Sermon Tone Analysis

“No ancient or modern philosopher - Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Russel - ever taught such far-reaching ideas about love.

No political figure, from Julius Caesar to Winston Churchill, has made such demands upon his followers to love.

And no religious teacher, whether Buddha, Confucius, or Mohammed, ever commanded his followers to love one another as he loved them and gave his life for them.

No other system of theology or philosophy says so much about the divine motivation of love (and holiness), or expresses love to the degree of Christ’s death on the cross, or makes the demands of love like the teaching of Jesus Christ and his apostles.”

This is a paragraph written by Alexander Strauch, in his little book, Love or Die: Christ’s Wake Up Call to the Church.

I wonder if you’ve ever considered how unique Christianity’s emphasis on love is.

And yet, it’s possible for Christians to drift into lovelessness.

D.A. Carson wrote an article titled, “A Church that Does All the Right Things, But…” and includes this paragraph: “They still proclaim the truth, but no longer passionately love him who is the truth.

They still perform good deeds, but no longer out of love, brotherhood, and compassion.

They preserve the truth and witness courageously, but forget that love is the great witness to truth.

It is not so much that their genuine virtues have squeezed love out, but that no amount of good works, wisdom, discernment in matters of church discipline, patient endurance in hardship, hatred of sin, or disciplined doctrine, can ever make up for lovelessness.”

The first quote demonstrates the absolute centrality of love in the lives of Christians.

Love for God, overflowing into love for people.

The second quote describes the possibility - and actually a common occurrence - that a church that externally looks so right but is lacking the very thing that makes everything they do meaningful: love.

Last week we were looking at Mark 12:28-34, where Jesus speaks of the greatest commandment in the Bible.

The greatest obligation God has set upon man: “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.

The second is this: you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

There is no other commandment greater than these.”

We spent some time reflecting on the primacy of love in the life of the Christian.

The greatest command God has given humanity is the command to love God, to have fervent, vigorous affections for God, to be inclined toward God, to delight in God, to adore and admire God.

This morning we want to talk about cultivating love for God.

And next week, we are going to talk about loving our neighbors.

But I want to start by thinking about what love is.

Jonathan Edwards, in his classic The Religious Affections, begins by demonstrating that God has given all human beings two basic faculties: the understanding, which is where we observe, perceive, contemplate, reason, and grasp; and what is often referred to as the heart: the part of a man that not only understands, but is evaluates and assesses as either good or bad, beautiful or ugly.

You see, there’s the aspect of the mind and understanding, whereby we come to grasp things; but there is also the aspect of the heart, where we love or hate things, where we are drawn to or repulsed by things, where we are pleased or displeased by things.

Now Edwards says that God doesn’t merely want our minds to observe, perceive, and contemplate God; but our hearts should be inclined to, wooed by, drawn toward, pleased by, him, delighted by, take pleasure in him.

In other words, one of the best ways to measure our love for God is by measuring the joy we have in obeying him.

The delight we have in service.

Edwards famously said: “God is glorified not only by His glory's being seen, but by its being rejoiced in.

When those that see it delight in it, God is more glorified than if they only see it.

His glory is then received by the whole soul, both by the understanding and by the heart.

God made the world that He might communicate, and the creature receive, His glory; and that it might [be] received both by the mind and heart.

To testify with wonderful eloquence how great God is, without affection is nothing, compared to the simple Christian who deep down in his soul delights in the very character of nature of God.

Do you love God? Do you have affection for him?

Are you inclined toward him?

Do you delight in him?

Does the thought of him bring you joy and pleasure?

Your life is not primarily about your duty, not primarily about your output, not primarily about your fruitfulness, but it is primarily about your affections.

Do you love God?

That is the greatest obligation on your life - above your marriage, above your parenting, above your career - because when love for God is what it should be, you’ll be a better spouse, a better parent, a better worker, a better friend, a better person.

So the question we left ourselves last week was: How do we cultivate love for God in our hearts?

On one level, we might say that there’s nothing we can do.

