Matthew 22:34-40; Loyal Love in Our Changing World

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Thank you for being here today.

The scripture reading is from Matthew, chapter 22.

Matthew 22 · chapter mention

You can find that on the screen behind me, I believe, as well as in the bulletin, and if you have your own personal Bible with you, it's in there too.

Matthew, chapter 22, and we're going to begin with verse sorry, 34.

Matthew 22 · chapter mention

I just had cataract surgery so I have to be very careful, have to figure out how I can read it.

So here we go.

This big, now you ready, here we go.

This is the word of God.

Hear God's word.

But when the Pharisees heard that Jesus 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 the second is like it you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.

May God add his rich blessing to the reading of his word.

Let's pray together.

Lord Jesus, we have just heard words that you spoke thousands of years ago.

Here we are today, living in our day and we know that these words that you spoke thousands of years ago are for us today as well.

And so we turn to you and we ask you, lord, to please send Holy Spirit to us.

May he come and fill every heart in this room, that we may see the truth, that we may hear it, that we may be empowered by your truth to live for you in a way that's honoring to you and to the Father and to the Spirit.

Amen.

I'm going to be here this Sunday and I'm going to be here next Sunday.

So if you want to be free of me, don't come next Sunday.

Go somewhere else, nobody will even notice.

But it's great to have two chances to talk with you together during this time, because you know we're entering into a season in the United States that is usually jam-packed, full of tension and strife and distraction and hardship and anxiety.

I'm talking about the presidential election, not the summertime.

It's a time when American people become easily agitated and Christian people get distracted.

They become distracted from the things that are primary in our faith and we become preoccupied with things that are important no doubt important, but they are easily distracting us from the most important things in our Christian faith, and it's for that reason that we're looking at a passage today in Matthew, chapter 22, where Jesus was asked the question Teacher, what's the greatest commandment?

Matthew 22 · chapter mention

The greatest commandment?

Well, if Jesus had been a good Presbyterian, like all of you are, he would have said well, they're all great, they're all important.

You can't make one more important than the others.

But happily Jesus was not a Presbyterian.

How about that?

Yeah, it's a good thing.

So he very freely did what many others in his day did, and that was he said.

Well, I can tell you what the first one is.

It is to love the Lord, your God, with all your heart and all your soul.

And Matthew says and your mind.

And it's a quotation from an Old Testament book, the book of Deuteronomy, in chapter 6.

This was not a surprise.

When Jesus did this, he understood the importance of that very statement, the love the Lord, your God, and how it's undergirding everything that followers of Jesus did.

Now I know in a group this size that we have a spectrum of people.

There are probably some of us who are very devoted to our Christian faith and in the middle, and then some that are wondering why did I even come here today.

I'm not a follower of Jesus.

Well, for all of us, whether you're on one end of the spectrum or the other, it's probably an important thing for you to hear what Jesus thought was the most important thing in the whole Bible.

If you can walk with us that far today, I think it'll be a good thing for your life and for the people around you.

What did Jesus think was the most important thing to take away from the Bible?

Imagine such a thing as that.

You get to hear it today from his own lips.

Love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, soul and mind.

The first thing I want to say to you about this passage is the magical word here in this passage love.

In fact, jesus goes on to talk about the second greatest commandment, and it's also like the first one.

And the way it's like the first one is it involves love too, and we live in a day when people are very keen on talking about love.

Have you noticed it?

A lot of people are talking about how you should love this and love that and love the people that you love.

Have you noticed it?

A lot of people are talking about how you should love this and love that and love the people that you love.

It doesn't matter who you love.

You should accept it because it is love, and so it's really important for us to understand what Jesus meant when he said love God.

What did he have in mind when he said those words?

I do want to make it very clear, before we look at that word love, that Jesus did not say.

The most important thing in your life ought to be that you obey, that you follow the rules, that you follow the regulations, that you do the right thing.

That's not what Jesus says here Now.

Jesus was all into doing the right thing here Now.

Jesus was all into doing the right thing, but he understood that doing the right thing needs to be motivated by something that's deeper, something that sits very much in the center of your soul, and it's all about what you love.

