THE GREATEST COMMANDMENT

THE GREATEST COMMANDMENT Readings: Matthew 22:34-40, Deuteronomy 6:1-9, 13-15, 1 John 4:18 LOVE THE LORD OUR GOD WITH: Introduction:... that word LOVE The word love gets bandied around so much today. We love our cars, our homes, our lifestyle. Often we barely say the word a heart symbol is often all that is used. On face book we just press on LIKE!! Love as an emotion is a feeling that can come and go, can easily be trampled on, has lost its sense of commitment and can be fallen in and out of. Some people don t say the words, I Love You very often for fear of being misunderstood, for fear of minimizing its significance or afraid because it will be thrown back in their face or for fear of rejection. I know, for me, it took me a long time to be able to use the word LOVE freely. I had seen LOVE made a farce of in my parent s marriage. I had grown up with what had felt like conditional love. My parents never just gave you a hug and said I love you. It was always about performance and perception. When I came to know Jesus I believe I experienced unconditional love and acceptance for the first time and it was life changing. I had a lot of issues to work through personally before I could use that word Love, SO when David and I started going out it was years before I could actually say to him, I love you. I actually used to sing to him the Meatloaf track, I want you, I need you but there ain t no way I m ever going to love you but don t feel sad because 2 out of 3 ain t bad!! How terrible was that!!! I didn t want to cheapen the word, I only wanted to say it if it was absolutely true. I think due to my parent s divorce and that the experts were saying that history usually repeats itself, I was scared of commitment in case I couldn t live up to it and the Statistics said that would be the case. Enter Jesus and His beautiful gentle healing that was able to take away my fear of commitment, failure and break the bonds of generational separation and divorce. For the record I finally could tell David I loved him, trusting myself and my God, mind you he nearly fell over and I never sang him that song again instead I belted out the Whitney Houston classic, I, I, I Will Always Love You. Never managing to hit those high notes much to Dave s dismay. 1/....with all your heart This passage from Matthew is one of a couple featuring interactions with the Pharisees and the Sadducees where they were trying to trip Jesus up. The Sadducees were aristocrats. They tended to be wealthy and held powerful positions, including that of chief priests and high priest, and they held the majority of the 70 seats of the ruling council called the Sanhedrin. They worked hard to keep the peace by agreeing with the decisions of Rome (Israel at this time was under Roman control), and they seemed to be more concerned with politics than religion. In contrast to the Sadducees, the Pharisees were mostly middle-class businessmen, and therefore were in contact with the common man. The Pharisees were held in much higher esteem by the common man than the Sadducees. Though they were a minority in the Sanhedrin and held a minority number of positions as priests, they seemed to control the 1

decision making of the Sanhedrin far more than the Sadducees did, again because they had the support of the people. Religiously, they accepted the written Word as inspired by God what is now our Old Testament. But they also gave equal authority to oral tradition. Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, much to the Pharisees delight, they moved in with their carefully planned question. Which is the greatest commandment of all? Jesus short, wise, simple answer cut through all their cunning and conniving silencing them. From 613 rules and regulations known as the Old Testament Law, to the Ten Commandments, Jesus boils it all down to the verses that we just read. We are to love God and love people. This commandment is taken from Deuteronomy 6:5 which is part of the Shema, the creed of Judaism, a prayer that serves as a centerpiece of the morning and evening Jewish prayer services. This isn t complicated. Love God. Love people. The expert in the law was trying to trap Jesus. Instead of giving them a loophole that allowed them to obey one commandment and ignore any of the others, Jesus gave them a commandment that encompassed all of the commandments of God in two simple sentences: Love God and Love your Neighbor. Five words! God himself gave us the central commandment to love God, along with the other commandments. This central command helps to define the spirit in which we must keep all the other commandments. If we are not ardently following this one command, we are not really keeping any of the others either. The Pharisees prided themselves on meticulous observance of the Law. They not only knew the Ten Commandments, but they paid rigorous attention to all the laws in the books of Moses. They tried to reason out the implications of the laws, and to make sure that they avoided even the possibility of violating any of them. But the Pharisees had lost sight of the very heart of the matter loving God. Without love for God, the external observance of the commandments becomes an empty form. In Matthew 23:25-26 Jesus specifically warned of the danger: Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean ( NIV). In Matthew 15:3 Jesus criticizes the Pharisees and the scribes Why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition?. When do we hold onto tradition, habits, customs at the expense of loving God and loving others? When do proper, external observances clutter and cloud this simple command? Genuine love of the Lord involves thought and sensitivity, purpose and action. Whilst today I have separated Heart, soul and mind, they really cannot be separated. For they were always held in antiquity as one, clauses referring to heart, soul, and mind are to be taken cumulatively, and here meaning love.. to.. the uttermost degree; with all that is within us, with our whole being. If we love God with our whole heart, for that to be true we will also love Him with all our soul and all our mind and in Mark it also says strength, which represents our physical being and in Deuteronomy it says strength instead of mind. Matthew possibly uses mind because of the Greek emphasis on learning that had so permeated the New Testament culture but unlike Mark he keeps it to 3 like the original shema. 2

