Love God More: Part 2

Amen.

Well, good morning, church.

Hey, my name is Justin.

I'm one of the pastors here at Sacred Mission, and it's my privilege to be able to bring God's word to you this morning.

We are going to be looking at chapter or Psalm 119, which is the longest chapter in the Bible.

It's actually longer than some books of the Bible.

So we just went through a whole sermon series in Philippians.

Psalm 119 is longer than that.

So I'm going to try to preach a faithfully on-time sermon on the longest chapter in the whole Bible.

That's my goal, right?

So what is Psalm 119?

Psalm 119 is a beautifully constructed poem that completely is centered around the beauty and glory and righteousness and goodness of God's Word.

This whole poem, this whole constructed piece of art, it is centered around uh God's holy word.

And it's really beautiful in the way that it's constructed.

So in it, there's 176 verses in this chapter, in this single psalm.

And there's 22 stanzas.

And each stanza starts with a Hebrew letter of the alphabet.

And that kicks off that stanza in the way that the psalmist communicates the goodness and righteousness and beauty of God's word.

And so it's very thoughtful, right?

This isn't just something somebody got up one day or was inspired in the moment, and then all of a sudden they just started jotting down their thoughts about God's word.

No, this is something that took time, that took discipline, that took thought, right, to be able to write out this beautiful psalm.

Some historians actually speculate that King David, who we understand wrote the psalm, uh, would use this to teach Solomon the Hebrew alphabet.

And so with each stanza starting with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, right, he could teach his son the actual language of their God, but also to catechize his children, specifically King Solomon, in the beauty and affection that he should have for God's word.

Maybe catechism is something kind of new or foreign to you.

You haven't heard of that language.

It's something that's been used within the church throughout time in a way to teach children.

So it's this series of questions and answers.

That's typically the structure and format of a catechism, so that you can educate and train and develop and disciple your children in understanding the word of God.

And so some historians speculate that he would even use this psalm for that purpose.

There's a great author named David Pallison, and he wrote a book called Speaking the Truth in Love.

And about Psalm 119, he says this Psalm 119 is actually not about the topic of getting scripture into your life.

Instead, it is the honest words that erupt when God says, when what God says gets into you.

It's not an exhortation to Bible study, it's an outcry of faith.

Psalm 119 is the thoughtful outcry that rises when real life meets real God.

And so we're talking about loving God more, part two.

And last week, what did we talk about?

We talked about loving God more actually starts from a kingdom principle with loving others more, because we cannot love God if we do not love our neighbor.

John helped us undersee that in his epistle in 1 John that we worked through last week.

This week we're gonna say that to love God more is to know him more.

To love God more is to know him more.

We cannot love someone we do not know.

It's just part of the reality of how God constructed relationships to work.

As we know one another more intimately, our affection and love for one another is fostered so that we might fall even more in love with one another.

Part of the challenges of marriage is marriage is fundamentally a continual pursuit to know the other person.

And it's when we stop doing that does love start to shrink back, does love start to wither?

Does love fade?

I didn't marry the same person that who I'm married to today is not the same person I married 16 years ago.

I've changed, they've changed.

And so with mine and Katie's marriage, it is a continual commitment to learn one another, to know one another.

And that helps that love continue to grow and be lit on fire, passion for one another.

And so we have to pursue knowing God.

And imagine this God is infinitely fully unknowable.

In that, we can never exhaust our efforts of knowing Him.

We will spend eternity in glory pursuing the knowledge of God that we might know Him and love Him, and we will never exhaust those efforts.

And so, in this life, as we are Christians who claim to love God and to follow Him, we should endeavor in such a journey to prepare ourselves for eternity that we might seek to know Him so that our love for Him continues to be fostered and cultivated and lit on fire so that we might love Him more.

You see, the doctrine of Revelation, it's essential to our ability to know God and thus to love Him.

We talked about this at the beginning of the sermon series.

There were kind of three principles that we were gonna work through to guide us in this sermon series to love the things of God more.