But to really grasp what Jesus had in mind when he said love the Lord, your God, we have to get in a time machine and go back to the days of Jesus, and we even have to go back further than that, to the days of Moses, from whom Jesus got that phrase love the Lord, your God, love the Lord, your God, because in those days it's going to sound strange, but let me just take you back there, jump in the time machine with me and go back for just a minute.

We won't stay there long, but back in those days, politicians, kings, emperors would speak to their people and they would say this to their people many different times, and inscriptions and things like that that we have our hands on now that we can read, and this is what they would say I want you, my people, my kingdom, the people of my kingdom to love me.

Oh sure, they wanted them to obey him.

Of course they wanted the kings always wanted to be obeyed by their people, but they wanted much more than that, something deeper than that.

I want you to love me, they said to them.

Now, here's what they had in mind I've done all these great things for you.

I'm the one that keeps the barbarians out.

I'm the one that keeps crime down.

I'm the one that makes sure we have food in the storehouses.

I'm the one that keeps the irrigation ditches empty and clean.

I'm the one that does all this.

So love me for it.

And that's in the background of what Moses meant when he said these words in the book of Deuteronomy, and it's also in the background of what Jesus has in mind here also, and that is the fact that there's good reason to be grateful to God, so grateful that you love him.

Now, if you're not a follower of Christ today, we're glad you're here.

We understand that not everybody believes in Jesus.

We invite you to, because it's a wonderful thing to believe in Jesus.

But the fact is is that even if you're not a follower of Christ, you can look around your life and I know you have problems, I do too.

Everybody in the room has big problems in their lives that really discourage them.

But you can look at your life and you can realize that the one who made everything is being very kind, very kind to you.

He's done good things in your life to you.

He's done good things in your life.

The life that you have is a gift.

The health that you have, to whatever degree you have good health is a gift.

Good relationships in your life these are gifts that God gives, and so every person, no matter where you are in your personal faith, every person should have a sense of the gratitude that we owe God, who creates and rules over all.

But for those of us who are in Christ, it goes far deeper than that, doesn't it?

Because not only has God done those kinds of general, broad good things for you and me oh, there are plenty of them but he's done something very special, and that is that when a man or woman or a child come to Jesus in faith, god forgives us of our failings.

He forgives us of our failings so that, no matter what you have done, no matter how wicked you have been in your life, you can have forgiveness of all of that simply by trusting in Jesus.

And those of you who love Jesus know that not only has he forgiven you, but he's made great promises for you also, hasn't he?

He's promised you eternal life in the world to come.

What a magnificent gift for someone to receive purely by mercy, purely by grace, not something we've earned, but a gift from God.

And that's the way it was even in those days of the ancient kings.

Not only did they want people to be grateful for what they had done for their people, but they also wanted them to put their hopes for the future in them.

That's what it meant to love, to love the king.

Put your hope in me.

Look at what I've done, look at what kind of power I have.

You can hope in me.

Look at what I've done, look at what kind of power I have.

You can hope in me, not in that other kingdom over there, not in that thing that you might pursue in life, but you can put your hope in me.

And let me tell you something is there a greater person in whom you can put your hope than the one who resurrected from the dead and the one who ascended into heaven and now sits at the right hand of the father and rules over all things?

The one who's going to come back one day and make everything new, everything new and give it to you and to me, simply because we trust him.

That is our hope.

And here we are in this time, in our nation, where there are troubles all around us, right within our nation, where we're facing the threat of war in at least three places in the world now major wars when the economy is no good, when trials are coming to us and agitation is coming at us from all sides, even as we go toward a presidential election.

But you know, the great temptation for everyone in the room, for me too, is to put our hope in something other than God, to put our love and our affection and our trust, our hopefulness in something else like a political party.

Oh, politics are important.

Politics is something that you want to be rightly involved in, but at the same time, that's not where our hope is.

Our hope is in Jesus.

That's why Jesus says Love the Lord, your God.

With what Part of yourself?

With the best part of yourself?

Nah, what he says is love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, all of your heart, all of your soul, all of your mind, from the inside out, without any exception, not crowded out by any other thing in which you put your gratitude and in which you put your hope for life and the future.

It's all in the hands of God.

Hope in Him.

So here we are, in this kind of a setting where the temptations to turn this way and turn that way, to be ungrateful, oh things are troubling, they're bothering me.

What's God doing?

Or there's no hope, unless I just get practical and deal with human beings?

