Sermon Tone Analysis

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.

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.

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.

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

Jesus tells us that we will be hated, because He was hated:

Let’s get back again to the context of our main verse this morning.

Our main verse is Deut6.5

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.