And the doctrine of revelation that God has revealed himself to us, not concealed himself from us, is essential to our understanding to be able to love him more because it gives us what?

It gives us confidence that we can know him, and so assurance that we might love him.

Confidence that we can know him and assurance that we might love him.

If we served a God who concealed himself, well then who he is, what he's like, his attributes, his personhood would all be speculation.

It'd be our best guess.

Well, I think God's like this.

Maybe.

I don't know.

He's concealed himself.

But the God we serve is different.

In his revealing of himself to us, we might authoritatively point to the revelation and say, no, God is this.

Because he's revealed himself to us through primarily his word.

And so we can confidently know God, and we can have assurance that we can love him because he has revealed himself to us.

As we start to work through the text, we look at verse 97.

So I'm not doing all of Psalm 119.

Take a deep breath.

Right?

Drink your coffee, you're jittering a little bit.

When we look at verse 97, here's what we see: we savor what we love.

We savor what we love.

So if you're following along in our notes on the app, you can fill in those blanks of the highlighted words.

They'll help you kind of track along with us.

You can use them later for devotional time as well.

But what I want us to get from this first verse is that we savor what we love.

The psalmist begins the stand the stanza with a cry from his very soul.

And what does he say?

Oh, how I love your law.

Right?

I love Psalm 97 coming out, or Psalm 119, verse 97.

Psalms 119:97

He's coming out strong in this new stanza.

Oh, how I love your law.

It's a cry from his very soul.

He's like a man who has found the greatest treasure and can't help but to have his excitement and joy burst out into words.

Have you ever seen that?

Have you ever seen somebody who got a gift, right?

Or found some, discovered something that just created so much excitement.

There was no ability for them to keep their mouths shut about the joy that just flooded their soul.

Right?

You can watch like YouTube videos of little kids opening up a PlayStation 5 and just geeking out, or some grown men.

And we need to talk about that later.

But they just can't help the excitement that bubbles out of them.

This is what David is like.

Oh, how I love your word.

It's like he's found the most richest treasure imaginable to him.

God's holy word.

This love, when he says, Oh, how I love, is the language of ahava.

It's equivalent to the English, the English language is simply to love in a way that's an emotional response.

So we talked last week how the word for love in 1 John was this agape love.

And agape love is different than an emotional love because we said this agape love is the steady intention of the will to seek another's highest good.

The steady intention of the will to seek another's highest good.

That's agape love.

That's a love of choice.

Right?

The love that men and women are supposed to have between each other and the covenant of marriage is supposed to be a reflection of that agape love, not a love that we feel and we allow those feelings to dictate our actions, but a love that we choose to be committed to for that other individual's highest good.

Because marriage is a reflection of the love, covenant love of God that he has for his people.

But what David is actually expressing to us is a love that's rooted in emotion.

It has a strong emotional attachment to either desire or to possess as they are in the presence of the object that they love.

This love is genuine, emotional reality for the psalmist that is stirred by God's holy word.

Then he goes on to declare, it is my meditation day and night.

So, oh how I love your word, it is my meditation day and night.

When we think about this meditation, right, we think about the way that David or the psalmist in this would continually ponder God's word.

And here's the here's the most simplest way, hopefully, that you'll take this and understand what meditation really means.

So if we look at the way that cows eat grass, when they first swallow, they're not able to have it broken up enough to where they could digest it.

And so part of their multi-stomach system is that they actually take that and they bring it back up and they chew it again and then they swallow it back.

And so there's this chewing of cud, it's this regurgitation, this coming back up, chewing on it, swallowing again, coming back up, chewing on it, swallowing again.

That's what David's saying.

He's savoring the word of God.

He's bringing it back up to be able to chew on it, to meditate on it, to pray on it, to sing about it, to write about it, to think on it, to talk about it in the ways that he goes.

It is a continual part of his everyday life.

And this means something, right?

This means something because he says, I do it all day, all day, right?

It's something that it's an intimacy that he has with God's word.

It's not that he's carrying around like a lambskin scroll, right?

