Sermon Tone Analysis

Pastoral Prayer

Chris is sick, those that are ill and recovering, Ukraine

Intro

Good Morning Everyone.

Thank you for joining us here today and online.

For those of you that may not know me, I am the youth pastor here.

I spend most Sundays downstairs with the next generation of the church.

This morning I get the privilege to share the Word of God with you today.

What a beautiful weekend.

I love being outside in the spring.

the warmth of the sun the new growth on the trees.

It is a time of new life and new beginnings.

I don’t know about you but with what has been going on the last couple of years it feels like the world is opening back up to us and there is opportunity everywhere.

Churches are still coming back for their first weeks together in person.

The airlines dropped the mask mandate and the life seems to be blooming this year along with the flowers.

Here is a question for you.

Do you tend to be an optimist, Glass is have full person, or a pessimist, the glass is half empty person?

There is nothing wrong with either.

I am and engineer.

The glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

But since covid my interactions with people seem to be more on the pessimistic side.

There seems to be a shift in many circles that is primarily focused on what is wrong with the world.

What parts of the sky is falling and how bad things are and how bad they will be.

There is a lot that is not going right in the world today.

There are attacks on the church, the leaders of our country are leading us in concerning directions, there are wars going on and we are seeing signs that new ones may emerge.

We are in a shift towards sin in society as we are definitely in a time where as the bible says people are not only making up new ways to sin but are applauding those who do.

There issues are around us for sure.

BUT…today I want to shift our focus to a different direction.

I want to shift our eyes up instead of out.

Not ignoring what is going on against us but also what we can do to impact this world that can look so dreary.

We have something the rest of the world does not have, the hope of our salvation.

Last week was the celebration and reflection of the death and resurrection of our most Holy Lord and savior.

Jesus the Christ the Messiah, the savior of the world, the hope of the hopeless, the finder of the lost, the atonement for the wicked, the caller of the elect, and the purest demonstration of Love that will ever happen in the past, present, of future of human history.

Most followers of Jesus met lst week and focused this demonstration of Love.

Leave that slide up for a minute.

Read that slide again.

Love… This is what we are going to look at today.

Love that changes the world.

Like all sermons we are only going to scratch the surface of this topic.

You will need to dig in deeper if you want to understand more.

Self study and small group study must be part of your growth as a follower of Jesus.

Why do I say that?

We have been going through heart issues as a youth group this year and we have started a weekly exploration of what the bible says about love.

The 1st week I printed up all of the bible verses with the word love in it.

How many do you think are in your bible?

692

So obviously we are not going to study all of the verses because it usually takes me an hour to go through one verse and I think our potluck will get cold if I go for 57 days.

We are going to look at a couple of answers Jesus gave to the religious leaders about love.

So open you Bibles to Matthew 22.

What Command to Follow?

Holding the bible

The religious leader asks Jesus what is the greatest command in the law?

Jesus quotes:

All of the law and all of the Prophets depend on these two commands.

There are many other commands but everything depends on these two.

The word depends also can be translated to hang.

Or to utterly be dependent on the object.

The entire Old testament hang on these two commands.

Jesus is saying that we must love God with our entire being.

The most important command in the bible.

So what does it look like to love God this way?

Well it looks like Jesus.

Someone told me once we spend time with what we love.

I find this to be very true.

Don’t you?

How many of you like to hang out at places you don’t like?

How many of you are sitting at home and you jump up all excited and you say “Hey everyone, you know that restaurant that gave us food poisoning and have dead flies in the soup, lets go there tonight?”

No we go to places we love to go to.

If someone would look at a detailed list of activities that you participated in.

Would they come to the conclusion that you love God? Would they think you loved God’s Word?

This is not intended to make us feel bad but we are all still sinners that will have desires to love things that are not of God.

We see Isreal constantly give up their love for God to love the things and idols of this world.

What we spend time on should warn us about where our heart is.

Where did Jesus spend his time.

In the will of the Father.

Always.

This love is not manufactured or willed into our lives.

It is a love the comes from God himself.

This love is a fruit of the spirit and is produced in us as we walk and grow in Christ’s likeness.

This love from God is then poured out on those around us.

We are to grow and be restored into the likeness of Jesus and do what Jesus did.

Jesus had another interaction with a religious leader that helps us define who we are supposed to love:

Who is My Neighbor?

This time Jesus does not answer with scripture.

He asks the man what the law says and the man quotes the same two reverences to Loving God and Loving your neighbor.

Jesus responds do this and you will live.

Not only does all of the law hang on these two commands but Jesus says if you do these you will live.

Most people would have probably left it at that and been proud that they answered correctly.

But this man had to ask one more question.

Had to reveal how sin works.

How selfish man is:

Give me the list of the people I have to love.

I just want to make sure my list matches with yours.

There is a lot of people that were hated in this society as there are a lot of people hated in our society.

Remember the interaction Jesus had with tax collectors like Levi (Matthew) and Zacchaeous or the Samaritan Woman, or the lepers, the demon possessed, the lame and the blind.

Even the Romans.

All of these people and others were not people that this man would want to love.

They were dirty, unholy sinners.

Why would Jesus hang out with them.

Don’t we do the same?

How many of you heard treat others the way you want to be treated.