear others acknowledge the same things that I have been seeing.

And so, as I considered these things this week and looked at my preaching plan for the coming weeks, I noticed that next Sunday is the day before Valentine’s Day, and it occurred to me that a couple of messages on love would be a good segue into our planned series on the church.

Now, as you can imagine, “love” is a pretty broad topic.

It’s very easy to get lost in the reeds while trying to narrow it down for a two-message series.

I could spend literally months, for example, talking about the concept of love that Jesus introduces in His “new Commandment” in the Upper Room Discourse of John’s Gospel.

I could spend weeks working us through Paul’s “love chapter” in 1 Corinthians.

But Matthew, Mark, and Luke all record one compact little incident during the life of Jesus that actually lends itself very well to a two-week study, and His teaching in that little incident is all about love, so it fits perfectly.

We’re going to take a look at Matthew’s version of this incident, and you can find it in verse 34-40 of chapter 22. Please go ahead and turn there if you have your Bibles.

Matthew 22:34.

Now, as background for this passage, you should know that this takes place during the last week of Jesus’ life.

Earlier in the week, He had entered the city of Jerusalem on a donkey, and the people had lined the road into the city, shouting “Hosanna to the Son of David; Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest.”

This was the traditional greeting and salutation for a newly crowned king in Israel, and so there were theological, prophetic, and political implications to what they shouted as Jesus rode into Jerusalem.

Later, Jesus had gone into the temple and overturned the tables of the moneychangers and those who were selling sacrificial doves to the poor.

And then, the next day, when He had gone back into the temple to teach, Jesus was approached by the chief priests and elders, who demanded to know by whose authority He was doing the things He had done.

He responded with a parable about an absent landowner who sent his son to collect the produce of his vineyard.

When the son arrived, he was killed by the people the landowner had left in charge of the vineyard.

Now, the chief priests and the Pharisees were often pretty dumb when it came to understanding Jesus’ parables.

But they did understand that they were the murderous keepers of the vineyard in this parable.

They didn’t really like being characterized that way, but they were afraid to confront Him directly, because Jesus was popular among the people.

So they began to plot to trap Him in something He said.

First, they asked Him whether or not it was lawful to pay the Roman poll-tax.

When they couldn’t trip Him up with that loaded question, one of the Sadducees came and put forward the riddle about marriage in heaven.

But that didn’t go the way they had hoped, either, because Jesus responded that they didn’t understand either the Scriptures or the power of God.

And so, the Pharisees thought they would take one more crack at tripping Jesus up, so they sent a lawyer to talk to Him.

Perhaps I should pause for a moment and let you think of your own lawyer joke to insert here.

I’m simply going to ask whether anybody is surprised a lawyer was chosen for this task of trying to trip Jesus up.

Anyway, here’s where we pick up in verse 34.

So, today, we’re going to concentrate on verses 37 and 38, the great and foremost commandment.

Next week, we’ll take a look at the second that is like it.

What is the great commandment in the Law?

How would this lawyer and the Pharisees who sicced him on Jesus have expected Jesus to respond?

Or, more to the point — how were they expecting to trap Jesus with this question?

I think what we can surmise about this question is that they didn’t really care how Jesus responded to the question.

In other words, if He had simply replied that the first commandment — You shall have no other gods before me — was the most important, they’d have said, “Aha!

So the others aren’t important, then, huh, Jesus?!” And they’d have replied the same if He’d pointed to any of the other 10 commandments.

They weren’t looking for truth from Jesus or to gain real understanding from Him.

Instead, they just wanted to trap Him and find some point of leverage they could use against Him in front of His many followers at this time.

In fact, if they were being honest — which they hardly ever were — the Pharisees would likely have agreed with Jesus that “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind” was, indeed, the great and foremost commandment.

This commandment came from the Book of Deuteronomy, and it was considered so sacred that devout Jews, like the Pharisees, would recite it as a prayer twice a day, in the morning and in the evening.

