Mission Driven Church: Love

Introduction

We are in the middle week of a three week series looking at God’s mission for the church through the lens of God’s goal seeing all nations return to him in worship. We see this image powerfully in Revelation 7.

Revelation 7:9–10 NIV

After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice: “Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.”

If this is the goal of God, the mission that drives all he does, then he created the church to help fulfill this mission. As we think about this mission, over the next couple of weeks we will be looking at 3 key passages that demonstrate how the church. joins God in mission. Last week, we looked at the Great Commission to go and make disciples, ion two weeks we will be looking at Jesus mission in Luke 4. And this week, we turn our attention to the Great Commandment given in Matthew 22.

Before we dive into the text this morning, let us pray for God’s blessing on the reading of his word.

Lord, open our hearts and minds by the power of your Holy Spirit, that as the Scriptures are read and your Word is proclaimed, we may hear with joy what you say to us today. Amen.

Text

Matthew 22:34–40 NIV

Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

L: This is the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ!

P: Praise to you, O Christ!

Why this command?

Many of us likely know this passage by heart and could preach a sermon or two on this saying of Jesus, if not in church, then to our children or friends. We know we are to love God and love others. But have you ever thought about why Jesus makes this command, love of God and others, central to the life of discipleship?

The prophet Hosea reveals a deep truth about God that we might miss if the only stories we focus on in the Old Testament are things like the flood, the tower of Babel, the Exodus, David and Goliath, Elijah and the fire from heaven and so on. So many of the stories we tell focus on judgment and wrath, but there is a deeper truth to God than his wrath at sin. God at his very core is a lover.

The prophet Hosea tells the story of God’s faithfulness to an unfaithful people in two ways. First, he lives it out as his wife keeps leaving him to work the streets and find more customers for her personal wares. But then he also shares God’s longing for his people. Sometimes, God’s words sound like a love song we might hear on the radio. Listen Hosea 2.

Hosea 2:14–15 NIV

“Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her. There I will give her back her vineyards, and will make the Valley of Achor a door of hope. There she will respond as in the days of her youth, as in the day she came up out of Egypt.

God loves his people and it breaks his heart when the leave him. He does not write angry break up songs like T Swift used to write. He writes loves songs meant to woo his people like Justin Timberlake.

God loves us with that all consuming passionate love of a lover. But Jesus revealed God also loves us with the protective, providential, love of a father for his kids as he taught us to address God simply as Abba or father or even more accurately dad.

We love God, not to earn his love, but because God already loves us with all of who God is as Jesus revealed as he suffered and died on the cross for us.

Truly we love because god first loved us.

Love of Others

And then Jesus does something interesting. To be fair, he is not the first to make this connection, but he connects the command to love God with the command to love our neighbor. the implication in how he transitions between these two commands is not that the second command looks like the first, but that the second command, to love our neighbors is how, or at least, part of how we love God. The two cannot be separated. We cannot love God without also loving our neighbors. And, if we say we love God, but we disparage, look down on, ignore the needs of or in some other way fail to love our neighbor, we have not loved God. They go to together. You cannot have one without the other.

So what does it mean for us to be a people who love our neighbors. Through the story of the God Samaritan Jesus has already redefined neighbor to not simply be people who live near us or think like us, but to be anyone in need, even and maybe especially, our enemies in need. Neighbor is simply everyone with whom we come into contact.

But what does it mean to love someone else? To start, it means we love them like we love ourselves. So how do we love ourselves?

Just a couple of weeks ago, I got overly passionate in a meeting. I knew it. So did everyone else. But, I also knew I hadn’t been sleeping well. So I was tired. It was a particularly full and demanding week. I immediately thought of all the reasons why my behavior happened and I should be given grace. To be clear, I went back to the group I was with and apologized and they were very gracious, but in reflecting on the experience, I wonder how often I can be tempted to assign someone’s poor behavior to the character, but assume mine is due to the situation. Do I give people the same grace for their screws up as I do myself? That is loving my neighbor as myself.

When I am hungry, I always make sure I get to have some healthy food to eat. Am I concerned with other people having enough food to eat.

I always vote fro the millages for Jenison Schools because I want my kids to have access to all the resources possible to help them grow and learn as they become adults. Will I have the same concerned and willingness to pay taxes when my kids aren’t in school? Do I care about the kids in Wyoming or Grand Rapids Public Schools having those same resources? That is what love of neighbor demands of me.

When I am in a new place or with new people I always long for someone to say ‘hi’ and include me in their group. Do I do the same for new people at work, school, my neighborhood, or church? That’s what it means to love my neighbor. I do for them what I would do for myself.

How does this fulfill the Law and the Prophets?

Jesus ends with saying, “All the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments.” I have read this phrase hundreds, maybe thousands of times, and have never really thought about how the law and prophets hang on these two commands. What does that mean? How doe these commands tie to the law and prophets?

May of us could probably point to the 10 commandments and see how they divide into two groups of commands, The first group focuses on how we treat God and the second on how we treat others.

But how do the prophets hang on these commands? Years ago, I was reading the gospel of John and was struck by how the author kept referring to himself as the disciple whom Jesus loved, as if this was a shocking thing. Which got me wondering why was the love of Jesus shocking. Thinking about it for a while, I decided it must be because of how the the author understood God and they must have gotten that understanding from the Old Testament. So, I read the Old Testament straight through and then I started reading and re-reading the prophets.

And this is what I discovered. While we think if prophecy as a form of predicting the future, the prophets don’t actually spend much time predicting future events. Most of the prophets spend their time confronting two sins among God’s people and warning them if they don’t repent, there will be consequences.

First, they rebuke the people of God for their worship of things besides God. And second, they rebuke the people of God for not caring for the poor. In Isaiah 1, God says their worship is offensive to him because they are not caring for the oppressed or the fatherless or widow. Only then is their love or worship of him acceptable. We see the same theme in Amos, Micah, Jeremiah and elsewhere The law and prophets in the Old Testament are all about worshipping God and caring for the poor, the oppressed, and the foreigners among us.

I find we have to be very careful when thinking through prophetic texts that talk about the people of God because in the Old Testament God had a chosen nation, but in the New Testament and today, God has a global church. Politicians and some nations may want us to mix our love of God with our love for country, but God does not want us to do so. That would be a form of idolatry.

Mission Driven Church

As we think about what it means to be a church or a believer driven by God’s mission for the church, how might this passage shape us?

Last week, we focused on the Great Commission, mission driven churches Go and Tell people about the kingdom fo God and the reign of Jesus over our world, teaching them how to live in God’s kingdom.

This week, as we look at the Great Commandment, we see that mission driven churches are believers are focused on two things in their daily life together, worshipping God with all of who they are and loving their neighbors, especially the poor, the outcast, the oppressed, those our world overlooks snd might even label losers are the ones we intentionally love and care for.

May our youth do this well on their mission trip, may our new Consistory members model this life for us, and may we all love well both God and neighbor.

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.