60 feet long.

He's just whip that thing out.

That's not what it is.

Hey guys, let's talk about this.

You know, we can just bust out an app and just start looking at God's word, but back then that wasn't so accessible to the everyday person.

And so there's an understanding of intimacy that David has with God's word, that he's able, because he stored it in his mind and heart, he's able to bring it back up in his very life, no matter place or time.

To think about the way that David loves God's word, that he's able to meditate on it, no matter his circumstance, because there's an understood intimacy that he has with it.

To imagine the love.

Oh, how I love your word, the psalmist says.

That an entire day for him was spent savoring it.

David savored what he loved.

As we look at verses 98 through 100, we see God's word surpasses life experience.

God's word surpasses life experience.

Here, the psalmist declares that the word of God gives him wisdom and understanding.

Wisdom and understanding are the matured fruits of knowledge.

Right, so as David seeks to understand God's word, as he seeks to store it in his mind and heart, that's knowledge.

But the fruit of knowledge that we should be pursuing as a people is wisdom and understanding as we pursue knowledge.

Because knowledge alone tends to lead us to pridefulness rather than to humility and loving God in the way that He's called us to.

You see, knowledge simply informs, it informs the mind, but it doesn't necessitate understanding or wisdom.

You may not know, but you may know, but you may not understand.

Understanding enables you to extract the meaning and principle out of the information.

With understanding, you would be able to teach rather than to simply regurgitate.

Wisdom applies knowledge and understanding to the best possible outcome.

To be able to take the knowledge, derive the meaning, and then apply it to your life for the best possible outcome is the aim and fruit of wisdom.

And so we observe a sequence of realities in the relationship between the psalmist and God's word.

God's commandments are ever with him, he says.

They were always present as a companion.

There was this pursuit of knowledge that David would have with God's word.

God's testimonies are his meditation, he says.

That's wisdom.

So David shows for us in this simple three verses the importance of knowledge, understanding, and wisdom.

Again, knowledge is the attaining of information.

Understanding is deriving the meaning and principle.

Wisdom is the application of it to life for our best possible outcome.

It is the relationship that he has with the Word of God that surpasses any life experience of those around him.

He talks about wiser than his enemies, more understanding than his teachers, and understand more than the aged.

It keeps him in all of life, intimate with the Lord.

A growing and steady love for the Lord through a growing and steady love for and keeping of God's word.

Verses 101 through 102, we see sin separates, keeping connects.

Sin separates, keeping connects.

He says, I hold back my feet from every evil way in order to keep your word.

There's a reality where, not just in our relationship with God, but in our relationship with one another, sin creates separation.

Right?

It's when we act in unrighteous ways towards another person that intimacy is threatened or destroyed.

This isn't just unique to our relationship with God, but it is fundamental also to our relationship with God, that as we sin, we begin to separate.

And intimacy begins to be harmed or threatened.

Isaiah 59, 2 says this, but your iniquities have made, or your sin have made a separation between you and your God.

And your sins have hidden his face from you so that he does not hear.

David is saying, I hold back my feet from every evil way in order to keep your word.

Why?

Because in keeping, there's connection.

In keeping, there's connection.

We look at John 14, 15.

Jesus says this if you love me, you will keep my commandments.

There's something that we have to understand as a very basic Christian principle, but that is at war with the worldview of our culture.

Obedience equals intimacy.

Obedience equals intimacy.

As we are faithful to obey and to keep God's commands and precepts and testimonies to us in the way that we live our life, intimacy with the Lord is fostered.

It grows and strengthens.

But see, we don't see that in the way that we understand love.

Probably because we really don't understand love well.

And so that seems really foreign to us.

Wait a second, you're telling me obedience is gonna make me more intimate with the Lord?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

The psalmist says, I do not turn aside from your rules, for you have taught me.

He is working to keep the word of God in the way that he lives his life in obedience to him, so that he might remain what?

Connected to him.

Because in keeping God's word, we are more intimately connected to him, where sin separates and breaks that intimacy.