You may have heard this prayer referred to as the Shema, which is a Hebrew word meaning “listen” or “hear.”

Turn to Deuteronomy, chapter 6, and we’ll take a look at the first part of this prayer, which includes texts from both Deuteronomy and the Book of Numbers.

We’ll pick up in verse 4.

Now, let me give you some context about these words of Moses to the people of Israel.

The Book of Deuteronomy is structured as a treaty between God and His people, Israel, before they move into the Promised Land.

It starts with a reminder of all that God has done for them.

Then, it moves into a series of commandments from God, their King.

And, finally, it outlines a series of blessings the people can expect for keeping His commandments and curses they can expect if they rebel against Him.

In chapter 5, we see that Moses repeats the 10 commandments that God had given 40 years earlier in His own handwriting on tablets of stone.

There are many other covenant stipulations and commandments listed in Deuteronomy and Numbers, but the 10 Commandments are the essence of all those other commandments.

In other words, all the other requirements for them flow out of the 10 Commandments.

Likewise, the portion of the Shema that Jesus quoted from Deuteronomy, chapter 6, can be seen as the essence of the 10 Commandments themselves.

In other words, keeping the 10 Commandments would be a natural result of loving God with all your heart, soul, and mind.

In fact, there’s a sense in which the Shema is simply a commentary or expansion on the first of the 10 Commandments: “You shall have no other gods before Me.”

Do you see that?

If you love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, you won’t have any other gods before Him.

You won’t put anything else ahead of Him.

Not wealth or power.

Not fame or fortune.

Not nation or family.

Not even your own self.

So this commandment that Jesus quotes from the Shema is first in the sense that it restates the first of the 10 Commandments, and it is foremost in the sense that it distills all of the 10 Commandments to their very essence: Love God with all your heart, soul, and mind.

But what does that mean, really?

What does it mean to love God with all your heart, soul, and mind?

Well, the short answer is that it means to love God with everything that you are, to love Him with all your essence and expression.

In the Old Testament, the heart was the seat of intellect.

The soul was the seat of the will.

And strength or might, as it appears in verse 5, referred to one’s physical capabilities.

By Jesus’ time, Greek understandings had taken over, and the mind was now the seat of intellect, with the heart the seat of emotion.

So Jesus was saying the same thing that Moses had said in Deuteronomy, but He was simply using updated language.

But the love that God was commanding here through Moses wasn’t primarily an emotional thing.

Rather, it was an obligation that came from the recognition of who God is.

That’s the point of verse 4.

There have been many different translations of the second part of that verse, but two of them tend to rise above the rest.

The first is the one that appears in the NIV: “The Lord our God, the Lord is one.”

This translation stresses that Israel’s God, Yahweh, is unique and that worshiping Him required them to exclude worship of other gods.

The second translation that rises above the others is “The Lord our God is one Lord.”

This translation speaks to the fact that God is consistent in His purpose for His creation, and it also is the basis for the argument that God was revealing His trinitarian nature even in the Old Testament.

God is one in three persons.

The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are never at odds with each other.

God has existed eternally as one God in three Persons united in perfect fellowship, perfect love, and perfect harmony of purpose.

As Eugene Merrill puts it: “The Lord is indeed a unity, but beyond that he is the only God.” [Eugene H. Merrill, Deuteronomy, vol.

4, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1994), 163.]

And because these things are true about God, we have an obligation to love Him with all our being.

Look at the first part of verse 4: “Hear, O Israel!”

The word that’s translated as hear, shema, has the sense not just of “listen,” but “listen and obey.”

In other words, to hear God’s commandment without following it is really not to hear it at all.

So, we might paraphrase these two verses like this: Listen and obey, Israel!

Yahweh, your God, is perfectly consistent in Himself and in His purposes, and He is the only God there is.

Therefore, you should put Him before everything else in your lives.

And when you think about it, isn’t that what love does?

When you really love someone, don’t you put their needs ahead of your own?

Don’t you seek for their good, even if you to have to sacrifice something to do so?

Think of parents and their children.