So how do we do that? How do we love God with all our heart? How do we love anyone? When we are in love what do we do so others know we love them? How do we know when we are loved? OFTEN..... We give each other gifts or we rub noses with the one we love these are often called eskinose kisses. We might go out on a date. Who remembers their first date? Gareth & Amy went out on a date for their 5 th wedding anniversary last night!! Often we like to hold hands when walking along and some of us are happy to share our food together (although my Dave never liked this!!) We ll sometimes have a little smooch and usually will love a cuddle or a snuggle together. Sometimes we ll dance with the one we love even if we don t really enjoy dancing. Some of us will sing songs to those we love as I mentioned earlier. We should and need to spend time playing with those we love and we can say loving things to each other. You know some of these are things we can do in loving God with our whole heart. One of them involves singing. God loves to hear our worship. David danced before the Lord. God loves us to spend time with Him and He loves us to tell Him how much we love Him. How good are you at doing these things? How often do you tell God that you love Him? How often do you worship Him apart from Sunday morning? Do you chat away to Him in prayer sharing all your day with Him? General William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army is an example of loving God with his whole heart. When asked for the secret of his success, Booth replied, I made up my mind that God should have all of William Booth there was; and if anything has been achieved, it is because God has had all the adoration of my heart, all the power of my will and all the influence of my life. [John C. Maxwell, Deuteronomy [The Communicator s Commentary], (Waco: Word Books, 1987), 107] William Booth s heart, his soul, and his mind, were obsessed with God. He refused to return God s whole-hearted love halfheartedly. To love God with all our heart we must love Him passionately. The heart represents our affection. The phrase all your heart" obviously speaks of exclusivity. Loving God with all my heart means that my first spiritual loyalty is to Him. The Bible indicates that our heart is central: Luke 6:45 says The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks. Everything we are and have, beginning with our inmost commitments and all our thoughts, we must devote to loving, adoring, and serving God. Yet all of us fall short of being able to love God fully. We are able to love at all because God is Love and everything we receive from Him and are able to give Him is because of His unmerited grace. We may also not be able to fully love Him because our own hearts have been broken, hurt or rejected. Can you relate to this? Some of us doubt if we can really trust God specially with our whole heart? And specially as a father due to our own earthly experience of fathers or others whom we have given our hearts to and who have let us down. The human heart is so fragile but our God can be trusted, He will always handle it with care, take the risk give Him your whole heart. He offers us as in the reading from 1 John, a perfect love, and that perfect, unconditional, all-consuming love can take away any 3