Verses 103 through 104, we see truth tastes sweet, falsehood becomes bitter.

Truth tastes sweet, falsehood becomes bitter.

In conclusion of this stanza of Psalm 119, we read, How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth.

To know God is to know truth, and to know truth is a sweet taste to us.

I mean, we love truth, right?

I would say, anyone in here, when you've been lied to or when you've discovered that you've been believing a lie, that tastes bitter to you, right?

There's something that just puts a bad taste in your mouth.

It brings harm to your heart and emotions, right?

But when we discover truth, oh man, how good of a taste is that for us.

And God is the source of all truth.

And so as we know his word, as he's revealed it to us, that taste should become sweeter and sweeter to us.

God's word is a taste of himself to us.

His goodness and his kindness, his mercy and grace.

And in that, we even begin to crave him more.

Because we know and desire that taste.

I have a deep, affectionate love for cherry-flavored ice cream.

Anything cherry flavored in ice cream form, I'm going to consume that.

And there are times when my mind helps me remember, you remember what that tasted like?

Oh, yeah, I remember what that tasted like.

I know.

You want to go to Kroger and get something?

Yeah, I want to go to Kroger and get something.

Right?

I want to go here, I want to get.

And so we know that taste.

We begin to crave that, we begin to desire it.

And truth should be that for us.

To know truth, to obtain truth, to have it stored up in our minds and hearts should be the sweetness that gives us cravings throughout the day.

To know Him.

And so in this, we become truth seekers.

Well, God seekers.

Because truth tastes sweet to us.

And in that we come to know the bitter taste of falsehoods.

The psalmist says, Through your precepts I get understanding, therefore I hate every false way.

Falsity, falsehood becomes something that we detest and despise.

To love the Lord is to love truth, to taste of his sweetness, and to develop a disdain for the bitterness of falsehoods.

As we look at this 97 through 104 of Psalm 119, I think that this is what I want us to walk away from this morning, understanding fully.

Loving God more is found in loving and keeping his word.

Loving God more is found in loving and keeping his word.

This is really the heart of the whole psalm.

Because as David is writing out his love for the law of God, for the word of God, it is intimately tied to his love for God Himself.

Because these are inseparable realities.

This is God in an expression of him, in a revealing of him.

There's an inseparable reality between God and His person and God in His Word.

We cannot claim to love God and reject the way that He has revealed Himself to us.

If we do that, if we claim to love God but reject the way that He has chosen to reveal Himself to us, we don't love God.

We love the fabrication of an idol that we have made in our own imagination.

We either submit To the word of God as being authoritatively true so that we might know him and love him, or else we find ourselves in idolatry.

Because his word is the revealing of his person, so that we might know him, so that we might love him.

As much as it is a revealing of his person, it's also a revealing of his will.

What is God's will for our life?

Well, he shows it to us in his commands and precepts, in his law, so that we might flourish as his image bearers.

God has so graciously given us his own commands that we might have the fullness of joy that he desires for us.

Now, God's love is not predicated on our ability to keep his commandments.

This is the difference between agape love.

The steadfast love of God, the agape love of God, is not predicated on our ability to keep his commands.

He chooses to love his people in spite of their own ability to keep or break his commands.

God's love is an intention of his own will upon you.

And so God loved you even when you were rebellious and at war against him.

But let me say this.

Let me ask you a simple question.

As you are in a relationship with God, in areas of rebellion, sin, falling, right?

When you've experienced those things in your life, do you feel more intimate with the Lord?

Probably not.

Because what do we do?

We're like a child.

Well, actually, we're like Adam and Eve.

And when we sin, we want to go hide.

We want to run away because we're afraid.

Because we think that God's going to be angry with us.

We think that he's going to punish us.

We think that we have to work our way back into good standing with him because we don't really understand and believe the gospel.

But what's the reality of this?

What's the other side of this?

When we keep God's word, right?

When we've been experiencing a season of obedience, when we've been fighting against sin, we've been putting our flesh to death.

Do you feel more intimate with the Lord?