No, our hope is not in these things.

Our gratitude is not conditioned upon the trivia of life.

Our gratitude is immense because God has done so much for us and our hope is in the Lord, because he is the one who controls all things.

He is the one who controls all things.

Love the Lord, your God, with all of your heart, with all of your soul, with all of your mind.

Let me tell you something about myself.

I'm an avid texter.

I text all the time, don't you just love texting?

Some people hate it.

Okay, bing your phone goes off, oh boy, you gotta text again.

Oh, I just love it.

It's fantastic.

Texting is fantastic if you know how to use it.

I can give you a perfect example of this.

Between my wife and me, I can fulfill a great many obligations as a husband with one letter and one question mark.

It's all I got to do, and I can do it so many times in the day.

It's incredible.

You know what the letter is, k, k.

And all I have to do is type those two things, send it off, and do you know what my wife hears?

Are you okay, darling?

Is everything going all right for you today?

How are you feeling today?

Oh, it's a long paragraph.

It's about this long.

If I called her on the phone, it'd take 30 minutes.

It takes, oh, less than a second.

It's great.

I love texting.

And then she responds with tremendous gratitude and tremendous love to me by typing back to me K.

All you have to do, guys.

Have you got the clue here?

I know you're busy.

I know you wonder well, do I really need to text home?

Just try it K and you'll get a K.

And now you wonder well, do I really need to text home?

Just try it, k and you'll get a K.

You'll feel better, she'll feel better and the world will be a nicer place.

Okay, and you can do it four or five times a day.

It's fantastic.

You can do that with your children, you can do it with all kinds of people.

It's fantastic.

I love texting.

One of the main reasons I like texting is because you can ask a question and get a simple answer back.

You know how it is in a conversation.

You just dread calling somebody up because you know if you ask a simple question, you're going to get four, five, six more things added to the conversation that you have to deal with.

You go oh, I just really don't want to do it.

I don't want to do it.

So I like texting for that reason too.

I bet you, if that lawyer who came to Jesus was able to text in his day, he would have texted his question to Jesus, because you know what he asked Jesus.

What's the greatest commandment?

That's all I'm asking.

It's a simple question.

Can you just give me a simple answer?

Well, jesus gave him the answer, but he said and the second is like it.

Oh, here we go.

Longer conversation.

Second is like it, and you know why?

Because saying love God with all your heart, soul and mind reminded Jesus of another love passage Love your neighbor as yourself.

The second is like it.

Now, most Christians know that Jesus pairs these two verses, but I want to remind you of how separated they are in the Bible and therefore how much Jesus wanted them paired in our lives.

Okay, so, loving God with all your heart, soul and mind.

That's found in the book of Deuteronomy, chapter six.

And if you've read much of the old Testament, you know the book of Deuteronomy because, well, it's interesting and so you can kind of apply it to your life pretty easily.

But do you know where love your neighbor comes from?

Love your neighbor as yourself, from your favorite book in the Bible, the book of Leviticus, and your favorite chapter in the book of Leviticus, chapter 19.

Leviticus 19 · chapter mention

Aren't you just thinking immediately?

Well, of course, that's my favorite chapter in the whole Bible, leviticus, chapter 19.

Leviticus 19 · chapter mention

So here is Jesus pulling together Deuteronomy, chapter 6, and Leviticus, chapter 19, and setting them right next to each other.

Deuteronomy 6 · chapter mention Leviticus 19 · chapter mention

And the second is like it, leviticus 19.

Love your neighbor as yourself.

It's quite remarkable, actually, because Jesus would have sounded very pious, he would have sounded very spiritual, just to say love God with all your heart, soul and mind.

But he just couldn't stop talking because he knew something about that loving neighbor and that to being nice to other people.

Ok, I think we kind of know that that's sort of a basic thing there.

But often we think of that second place, that second command, great commandment.

We think of it as if it's a distant second.

Imagine this Imagine you're at the finishing line of a marathon.

I don't know if you've ever done this, but if you're near the end, the finish line of a marathon, observing, you're on the side.

I know you're not going to run, but if you're just on the sidewalk watching the first person running across a marathon is often very far ahead of everybody else I mean really far ahead so he or she can cross that line, break the band and all those sorts of things, break the wire and you're looking around.