God regenerates the heart.

God grants faith and repentance.

The Holy Spirit produces love.

These things are all true.

At the end of the day, God, and God alone, must work in me.

I cannot produce love for God anymore than I can climb into heaven.

And yet, Scripture commands that we love God.

Jude 21 says, “keep yourselves in the love of God” - an imperative we must not ignore.

Psalm 31:23 “Love the Lord, all you saints.”

So if it’s a supernatural work that God does in me, and yet I am responsible to love God, what must I do?

First, repent.

The beginning of our work to cultivate love in our hearts for God is to repent.

If you’ve never loved God, you’re not a Christian and you need to repent before God.

And if you’ve loved God imperfectly, as a believer, you need to repent of lovelessness.

Take a look at Mark 12:34.

Jesus has just stated that the most important command in the Bible is to love God and neighbor.

The scribe agrees, and Jesus’ statement to the scribe is: “You are not from the kingdom of God.”

Think about this with me.

Jesus’ answer is, as usual, brilliant.

He affirms that the scribe is correct, but at the same time he does not tell him that is in the kingdom, or that he has been saved.

Jesus says he’s close to being saved, but not quite there yet.

Why is that?

Here’s why: knowing what God commands in his law is not enough to be saved.

Having an understanding of what God requires of us is not how we enter the kingdom.

How do we enter the kingdom?

Peek back at Mark 1:15 “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”

No one gets to heaven by knowing God’s law.

No one gets to heaven by obeying God’s law.

You see, not a single one of us present in this room, not a single person in any church across the world, not a single person in all of history, except the Lord Jesus himself, has ever loved God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.

We have all failed miserably at the greatest commandment!

We don’t get saved by knowing God’s commandments.

We get saved when we recognize our abject failure to obey God’s law, and we stop trying to reconcile ourselves to God by being good enough, and we confess our guilt, and we cling to God’s mercy.

The gospel is not, “Obey me and you’ll live.”

It’s that Jesus came, lived, died, and rose to save people who are incapable of obedience.

It’s that you must do nothing except trust him.

You see, the reason why the scribe is close, but not quite in the kingdom of heaven, is because he’s got half the formula right.

He’s right that God requires that we love him with all our heart, but here’s the question: does admit his own inability and bank his soul on God’s grace?

If you want to cultivate a heart of love for God, start by seeing how outrageously pitiful your love for him has been, compared to the love he deserves.

Confess it to him, and then be amazed at the fountain of mercy that flows freely from his heart.

Don’t start with religious activity.

Imagine a person with cancer spreading through his bones skip dealing with the actual cancer and moving straight to the physical therapy.

Start with repentance.

Start with confession of sin.

Start with the admission that you’re guilty, that you’re unable to change without God’s help, and turn to him for mercy and power.

Second, Meditate on the character of God.

If you want to cultivate a love for God, you must cultivate a knowledge, a familiarity, a grasp of the revealed character of God.

You cannot love a God you do not know.

Jeremiah 9:23-24 “Thus says the LORD: “Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, 24 but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the LORD …”

David wrote Psalm 63 when he was facing the dangers of the wilderness.

He writes in verses 5-6 “My soul will be satisfied with fat and rich food, and my mouth with praise you with joyful lips, when I remember you upon my bed; and meditate on you in the watches of the night.”

David’s soul will have a feast, his heart will be moved to love and praise and adoration, when he meditates on God himself.

If you don’t have time to meditate on God’s character, change your schedule today.

A life without margin is a life without meditation, and a life without meditation on God will be drab, dull, drudgery.

You need to ponder the greatness of God.

J.I. Packer puts it this way: “[The study of God] is the most practical project anyone can engage in….Disregard the study of God, and you sentence yourself to stumble and blunder through life blindfolded, as it were, with no sense of direction and no understanding of what surrounds you.

This way you can waste your life and lose your soul.”

In 2022, start a journey through the everlasting hills of God’s character.

With every step upward you will encounter scenes and views that will take your breath away.