Has his love for you changed?

No.

His love is steadfast.

He loves you so much that he was willing to crush his own son to obtain you.

But it's your ability to know and experience his love.

That's the difference.

Because obedience actually equals intimacy.

So to love God at all is completely dependent upon his word, both to love it and to keep it, that we might know him and be obedient to him, because in him is the fullness of life that we long for.

If we are to desire to love him more, his word must be our foundational starting point.

Yeah, many of us continue to struggle with this, right?

This affection for God.

If we're honest, do you, I mean, are you always, always on fire for the Lord?

Are you always a deep love for God?

Are you always never hindered at all, intimate with Him?

No, we struggle with this.

All of us do, in some form or another.

We become frustrated and disheartened by the absence of growth that we see in our lives.

We want to love God more, but can't seem to crack the code on accomplishing such a holy desire.

You see, some of us we struggle to love God's word.

We struggle to love God's word.

When we hear the language of the psalm, it seems foreign or even disingenuous to us.

Have you ever done that?

Have you ever read part of the Bible, specifically like the poetic language of the Bible, and you're just like, uh, I don't, no, that's that I don't, I've never experienced that.

That seems foreign.

Have you ever just been like shopping at Target and just be like, oh, how I love God's word?

No.

Probably not.

You're like, oh, how I love that summer dress.

Um we probably just don't bust out from within us this passionate cry of God's word.

Right?

We we struggle in so many ways.

In the language of the scriptures, at times it feels foreign and disingenuous.

We tend to relate to it as an unattainable aspiration.

God's word seems more like obligatory labor than a joy-filled delight.

And I would submit there are a few assumptions that we're getting wrong that leads us to this paradigm.

The first assumption is this we believe love is something that happens rather than something that's worked for.

We believe love is something that happens rather than something that's worked for.

Because we live in a Western romanticism, we have come to the worldview that states love happens.

And it's an emotionally driven thing, right?

Where it just happens and it's there, and then if it's ever lost, we move on to something else to try and find that again so that it might happen to us.

You know, there is a great uh there is a greater divorce rate in that in any country that holds that worldview than countries that hold a worldview of like arranged marriages.

Do you know why?

It's because through the worldview of an arranged marriage, they fundamentally start from a place that love is worked for, not something that just happens to them.

You see, if you're going to have a successful marriage, you're gonna have to continually work toward that love.

Because there's gonna be days when you wake up and it's not gonna be there.

That feeling is gonna be gone.

In fact, sometimes that feeling is gonna be like anti-feeling, like you want to do everything you can just to destroy this.

Because we believe that our truth and reality is centered around what we feel within us.

Rather than what the Lord shows us through his word, is that these are things that are to be worked toward.

An effort of the individual towards another that we might love them.

If we continue to think that, if we look at this in our relationship with God, if we continue to think that every morning you wake up that you don't feel a love for God's word, that means it's not present and it's not going to be there.

You are continually going to be frustrated in your Christian walk and you will never get the intimacy that you long for.

Because you're waiting for something magical to happen.

And can that happen?

Sure.

Normatively, that's not the way God works.

It's something that we have to work to foster in our own lives in the same way that we have, like some days I just have to work to love my own kids, right?

Anybody ever wake up and just don't want to love your kids that day?

Sometimes you have to work to love your job.

Sometimes you have to work to love your spouse.

Sometimes you have to work to love your neighbor.

We all have to put effort into developing this love that God calls us to through his word.

So that's the first misconception.

The second one is we lack a general sense of discipline to make choices that are best for us.

We lack a general sense of discipline to make the choices that are best for us.

How many of you are still struggling with health choices, financial choices, marriage choices?

You name it, right?

Go through the gamut.

How many of you are making some of the same decisions and choices that you've been not wanting to make for 10 years?

Why is that?

We have this general sense of an inability to make the right choices that are best for us.

And to love God's word, to get into God's word, to meditate on God's word.

That has to be a conscious choice.