Well, where's number two.

Well, number two's way back there around the corner still Hasn't even come around the corner yet.

So you have to wait and wait and wait for number two.

Yay, number two.

Well, that's a very distant second.

But that's a very distant second.

But that's not the way Jesus thought of it.

We often think of the second greatest commandment as something very distant.

But it's not how Jesus thought of it.

We think, you know, if I can just get my life together about loving God and having a gratitude for him and putting my hope in him, then that'll take care of it.

I don't need to think about anything else.

But Jesus says no, you actually do, you actually do so.

Jesus portrayed the second greatest commandment more like a second place in a sprint.

I don't know if you've ever watched people running sprints, but basically you've still got the wire, you've got the finish line.

But often, because it's such a short race, the first runner, the winner and the second runner are so close to each other that you have to have a photo finish.

You have to take a picture of it to see who actually crossed the line first.

So everyone's waiting.

Who really crossed the line first?

Who broke the wire?

Now, there's something about those photos.

Those photo finishes that if you have number one in the frame of the picture, number two is also in the frame of the picture.

It's number two but it's always in the frame if you've got number one in the frame.

And that's the way the Bible talks about loving your neighbor as yourself.

In fact, the Apostle John says in his epistle.

He says If you don't love your neighbor whom you can see, how can you talk about loving God whom you can't love?

God, pardon me, if you don't love your neighbor whom you can see, how can you talk about loving God whom you can't see?

It's impossible.

These two go together, hand in hand, loving God and loving neighbor.

It's fundamental.

It's at the center of who we are to be as followers of Jesus.

Not some kind of spirituality that takes us off in service to God and then disregard of other people, but rather a spirituality and a devotion to God that leads to devotion to our neighbors and a devotion to God that leads to devotion to our neighbors.

Now, it might shock you to know this, but here we go.

Remember, in that time machine we went way back to the days of the kings of the ancient world and how they would tell their people I want you to love me as your king.

Well, those same kings, in those same documents, would say this kind of thing.

They would say to their citizens I want you to love each other, I want you to love each other too.

Now, why did kings in the ancient world do this?

Well, it's because many times their kingdoms were so big they would be made up of different ethnicities and scattered out for hundreds, even thousands of miles from each other.

And what troubles would come.

In.

One region needed attention not just from that one region, but everybody in the kingdom.

So if you have a war, if you have a famine, if you have some kind of pestilence or something like that, then everybody is to throw in.

Love your neighbor, love your neighbor, love one another.

That's what they kept on telling their people.

Love each other.

And kings did that because they knew something about running a kingdom and that is a kingdom divided against itself will not stand.

And it's in that frame of reference that the Lord says not simply that we are to love God, but that we are to love our neighbors as well.

And think of how high the bar is.

Love God as you love yourself.

Now, in one way or another.

All of us love somebody a whole lot.

Number one we want our comfort.

We want our comfort, we want our satisfaction.

We want life to be good for us, not bad for us, and that's the bar that Jesus sets before us, that Moses sets before us, for how we're to love other people.

That's how important it is to the kingdom of Jesus that we love each other.

I don't know what your neighborhood is like, but I can tell you about my neighborhood, and that is that there are very few people in my neighborhood.

I live in a gated community in Orlando, florida, but there are very few people in my neighborhood that look like and talk like my wife and me.

Can I put it that way?

Are you with me on that?

It's quite a diverse neighborhood.

That is a hard thing to do, to live in love for your neighbor when they're different from you.

So what's the natural tendency?

It's to gather in like this and stick with people that are like us, but even that can be hard, can't it?

I said this church is a friendly church and it is.

You smile more than most churches, absolutely, you smile more than most Presbyterians, that's for sure.

Okay, thank you, don't stop it.

But as this church grows and it's grown so much already but as it continues to grow, especially as you're thinking about a new building program and things like that you're going to be attracting people that are going to be harder to love than the ones who are around you now.

So it's good to go back to this basic principle that Jesus is giving his followers.

The second greatest commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself.

It happens in the church, happens in your neighborhood, but let me go just a little deeper on this, in a way that might speak to your own personal life.

Loving your neighbor as you love yourself, it actually begins at home.