fears we may have in giving our God, all of our heart. Biblically the opposite to love is not hate, it is fear. Only your whole heart will do. Deuteronomy 6:15 says, He is a jealous God, He does not like divided loyalties, or luke warmness, it is your whole heart or nothing!! Isaiah 42:8, says, He will not yield His glory to another or His praise to idols. Is He competing with anyone or anything in your life? If so what? And Why is He? Are you prepared to give it up and give Him your all just as he did for you at Calvary? 2/...with all your soul Our hearts can be fickle, they can rely on feelings. We may only feel loved or able to love if we feel it. God understands this and so He asks us to love Him with not only our heart but also with our very soul. The human soul speaks of identity and intimacy. God wants us to love Him with ALL our soul on the deepest level of intimacy, holding nothing back. The soul is that which makes everything about us who we are. Psalm 103:1 says, Praise the LORD, my soul; all my inmost being, praise his holy name. Our inmost being must love Him too. All our thoughts and affections must be engaged and united for this task of loving God. For the Hebrews All that is within me are the various organs of the body, which were regarded by the Hebrews as the seat of thought will and emotion. The Psalmist summons all the faculties and powers of his being to unite in the praise or the love of Jehovah. I know when my husband Dave died, I wasn t sure whether or not to go to see his body at a viewing later, but I am so glad that I did because it showed me that everything that made Dave who he was, was gone and all that was left, his body, his earthly tent, an empty vessel, his common clay pot was an empty shell. His soul, the very essence of who he was had long gone to be with His Lord. When it talks about loving God with all your soul, it means with every part of your being, which is why, again, it is so hard to separate out these 3 points. 3/...and with all your mind. As we all know and as I said earlier our feelings can be fickle they can come and go. If following Jesus was dependent on what I felt I probably would have given up long ago. God knows this and understands this which is why he added all our soul and mind, to this commandment. The reading in Deuteronomy talks about binding the laws of God on our foreheads. The Pharisees did this religiously and so do some Jewish people still today. Again, Jesus is having a go at their empty traditions and their showmanship. It is no point just having God s laws physically on your forehead unless you are pursuing and following them. Our minds and brains need to be engaged, knowledge for knowledge s sake is not enough, it must be acted upon. Faith is about believing when we don t feel it. It is about taking God at His word. Truth is truth whether or not I feel it. And to love him with all our mind is to engage our intellect in loving Him. We are to Love God Intelligently "with all our mind". This statement helps us avoid extremes. It keeps us balanced. Emotions must be balanced with truth. Emotionalism 4

occurs when experience takes priority over the Word of God. Feelings and faith must be governed by the facts of God s Word. Devotion must be guided by Scripture and by truth. Some love and serve God emotionally, while committing intellectual suicide and others can love and serve God intellectually, but with no emotion. How often are you using your intellect to love God? Learning more about Him is one way to show Him you love Him and are wanting to become more intimate with Him. What if I was to ask you to share with the person next to you what you have learnt about God this week? Don t worry I m not going to but what would you say? When was the last time you learnt something new about God? Did you get excited about this? Who did you share it with? Perhaps you could choose to do some extra study this year. The Bible is able to be read by all, but when you delve deeper into the background, the language and the culture it so often brings the Word to life and reinforces its truth in deeper, amazing ways. Conclusion: Nothing Less Will Do!! Jesus is reminding us that we are to love God the same way He loves us. We cannot respond to God s whole-hearted love in a half-hearted manner. We are to love Him with ALL our heart, ALL our soul, and ALL our mind. Heart, soul and mind are not three distinct small pieces of ourselves that we may offer. They all point to what and who we really are. God isn t just someone we worship and serve. He s someone we know. He wants a relationship with us. He has shared his life with us. When we reflect upon His love for us, we will love Him more! John 3:16a "For God so loved the world that He gave us His only Son. Now we should be willing to follow His example: as it says in Ephesians 5:1-2, Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children and live a life of love. While the rest of us, and the Sadducees and Pharisees put a premium on holy and right living and other things. Jesus puts the premium on LOVE. It doesn t take much to understand why. God is Love, and that s why the premium is placed on love. Jesus said, that [to love God] is the first and greatest commandment. It is first and greatest in that it represents the heart-beat of all the commandments. Love God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind for nothing less will do, nothing less will be accepted by God. He wants our whole being and this jealous God deserves it, for He held nothing back and still doesn t despite our response. His grace, His mercy, His unconditional love and His perfect sacrifice were perfect demonstrations of His love for us. What can you do this week to show God how grateful you are and much you love Him? Why not make a date to talk with him about it!!! Ange van der Leeuw 22 nd January, 2017 5