I've never woke up and like two blue jays fly into my window and they bring my Bible to me and they open it up and then they start singing the psalms into my ears and just, oh God, you love me.

That's never happened.

The same way, like, you know, a donut doesn't turn into uh uh some type of protein shake as I push it into my gullet.

We have to make conscious choices to do the right things in our life.

Or else what's gonna happen?

We're gonna continue getting the same outcomes that frustrate us today.

If you want intimacy with the Lord, start by making a conscious choice to love him and pursue him.

Third, we take for granted what is so accessible to us.

We take for granted what is so accessible to us.

Where do we find a ton of value?

Where do we find uh a ton of value, where we place so much um weight into something that is valuable to us?

It's it's something often that is hard for us to get, right?

Why are diamonds so expensive?

Diamonds are so expensive because they're so hard to get to, they're so rare.

When anything is accessible, it becomes cheap, right?

That's why rice is like 10 cents, not$100.

I don't know, it might be now, I don't know, but uh I haven't got shopping in a minute.

Uh but the reality is the more something is accessible to us, the more cheap it becomes in our value matrix.

And so we take things for granted.

I would argue that this happens in so many different levels, not just through the word of God, but if you look at our society as a whole, uh even in the scrolling nature of our ability to simply consume images of individuals, we've cheapened beauty, we've cheapened intimacy, we've cheapened these things because false parts, false, false projections of them are just a thumb flick away.

And so accessibility creates cheapness.

And the Word of God is the most is so accessible to us, right?

Some of you have like four different versions of it right now.

You've got a printed version, you've got an app that has it, maybe you have a genuine lambskin scroll with Isaiah, you know, printed on it.

That'd be awesome if you did.

But we have, I've got so many Bibles that I now like collect high-end premium Bibles because I can.

And then I have a ton of Bibles that I haven't looked at in like 20 years because they're not they're not made with goat skin.

That's a real thing in my heart.

I'm trying to be honest with you.

And so this accessibility cheapens things.

We have to look at how rich and beautiful God's word is.

The psalmist says in 119, it is desired to him above all the riches of the earth.

Above any silver or gold that could be handed to him, God's word is more valuable.

As you assess your life, what are you putting in higher value points than God's word?

Is it to deaden your brain as you binge watch another series?

Is it to jump into, you know, whatever social circle and instead of disciplining yourself to read God's word?

Is it to uh what is it?

Is it to get up early in the morning so that you can answer five more emails before you get logged into work?

Is it so you can sleep an extra 15 more minutes?

Like, where in the value points of your life have you put God's word?

And I think as we do a self-assessment, we'll discover, man, for some reason it's down here.

Why?

Because we really don't view it as something more desirable than all the riches of the earth.

This is God giving himself to us.

How much more rich could we ask to be?

All of these are falsehoods that need corrected in our life.

To love God's word will take a disciplined effort that will produce the outcome of the sincere love that we desire.

But some of us we struggle to keep God's word.

We struggle to keep God's word.

The keeping of God's word seems more like death than life, bondage than liberation.

We see no real sense of profitability to obey, and so we go on living, submitting to our own desires.

Yet in that mode of life, we wonder why our relationship with the Lord continually struggles.

Because we fail to see the synthesis of intimacy and obedience.

Right?

Many of you want to say, I love God, but I just do whatever I want.

Or I don't see any real profitability in keeping his commandments.

Or for some of us, we look at God's law as something that oppresses us rather than liberates us.

But in God's law is life.

And actually, the keeping of what God commands us to do is the highest human flourishing possible.

The most joy that we can obtain is actually in keeping his law.

That's how he set it up for us.

In fact, in anything opposing his law is death to us.

But we continually fail to believe him.

Right?

We're like a child who reaches up and touches the hot stove.

And we say, I told you so.

And you're like, Don't do it again.

Well, watch me.

Bam! And just do it again.

It's like, all right, I'll just put your hand on it next time.

Um, I never do that.

That's bad, and you'll get people called on you.

Don't do that.

But we fail to see this synthesis of obedience and intimacy because we look at God's laws like, you just want me to suffer.

