Forgive our words which mirror our hearts. Forgive us for the times when we have dishonoured your name.

Transcription

1 Prayer: Father I confess that there are many gods that compete for the love of my heart. Forgive me For worshiping my comforts and possessions For worshiping great human beings For worshiping myself, my feelings and my desires For worshiping my loved ones and family For worshiping my status and approval Father you are a God who loves even to a thousand generations; Yet you are jealous for your honour and glory; Forgive us for bringing you down and making you small. Forgive us for trying to contain you in an image or an object. Give us knowledge of your greatness, your power and your majesty. Forgive our words which mirror our hearts. Forgive us for the times when we have dishonoured your name. Hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

2 Amen Well hands up if you have ever done something weird while you were driving I have seen ladies painting their nails, brushing their hair and doing their lipstick I have seen men shaving. I read that one woman was caught changing a baby s nappy while driving - that is real multitasking. One policeman also caught a man playing a musical instrument Well hands up if you have used your cell phone while driving hands up if you have sent a text while driving. May I say it is not the greatest idea but we have all done it! In June last year a Tennessee school bus accident killed two students and a teacher's aide. One school bus crossed the concrete median of a highway and crashed into another school bus traveling in the opposite direction all because the driver was texting Well, there is no doubt that cell phones have changed our lives. One of the major changes, I think, is that we are now much more distracted than ever before. Our lives are filled with Instagram and Pinterist and Facebook and Twitter. I can now receive the thoughts of my favourite politician or movie star in real live time on my phone as they tweet them In fact it is quite hard not to get distracted in our world. It is hard not to get distracted by all the competing voices that contend for my limited attention. I don t know about you but I seem to have a million thoughts buzzing in my mind all at the same time. It is not unusual for me to wake at 3am with a thousand things going on in my head. There just seems to be so much noise in my life It is something of a relief then when I find someone who can clarify things for me; someone who cuts through the noise, someone who sifts through all the junk and pulls out for me the very essence of life.

3 Which is what Jesus does for us today... Turn to Matthew 22:24 where we find Jesus in conversation with the Pharisees which is always fun. One of them asks him this question, Which is the greatest commandment in the Law? It is not a question that I get asked very often in fact I have never been asked it that I can remember but it certainly was buzzing around in Jesus day. In fact the New Testament records at least two and possibly even three separate occasions when he gets asked this very question Which is the greatest commandment in the law? To which Jesus replies, Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. Now, in that one, brief, simple sentence Jesus cuts through so much of the noise of our world. He cuts through the noise of all the world s religions. He cuts through the noise of Islam and Hinduism and Buddhism and multi-faith-ecumenicalism. He cuts through the noise of thousands of years of Christian conflict; of denominational divides; of theological debates and church politics; he cuts through all the conflicts and the distractions and he says this is what it is all about Love God totally. That is what life is about; that is the essence of life; that is what this world is about; that is what you are made for; that is your purpose; your raison d etre in that one simple sentence Jesus gives us the heart of life

4 We are made to love God. Now most of us here today love God with some of us. But if we are really honest with ourselves we also love all sorts of other things as well. The truth is that we get distracted from loving God only. We love pleasure, we love sex, we love things, we love power, we love the thought of having just a little bit more, we love achievement and esteem and respect, we love comfort and the idea of fame; we love security and ease, we love rest, we love being loved But Jesus says we are not made for any of those things we are made to love God with every fibre of our being Now of course that command has got a little partner to it love your neighbour loving God has an outflow of other people love and we will come to this in more detail in a few sessions time. The two are deeply interconnected. You won t love people if you don t love God and loving people flows out of loving God but I am not going to say anything more about that little partner today. Today I want us simply to focus in on loving God with all of us Now I wonder if you were surprised by Jesus answer. I think we might have expected him to choose one of the Ten Commandments as the greatest command but he doesn t. he chooses a command that is not in the Ten Commandments at all and by doing that he shows us that the Ten Commandments are in fact set up to move us towards this goal God himself. And our love for God is in fact what theologians call the hermeneutical key to understanding the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments are simply God teaching his people what love for him looks like Now love is described in the Ten Commandments by contrasting it with un-love. In the Ten Commandments love is described for us by what it is not. In the Bible love is often described this

5 way. In 1 Corinthians 13 for example love is to not envy, love is not proud, love is not self-seeking, love keeps no record of wrongs And the first of the Ten Commandments teaches us that 1. Love is not a divided heart. Love is exclusive God says Deuteronomy 5v7. You shall have no other gods before me. To love God is to turn our hearts off the love of other gods. Loving God means leaving our other gods behind and turning our hearts in single mindedness towards him so that the things of this world grow strangely dim In many ways the love of God is like a marriage relationship. We have had lots of wedding images so far in this series I am unapologetic about that because the Bible uses marriage as the primary symbol to help us understand our relationship with God So imagine a wedding day Bride and Groom. She, princess like in white satin he, a knight in shining armour. As they stand there they promise each other that they will forsake all others and take only you till death do us part. It is a promise of exclusivity. I will take you alone I will have no other husband but you. I will have no other wife but you no one else but you I will not love anyone else. My love for you means I am exclusive The celebrity stars today have this bizarre thing called an open relationship. I was reading recently that David Bowie had an open relationship with his first wife. Which means we are married but we can sleep with other people if we want to needless to say his first marriage ended in an