Now, I know I come from the South and I know what it's like to live in the South and how easy it is to put up and make things look nice and act like everything's okay when somebody knocks at the door.

Quick, quick.

Somebody's knocking at the door when you go to church and you go to a party oh yeah, everything's great, great, great, great.

And then to come home, and it's a nightmare home, and it's a nightmare.

A nightmare with your children, a nightmare with your parents, trouble with your grandchildren.

I'm at that age now it's easy for the home to be a place where we forget that.

Jesus says the greatest, second greatest commandment is to love your neighbor.

Men, your wife is your neighbor and the Lord Jesus wants you to love her like you love yourself.

Sisters, your husband is your neighbor and Jesus wants you to love your husband like you love yourself.

Parents, your children are your neighbors, and I know that's hard, but Jesus wants us to love them like we love ourselves.

This past summer, my wife and I celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary.

I know you're going to say impossible.

50th wedding anniversary.

See, it's a big one, it's a big one.

See, I come from Southwest Virginia and up there it's like it is down here you can marry her at 14, unless she's your first cousin.

Okay, then you have to wait until 16.

Well, she wasn't my first cousin, so we got married pretty early and right out of high school we get married and you know, we're so in love, right, so in love.

But there's a lot of changing.

That goes on from high school forward isn't there, and so I can just tell you that it hasn't been one sweet honeymoon for the last 50 years.

There have been rough spots.

Now, all the time, you know, we go to parties or we go to friends, especially unbelievers, and we'll let them know we just had our 50th wedding anniversary and they'll say why?

How in the world did you do that?

Our answer is fairly plain and very simple.

We have a king, and our king says love your neighbor as yourself, and that starts at home, and so when we had trials and troubles, we would go and get help that we needed you with me on this.

Now, friends, this is a hard thing to say to you, but I'm saying it just as plainly as I possibly can the place where Satan wants to work against the kingdom of God is inside the kingdom of God, and we must learn how to love our neighbors within the kingdom of God so that we will stand in a strong kingdom.

Nikita Khrushchev do you remember him?

Some of you are old enough to remember him.

I think it was around 1960.

There's a very famous event that occurred.

He was oh, if you don't know, he was the head premier, I suppose, of Russia at the time, during the Cold War, during the USSR.

Okay, big deal, big deal guy.

And there was this big speech that he gave where he literally took a shoe off.

I remember as a young child, about six years old, he took a shoe off, seeing the newscast of this, and started pounding on the podium.

Pounding on the podium, and one of the things he said was we will conquer the United States of America without firing a shot, because we will divide you from within and we will destroy you from within.

Well, look at America today.

That strategy seems to be working fairly well at this point, doesn't it?

Well, I'm not saying Nikita Khrushchev was the devil, but I am saying this that strategy seems to be working fairly well at this point, doesn't it?

Well, I'm not saying Nikita Khrushchev was the devil, but I am saying this the devil is trying to do that in your home.

The devil is trying to divide and conquer from within your family and from within this local church and from within our denomination and within the Christian community at large.

And we must say no, because our great king has said the second greatest commandment in all the scriptures is to love your neighbor as yourself to love your neighbor as yourself.

The kingdom must be united in order to be strong against the world.

We can take the persecution from the outside.

We can take the agitation from the outside.

The difficulty is when we allow ourselves to be divided within.

Don't let it happen in your family, don't let it happen in this church.

Don't let it happen in the Christian faith in this country of ours.

Amen, let them bang their shoe and just simply say no, you're not going to do that with us.

It's just not going to happen.

I love what Jesus did here, because it does tell us that the most important thing we've got to deal with is love.

Love for God, gratitude and our hope in him, and love for our neighbors for the sake of this magnificent kingdom that God has given to us in Christ.

This is our hope.

Don't let the distractions and the problems around you take your eyes off the most important things.

You remember what that lawyer said.

It was a trick question.

What's the greatest commandment?

And jesus did not hesitate love the lord, your god, with all your heart, soul and mind.

And then he added but the second one is like it and don't forget it either Love your neighbor as yourself.

Let's pray together.

Our Lord Jesus, how we bless you, how we bless you that you can speak to our lives thousands of years after you left this planet.

Please write these words in our hearts that we may know you, know others, love you and love others, and as you do that, we will give you the praise and all the glory for it.

Amen.