How We are to Love God
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How We are to Love God
How We are to Love God
Whenever we study the Word of God, we ought to be considering all of those things we talk about from time to time. What did the passage mean to the original audience? How does it fit in with the chapter and book it is in, and how does it fit in with the Bible? What does it mean to us today? And finally, we say we try to find the application. The application is usually either, what sin in my life is this passage exposing, or what command am I receiving from it, and what does that tell me about what I should be doing?
So these are questions we should be seeking to answer whenever we read and contemplate any portion of scripture. But all too often, we tend to focus on the trivial. How many syllables were in the original Hebrew or Greek. Or even worse, how does this passage make me feel? Your feelings are not unimportant, but when it comes to figuring out what a biblical passage is all about, your feelings have to take a back seat. The important thing is not what you are feeling about it, but what God is saying through that scripture.
So we come to today’s passage and you may have read ahead, but at least one of us here had to spend a bit of time researching the passage. Studying it to learn its meaning, to see what God is saying. Sometimes the preparation of a sermon is a dangerous sort of thing. This is because the preacher, in spending a lot of time as my preaching professor often said, “Marinating” in the text, it can be a very uncomfortable feeling. The text being preached is not only to impact the congregation. The preacher himself must take stock of the passage, and test his own life by it, and often this results in the preacher sitting there on a Saturday night, thinking he is imminently unqualified to preach this text, because he himself has not yet perfectly obeyed this scripture.
And so it is this morning, that as I stand here, and have felt that feeling many times. I’m not perfectly holy, I’m not perfect in my speech, I’m not perfect in my thoughts, I’m not perfect in my actions. I’ve felt that feeling many times in preparing to preach. It’s nothing new. But this time is different. I chose to focus on one single verse today, and as I looked it over again and again, studying the words and context, trying to understand what it meant to the original audience, doing my best to make an application of it that we could be challenged by, I realized that this command of God, the one Jesus said was the greatest command, is one that I am fearfully shortcoming in keeping.
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.
If you were to really, carefully read it five times, and think introspectively about how you are doing in keeping this command, if you are sincere in your desire to obey God and take seriously the working out of your faith, I think then, like me, you will realize that in the keeping of this command, not one of us could say, on a scale of one to ten, I am a ten in keeping this one. In fact, I doubt any of us would dare to rate ourselves anywhere near the ten if we are honest.
So let us take a look at this command. First, we will consider the context, what it meant to those who first received it, and what it means for us today, and how we can begin even now to strive to do better in keeping this command.
“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
I’m getting some bids to have some posters made so that we can hang this passage in the entry of each building to constantly remind ourselves what our purpose is, what we as a church have chosen to make our primary focus, and that is to obey this passage. But let us remind ourselves where in scripture this passage falls. It falls within a speech given by Moses to the people of Israel. He has reminded them of how God delivered them. He has reminded them of their own falling short and their recommitment to follow God. Shortly before this portion he has recalled the Ten Commandments, and immediately following, he will go through more of the rules that Israel is to live by.
And in between all of this comes this command, the command that Jesus said was the greatest command. All the law and the prophets are summed up in this command. All the Ten Commandments are summed up in this command. All of the other rules and statutes the people of Israel were to obey, including the very specific instructions about how they were to worship God, all are summed up in this command. Last week, I shared this quote from St. Augustine: Love God, then do as you please.
Basically he was saying that if you love God, that what you please to do will be the will of God. But really St. Augustine was not saying any more than Jesus said in the gospel of Matthew.
But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together.
And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him.
“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”
And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.
This is the great and first commandment.
And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
Love God, then do as you please. Peter Marshall, who was the subject of the book and movie “A Man called Peter”, and was chaplain of the US Senate, known for his beautiful prayers, that in those days were printed in every newspaper by the Associated Press, spoke of how as we mature in our faith, our will and God’s will become on and the same. Love God, then do as you please means that the closer we get to perfection in loving God, the more His will and our will become joined together.
The question may be asked, by fragile humans, but how can one command love? Isn’t love a natural affection towards someone or something? Can God really command us to love Him? The answer is yes! Of course He can! I can imagine a young single guy thinking to himself about now, well that’s it, then! That pretty girl I like, I will just command her to love me! Since the pastor says love can be commanded, finally this will be how I get her to love me. I will just command it.
