To Love - God’s Commandment
Mwemba Mwemba
Midland SDA Church
December 4, 2010
The scripture we just heard reads as follows in the message: 37-40Jesus said, "'Love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence.' This is the most important, the first on any list. But there is a second to set alongside it: 'Love others as well as you love yourself.' These two commands are pegs; everything in God's Law and the Prophets hangs from them." May I ask you to keep your Bibles open at that passage.
Lets pray together….Dear father……
She was in her early 20’s and we all knew who she was. Mildred was a pretty girl by any measure in our congregation and excelled in school. She had been dating a young man by the name of Peter, from a family in our church. Peter was my age and a friend of mine. For a while things seemed to be going well, but somewhere along the way this young lady started looking for more. Within a few months she told Peter she needed time to think about their relationship and their future together. What we all did not know, was that she had already started seeing a married man who was a local businessman and the truth was in her mind she had dumped my friend for a married man. Months later we heard that things had gone sour and she was seeing another married man and in some of my conversations with her, she indicated to me that she was looking for Love ONLY from a man who was ready and willing to take care of her. But in order for her to Love someone - that person ought to have been wealthy. She had dumped my friend Peter because he was not wealthy.
What Mildred went through is common among us. She was in search of someone who was going to love her…shall we say unconditionally. Meantime she herself did not seem to be willing to love someone unconditionally. What is it about Love and us human beings? Jesus commands us to Love in the verses we just read, but the shortcomings in the way we share Love highlights the very nature of our sinfulness – SELFISHNESS and PRIDE. We tend to choose who to Love – and that by-the-way changes depending on conditions we set for ourselves – if that person hurts us, we tend NOT to love them anymore….and the reality is that we all want to show Love to those who are Loveable….perhaps because they are wealthy, popular, or maybe influential but we find it hard to Love the unlovable, such as the poor, the homeless or those that do not meet the love conditions we have set etc…etc.
Lets go back to the passage we just read for a minute….Matthew 22:37 – 40. That day seemed to have been what our son calls a bad day for Jesus. I imagine he was minding his own business - teaching and telling parables but the bullies did not want to spare him. Not sure if the word bullies existed back then, but the Pharisees, Herodians + Sadducees were as usual looking to trap him. The one lesson we take from how Jesus handled bullies was he never argued with them. The Bible records that each time he spoke to them, they were amazed at the way he responded….and this day was no different. By the time we get to verse 37, they had already questioned him about weather it is right to pay taxes and about the resurrection. In a way these teachers of the law were arguing among themselves and yes part of the reason they were asking Jesus these questions was for Him to prove some of them right, but also it was a way for them to trap him. Friends aren’t we all like these teachers of the law – arguing among ourselves regarding what the Bible teaches us.
One way I like to read the Bible especially when Jesus is speaking is to take the position that He is addressing me. In this case, lets me take the position that I am asking him the question about the greatest commandment. So I am a Pharisee…..Part of the reason I would ask Jesus this question is to better understand God’s command, but it could also be to justify my sinfulness/shortcomings – MY SELFISHNESS AND MY PRIDE. You see the Pharisees had classified over 600 laws and often tried to distinguish the more important from the less important. In this case what Jesus is saying to the Pharisees and us this morning, is that instead of going through each of the laws and analyzing them one by one, he simplifies it for us. He says if we truly Love God and our neighbor, we will naturally keep the commandment. Rather than worrying about all we should DO or NOT do, we should focus on Loving God and others – this is looking at God’s law positively. If you are like me, you probably often times find it hard to fully understand what our savior meant, when he said Love God with all your heart with all your soul and with all, your mind and how to live our lives doing so. What does to really mean to Love God with all my heart, with all my mind and with all my soul. So I chose the easy road and thought I would focus our attention on what we can easily relate to - the second command.
I thought we would look at what Jesus meant when he said Love your neighbor as yourself. Yes we can all relate to verse 39 – loving my neighbor as myself….I can relate to that. In other words it means loving and supporting our brothers & sisters in third world countries, the folks at the homeless shelter. Yes, we can relate to loving our brothers and sisters that are in places that have been struck by natural disaster – by making donation towards a recovery program or going over there to help with rebuilding efforts. My question this morning is closer to home - how much are we doing to Love those around as we Love ourselves. When Jesus references our neighbor, it means the stranger we do not know, and I am sure by now you’ve realized it could literally mean our next door neighbor or say the person sitting next to you this morning – a church family member….. lately I have been asking myself the question – AM I doing enough of what Jesus is commanding us in verse 39 as it relates to my wife and kids – my family. Yes, I might be LOVING as myself those folks I do not see very often, say, my next door neighbor, but the question - is do I love my son as myself and yes I am married to Hope, but do I love her as myself. I truly believe that Gods plan for us is simple and what Jesus is saying is - It is not always the way I treat my wife and kids or my church family such as Tony, or Dick, or MaryAnn that leaves much to be desired, but the much simpler things – simple things such as the way I consistently speak to them, my choice of words or even the tone of my voice. If you are like me, these are some of the ways that seem to indicate if others feel loved or not. God’s plan for us is simpler than we think – Its just that we like the Pharisees try to complicate it. Even for those of us that have been married a long time, I often times wonder why we choose to ignore/our spouses perhaps to avoid confrontation – yet we ourselves do not want to be ignored/avoided.