6 acrimonious divorce and him deeply dependant on drugs I think we can safely say it didn t work. I love you but I want to sleep with other people is to actually say, I don t really love you at all No the love for God is exclusive. The love of God is a love for him at the expense of the love of other things Now for most of us, the great danger is not that we don t try to love God but it is that we are so distracted and rushed and preoccupied with other things that we settle for a mediocre version of respectable religion instead of a radical love for God. And so we have got to start a fight with the distractions of our hearts, the direction of our hearts, the love of our hearts. We have got to start today a battle that turns the loves of our hearts consciously towards God and away from the stuff that seems so enticing but ultimately fades and disappoints. We have got to root out the sometimes good things that easily become the gods we desire For the men that is probably interconnected with your work. We men get so much of our sense of worth from what we do. I clinched the deal. I built the building. I fixed the mess I am the man we have to constantly check whether that love for respect has captured our hearts For the ladies I suspect that it won t be work but it will be somehow intertwined with your relationships. It will be easy to love being loved and to worship that feeling. It will be the desire of your heart to be treated like a princess and esteemed and cherished and you will idolise the man who gives you those things or crave a man to do so. Again you have got to start the fight and turn your heart towards the one who really loves you

7 Now, secondly God teaches us that to love him means to think of him as he is and not as we desire him to be because 2. Love thinks true thoughts The second command in V8 says you shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. Love is interconnected with truth. Sometimes people wake up after being married to someone for a period of time and they realise that the person they thought they were marrying is not in fact the person that they did marry. And sometimes the fault doesn t lie with the one having been married.no instead what has happened is that one party fell in love with a dream. They fell in love with someone that doesn t actually exist, and instead they made the person to be the object of their desires rather than loving them for who they actually are And we do this with God as well. One of the things you will see in your heart when you dig deeply is the temptation to make God like you, to make him understandable to you. We make God smaller so that he fits our minds rather than stretching our minds to the truth of God. That is what it means to make an idol. We want to have him smaller so that we can visualise him and understand him and get him to do what we want. And so we paint him as a medieval Italian man, or we carve out a crucifix in order to visualise him on the cross but the truth is that images dishonour God because they hide his glory and they convey false ideas about him because he is always bigger bigger than any image or any idol. He is just bigger. There is a lovely moment in the Narnia series when Lucy sees Aslan Oh joy! For he was there: the huge Lion, shining white in the moonlight, with his huge black shadow underneath him. But for the movement of his tail he might have been a stone lion, but Lucy never thought of that. She never stopped to think whether he was a friendly lion or not. She rushed to him. She felt her heart would burst if she lost a moment. And the next thing she knew was that she was kissing him

8 and putting her arms as far round his neck as she could and burying her face in the beautiful rich silkiness of his mane. Aslan, Aslan. Dear Aslan, sobbed Lucy. At last. The great beast rolled over on his side so that Lucy fell, half sitting and half lying between his front paws. He bent forward and just touched her nose with his tongue. His warm breath came all round her. She gazed up into the large wise face. Welcome, child, he said. AsIan, said Lucy, you re bigger. That is because you are older, little one, answered he. Not because you are? I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger. As we love God, as we grow to know him we will find that he is bigger than we ever imagined and any image always obscures his glory. We don t need them. The only thing God gives us to understand him are words and so we must fight the urge to reduce him down to images and instead work hard at putting the words he has given us into our lives If you are serious about loving God you will be serious about his word serious about personal Bible study and listening to biblical preaching. Often I get asked, why don t we have a big cross on the wall of St Stephens to help us visualise God because God doesn t want that he wants us not to have idols but instead to think of him as he is

9 Finally, 3. Love is concerned for the name of the beloved The third command in verse 11 is You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name Now when we hear this we immediately think of kicking our toe against the coffee table and blurting out, Jesus Christ or the American television personality who wins a prize and immediately mouths off, O my God. And of course those do constitute a misuse of the name of God. But remember that Jesus coming transforms our understanding. So Jesus tells us that our words are the outflow of our hearts. If I am unconcerned about the name of God with my words it is only because I have long ago become unconcerned about his name in my heart. Your name is deeply interconnected with you; your name speaks about who you are; your name carries associations that are good or bad; your name is a mental picture of you

10 Last week I bought some ice cream. I love Ice Cream - hands up if you love Ice Cream. On a Monday Tracey has to work but it is my day off so I do some shopping for us, I hate shopping anyway on this particular day, Nestle Vanilla Ice Cream with Bar One sauce was cheapest. I thought we will have one of those. When I got home I discovered that the reason it was cheaper than the other ice creams is because they have made the tub smaller. Nestle ice cream is 1,8 litres not 2 litres anymore. It is called stealthflation we have seen it in chocolate and chips and bread now it is coming to an ice cream near you it is getting smaller. And the corporate bigwigs in their suits think they are so clever but you know what I felt, I felt cheated by Nestle. The name of Nestle is scum to me at the moment. I will forget in a few weeks time and move on because life is too short to be irritated by these sorts of things but for now I don t like Nestle. They have hurt their name in my heart. And I have told you to watch out for Nestle too. Now in contrast to that when I hear the name Tracey my heart gets warm and fuzzy. I am never tempted to use Tracey s name when I kick my toe on the furniture because she is the love of my heart. I may be tempted to use Nestle in the future. And so what I do with my words is a reflection of the love of my heart and it is the same with the name of God. Don t misuse it; but don t misuse it because it s the law; don t misuse it because God is the love of your heart The essence of life is loving God not loving anything else, loving him as he really is and cherishing his name because he the one who loves you so much is precious to you Pray