Well, hold your horses. You see, this is not going to work for you in dating, young man. You cannot just command a girl to love you. You have not done anything really significant for her! You have not authority over her. You have no foundation to stand on which would give you any kind of right to demand her love. But God does have authority over His people. he has done something significant for us. He has a foundation to stand on. In fact, scripture tells us righteousness and justice are the foundations of His throne.
God has the authority because He is the creator and we are His creatures. He has ownership over every one of us. He has ownership over those who try to please him, and He has ownership over those who hate him. And when this command was first given to Israel, beyond just the fact that he is the creator, and truly the only entity that has a completely free will, God had shown them His power, shown them His special concern for them, shown them His preference of them, shown them His sovereignty over men and all of nature, this God was perfectly able to command love from them.
If this is the greatest commandment, then it strikes me that those who are eternally damned will probably be people with a special resistance to this command. They do not love God, they hate Him. And since they hate Him, they Hate His rules, His commands. Those who love Him want to honor Him and keep His commandments, those who hate Him want to dishonor Him and therefore rebel against His rule and reign.
The more I learn to know God and His Word, the more I understand what this Word is saying, the more the world around me makes sense. When Christians are attacked for saying abortion is wrong, the hate towards the church is really hate towards the God the church represents. When Christians are attacked for saying marriage is a sacred union between a man and his wife, and therefore there is no other valid expression of it, the hate towards the church is really hate towards the God who set the family structure within His design for society. When Christians are attacked because they don’t want drag queens in the schools, or kids being told they can choose their gender, the hate is not really towards them, though they may feel the wrath of the God-haters.
Yes, those who hate God’s way of doing things really hate God himself. And as His representatives on this earth, we may as well get used to the idea that if we are to stand for the ways of God, we will receive part of the anger that the God-haters have. Is this language too strong? How can I say they hate God? It is clearly evident. On Mother’s day, I gave a message about God’s church being pro-life. I mentioned that abortion is part of Satanic worship. Well, in case you didn’t believe me, there are now members of the church of Satan suing the states who have outlawed abortion, saying that they have a right to abortion as a religious freedom.
Who hates god more than Satan? And who therefore does all he can to pervert God’s way, to spread the hate of God’s commands far and wide? I’m not sure how we can put evil on a scale, but since scripture says that in the last days, sin and wretchedness and hate towards God will be like in the days of Noah, I think our world today, if it isn’t there yet, is hurtling towards that level of depravity faster than ever, at least in recent history.
But God will finally deal with those who hate him: Deut32.47
if I sharpen my flashing sword and my hand takes hold on judgment, I will take vengeance on my adversaries and will repay those who hate me.
For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed.
Jesus tells us that we will be hated, because He was hated:
“If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you.
If I had not done among them the works that no one else did, they would not be guilty of sin, but now they have seen and hated both me and my Father.
but he who fails to find me injures himself;
all who hate me love death.”
Let’s get back again to the context of our main verse this morning. Our main verse is Deut6.5
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.
And in the context of this command to love, is the giving of the Ten Commandments and the other rules and laws Israel was to live by. As I mentioned last week, Christians today are not obligated to keep all of those ceremonial laws, but the moral law of God is eternal, and every person, Jew or Gentile, believer in Christ and unbeliever, Lovers of God and haters of God, every person will be judged in how they kept the moral law of God. Believers will be judged as well, but our judgement will be in light of our Savior, who saves us from our own sin and took the wrath of God on Himself in order that it be turned away from us who he saved.
So the people of Israel were given this command to love in light of the proofs God had given them of his power and grace. So they were to love Him with all their heart and soul and might. Again, we want to first understand this in light of how Israel understood it when it was given. To a Hebrew, the heart in this context is not the physical organ, it is basically the mindset of the person. We might ask someone today, what is on your mind? and it would mean about the same as what an ancient Israelite would have meant if they were to say, “What is on your heart?”. And indeed, some people today still use these interchangeably.