You see Jesus know our nature as humans….wonder how I know…he starts with that in verse 39 he commands us to Love others as ourselves. He starts with our inborn, deep, defining human trait—love for self.
The challenge for us is - How much you Love your family as you love yourself is a very personal question and will become apparent as you hear and respond to what Jesus is teaching us. For a minute think of how much you Love yourself. Then translate that into Loving those around you. He commands, "You shall Love your neighbor as yourself." This means as you long for food when you are hungry, so long to feed your family when they are hungry. It also means that as you seek to be safe and secure from calamity and violence, so seek comfort and security for your family…..and yes it does simply mean that what you would like others (your wife, kids, Tony, Dennis, etc…etc) to do to you, so do the same to them. What I am saying this morning is in order for us to Love our neighbors we ought to challenge ourselves and start with our family and those closest to us.
Even for us married folks find it hard to truly love our spouses as ourselves. We often times hurt and pain becomes the new normal. We seem to show Love to our next door neighbors, workmates and fail to love spouses and kids.
The Mills brothers sang a popular secular tune several years ago called ‘ You always hurt the one you love”..…words go something like this.
You always hurt the one you love
The one you shouldn’t hurt at all.
You always take the sweetest rose
And crush it till the petals fall.
You always break the kindest heart
With a careless word
I think there is some truth to it
You know friends the devil will always try to use us to hurt the people we spend the most time with…our family, our church family. Question I have for us this morning is. Do we Love our family, church family, the way we love ourselves.
Lets flip the coin for a few minutes. Have you ever wondered if you are an enabler for others not to show love. A friend recently reminded me – that most families have folks who are not so easy to love. They make the holiday season a challenge for families to get together….so the question this morning is are you such a person who makes others dread the holiday season. Let me remind you that Christ can make it possible for us to Love and be loved. Let me sum it up……. Newspaper columnist and minister George Crane tells of a wife who came into his office full of hatred toward her husband. "I do not only want to get rid of him, I want to get even. Before I divorce him, I want to hurt him as much as he has hurt me."
Dr. Crane suggested an ingenious plan "Go home and act as if you really love your husband. Tell him how much he means to you. Praise him for every decent trait. Go out of your way to be as kind, considerate, and generous as possible. Spare no efforts to please him, to enjoy him. Make him believe you love him. After you've convinced him of your undying love and that you cannot live without him, then drop the bomb. Tell him that your're getting a divorce. That will really hurt him." With revenge in her eyes, she smiled and exclaimed, "Beautiful, beautiful. Will he ever be surprised!" And she did it with enthusiasm. Acting "as if." For two months she showed love, kindness, listening, giving, reinforcing, sharing. When she didn't return, Crane called. "Are you ready now to go through with the divorce?"
"Divorce?" she exclaimed. "Never! I discovered I really do love him." You see her actions had changed her feelings. Motion resulted in emotion. The ability to love is established not so much by consistent promises but more by repeated good deeds (REPEAT)
My prayer this morning is that by God’s grace we will start by Loving our wives, kids husbands, parents, brothers, uncles – in other words our immediate family as God commanded when he said I am giving you a new command. You must love each other, just as I have loved you…..and that you are my friends, if you obey me. Unlike Mildred, our Love should not be based on what we can get out of a relationship. It should be unconditional. Lets be kind, considerate, generous, pleasing to each other – even to those family members who make the holiday season unbearable for us. In closing let me say this - the second command in verse 39 is incomplete without verse 37. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ Which is the first commandment means before you make your own self- seeking self-giving agenda; make God the focus of your self-seeking. "Love God with all your heart (or passion)" means: Find in God a satisfaction that it fills up all your heart. "Love God with all your soul (prayer)" means: Find in God a meaning so rich and so deep that it fills up all the aching corners of your soul. "Love God with all your mind (intelligence)" means: Find in God the riches of knowledge and insight and wisdom that guide and satisfy all that the human mind was meant to be.
We all need to love and be loved…..we all need joy in our hearts. We surely need hope. We need security in our lives, how about a sense of fulfillment and significance…you know a sense that we are contributing to society. Take all that we need focus it on God until he satisfies your heart, soul and mind. Friends this is a command. A command from God for us to come to him so that he can give us all the fullness that will satisfy our heart and soul and mind with his glory. This is the first and greatest commandment. Our search for all these things that we long for now becomes our search for Gods own heart. This I believe we can only achieve by constant submission, prayer, communion with God. That is why this is the first and greatest commandment.
My prayer this morning is that we will all re-examine our lives and ask ourselves the question. How much have we drifted from this command. Can we still pass the test as this command relates to those closest to us…since that is where we ought to start. The good news is that by Gods grace we can pass the test. We can re-new our relationship with our savior. AMEN