But to love God with all your heart, could roughly be translated for us today to say something like, Love the Lord your God with all of your thinking, or all of your thoughts. Or maybe we could say, everything we think should reflect our love for God. Now, some may take this instead to mean love God with all of your affections. And really, there is no need to get into too much debate on this. Because the command leaves us no other impression than that every fiber of our being, whether thoughts, whether actions, whether opinions, whether affections, all of it should be involved in loving God.
You may have noticed the wording to be slightly different in Matthew. He used “with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” And before we go ahead and say the Bible is inconsistent here, let us keep in mind a very big difference between Deuteronomy and the gospel of Matthew. Deuteronomy was written in Ancient Hebrew, Matthew was writing in ancient greek. So today, modern translators have the difficult job of taking these ancient texts and translating them into understandable English so that the broadest population among us can have a decent understanding. In the same way, when the gospel writers composed their work, they were putting it into Greek, the most common language in trade, with the broadest understanding in their world at that time.
Not only that, but the gospel writers may have at times been less concerned with making their quotes from the Old Testament perfect translations in to Greek, but wanted to get the main point across. So Luke in His gospel, uses heart, and soul, and strength, and mind. Again, he is not contradicting the other accounts, but making clear the main point, which is that love of God should be the driving force of everything we say, do, think. Love of God should overpower any of our own selfish desires. It should overpower our appetites for worldly things.
I should quickly say that soul is defined in some different ways, but generally means something like the part of us that is not physical but spiritual, or that part of us that is our own will or personality. And Might, or strength, may mean both our physical efforts and abilities as well as our driving force or passion.
We can’t ignore this command because it was given to the Jews. If Jesus said it was the greatest commandment, and it is recorded in the gospels that he said so, then we can take this command not only for Jews, but for everyone. Everyone will be judged in their obedience to the commands of God, and if this is the greatest one, then all other commands fall within this commands’ broader implications. Again, it is about love or hate. Do you hate God? Then you will hate all his other commands. If you love God, you will love His commands, even when you are not quite keeping them perfectly.
For the believer in Christ, we are not slaves to sin, but slaves to righteousness. In other words, our nature is not sin, but righteousness. So when we do righteous things as believers, that is because it is our nature to do so. When we do sin as believers, it is not because that is our nature, but it is opposed to our new nature in Christ. Sin for the believer is the exception, not the norm. Read Romans 6 and see if this is true.
But for the God-hater, when he sins, it is because it is his nature to do so. If the God-Hater ever does something good, it is not because his nature is good, but in fact, the good he does do even convicts him because it shows he is aware of what is right and what is wrong.
Paul wrote in Romans 2 that even those who didn’t receive the law by nature do what the law requires and this shows the work of the law is written on their hearts, and their conscience beard witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or excuse them, on the day when God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.
But how do we love God? How do we obey this command to love Him with all our hearts and all our soul and all our might? Let’s think for a moment of people we love. What causes our love to increase for them? Well, it has been said absence makes the heart grow fonder. However, I don’t think this is universally true. Temporary separation between two people who love each other does indeed make them miss each other, pine for one another. But longer absence can actually have the opposite effect. I had some pretty close friends in High School, but after many years not seeing them except on Facebook, if I do see a post from some of them, it often makes me wonder who they even are.
I graduated with a class of 495 students. and there have been times on Facebook when I got a friend request, and the name, the photo, none of it even rings a bell. And sometimes I have had to send a message to another classmate and say “who is this? I have a friend request from her?” and I may be told, remember, she played flute in band, or something like that. But I can honestly say that I don’t love or have increased fondness for any school mates after these many years of no contact with them.
I could say the same for Marines I served with, people at various jobs I have had. Even close friends we spent time with as a couple, since we or they moved away, our bond has decreased. we are less involved with them, so we know less about their lives, and so our affections for them are not the same as they once were.
I have read many very long novels. And it is not uncommon when you see you are getting to the last few pages, that even though you know the conclusion is coming and you want to see what happens in the end, you feel like when you close the book you will miss the characters. I would say for me, it especially true with Dickens. If you read David Copperfield, which has many elements of Dicken’s own life in it, and perhaps a little more of his own passion found in those pages, that by the time you close the book, which is 700-900 pages depending on how small of print you have, you really feel you have some love for those main characters.
Or perhaps you aren’t a reader so much. Let’s try this. How many times have you become a loyal fan of a television show, and there comes a time where the news comes out, the show is now in its last season. And you feel a little sad inside. And everybody wants to watch the last episode because it will be the last time they see these characters they have learned to love. These characters even felt like family. Familiar people with their quirks and mannerisms, you quote them, you talk about them with others. So it turns out that the finales draw a huge audience.
It is less so now, but there was a day when there was no streaming, no tivo or DVRs, and in those days when a show was ending, the audience would be huge. In fact, I looked this up, and here are the top 20 show endings of all time, starting with 20 and I will bring it down to number 1. Some of you folks probably had a love for at least one of these shows, and you may remember that tender feeling you had when the show came to an end. here are the top twenty finales by size of audience:
Macgyver, St. Elsewhere, Full house, Golden Girls, Happy Days, Gunsmoke, Star Trek TNG, Everybody Loves Raymond, Dallas, Frasier, Home Improvement, Family Ties, All in the Family, Cosby, The last Tonight Show with Jonny Carson, Magnum PI, Freinds, Sienfeld, Cheers, and finally, the all time number one watched episode of any TV series in history was the finale of MASH. Over 100 million people watched the last episode of MASH.
Now, as I read those, were they any warm feelings you felt, thinking about those characters in those shows? Or maybe you are more like me, and have this feeling at the end of a long novel? But what is the common factor usually when you have been drawn into a care and concern for these fictional characters?
Here it is: You spent a lot of time with them. Take Mash as an example. 11 seasons, over 250 total episodes. In those days, if you missed the show, you were out of luck. There were no DVRs, no streaming. So week after week, you had to make sure you were near a TV at a particular time. People ordered their lives around making sure they could watch the show. Then they talked about it with family and friends. They grew to love the characters, even the annoying ones. 250 episodes, plus reruns, people had spent a lot of time with those characters.
The 700 page novel, if you read something like that, for most of us, that represents many hours as well. You learned the background of the characters, you went through times of sorrow and triumph with them. In the end, you loved some of them. Why? You spent time with them.
So how can you love God if you hardly spend any time with Him?
How can you love Him with ALL of your heart, soul, and might if you spend no time with Him? Too many people in churches today think they will be fine with an hour or so of exposure to the things of God each week. But if we are to love Him and keep this command, we ought then to spend time with Him. How else can we learn to enjoy Him?
So what do I mean by spending time with Him? Isn’t God present all the time with us? Yes, he is.
We can spend time with God in many ways. We can read His Word. We can pray. We can worship through song. We can listen to preaching. We can spend time with brothers and sisters in the faith, talking about our mutual faith and celebrating Christ together. This is how we love God.
Our command is to love Him, and the more we get to know Him, the more natural this will be. And we may also reflect on His attributes. We can reflect on how He has blessed us. And we can remember that if we are in Christ, He has loved us despite who we are. I have been going through the book “Knowing God” by JI Packer lately, it is a stellar book. Packer reminds us of the love of God that is not based on our merits, but is despite our sinfulness. He says:
There is tremendous relief in knowing that his love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery now can disillusion him about me, in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself, and quench his determination to bless me. There is, certainly, great cause for humility in the thought that he sees all the twisted things about me that my fellow humans do not see (and am I glad!), and that he sees more corruption in me than that which I see in myself… There is, however, equally great incentive to worship and love God in the thought that, for some unfathomable reason, he wants me as his friend, and desires to be my friend, and has given his Son to die for me in order to realize this purpose.
So how do we love God with everything we have? We need to get to know Him better. Then we will appreciate him more. Time with Him will increase our affection for him, just as time with our favorite people does. Think about it. If time with fictional characters makes us love them more, than certainly time with the Living God will help us to grow in affection for him.
This is what our challenge as a church is going to be, to obey these commands. And really, they are all wrapped up together. The command to love is linked to the other commands, our time with the Lord will increase our love for Him, and let us not miss this: That not only has God given us His word, and invites us to come to Him in prayer, he has given us each other. The church is Christ’s. We are given to one another to encourage each other, to testify to His grace, to challenge each other to go deeper, to celebrate together the victories of life, to weep together in the times of mourning.
Spending time with God’s people is another way to spend time with Him. So let’s do it together, for His glory.