You don't want me to have fun, you don't want me to have pleasure and my desires fulfilled in my life.

And God says, Yes, I do.

You don't understand, you want the wrong things.

I want to give you more than you can even think or imagine, but you keep settling for trash.

1 John 5, 3, for this is the love of God.

What?

That we keep his commandments, and his commandments are not burdensome.

Sin will always create a chasm between any relationship.

Righteousness will always produce deep and real intimacy.

We should no longer be dumbfounded when we examine our lives and we see a lack of love for God and a lack of obedience to his word.

Because a mature believer will be able to identify that reality and work toward closing the gap through righteous living.

The beauty and hope for us, though, this morning, church, is that Jesus is the word that we might love God.

Jesus is the word that we might love God.

Jesus is the word of God made flesh.

You see, we're not able to see God because of his holiness.

As Moses desired to see God on the mountaintop, he hid Moses in a cleft of the rock and he said, As I pass by, you'll be able to see the veil of my train.

You won't be able to look upon me because surely, Moses, you would die.

God is so holy that man cannot look upon him.

But what happened to the word of God sent forth?

It was veiled in flesh that we might gaze upon his beauty.

Colossians 1.15 says, He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.

We cannot see God the Father, but we have been able to see God the Son, Jesus, because of His glory being veiled in flesh.

And we can know God fully because He has revealed Himself through His Word, begotten in the Son, veiled in flesh.

So as we look at this, what is the interrelationship of the Trinity?

Jesus was sent forth from the Father.

Jesus said, if you've seen me, you have seen the Father.

And so there's this beautiful relationship between the revealed truth of God through his scriptures and the revealing of God Himself fully in his Son Jesus, because Jesus is that very word sent forth from the Father that we might know him.

Not just know him, but we might love him.

We cannot love God the Father without submitting to and being obedient toward and having faith in God the Son.

Because there is a direct relationship of intimacy between God the Father and the knowledge of him through his word.

And Jesus is the full manifestation of that reality.

We can know God because he has given us his word, his son, that we might love him.

Jesus fulfills all the promises of God and freely gives them to us as an inheritance.

Matthew 5, 17 through 18.

Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets.

I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them.

For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot will pass from the law until all is accomplished.

Here's what I want you to understand.

What was the intimacy that Christ had with the Father?

It was fundamentally rooted in obedience.

He did not come to throw away any aspect of the law.

He said this: not just the word of the law, but the letter of the law.

Not just the letter of the law, but the punctuation of the law.

There's not one aspect of it that will not go completely fulfilled in my obedience to the Father.

And what did that create?

Deep, eternal, unbreakable intimacy with the God with God the Father.

And what does he give to us freely by faith?

He gives us that, that obedient righteousness, so that we might love him.

Ephesians 1, 11 through 14, in him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will, so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory.

In him, you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is what?

The guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it to the praise of his glory.

The fulfillment of God's word in Christ Jesus, the sending of the word to be made flesh was so that you and I could have an inheritance of intimacy and true and genuine love for God the Father, our Maker.

How good and kind is God to us that he reveals himself to us, that we might know him.

But he doesn't just simply reveal himself to us in word and then requires us to strive and scrape and claw to obtain what he's dangling in front of us like a carrot.

No, his son perfectly and fully satisfies every iota and dot of that law and then freely gives his accomplishments to us that by grace we might love him.

This is the hope of the gospel.

When we fail to love God's word, when we fail to keep God's word, it's not just on us to try and make it up and sway his opinion to love us more because we've done a couple of days of good things.

We should be satisfied and rested in knowing that he loves us.

His son died for us.

He has brought us in through the accomplishments of his perfectly righteous son.

And we have intimacy with the Father because of that.

Because, see, Jesus is both the word and the fulfiller of the word.

And by faith we get all of him.

All of him.

Both his spirit and righteousness that we might truly love God.

And so, what's our hope, church?

What do I want us to do?

I want us to be a people who love and keep God's word.

We want to be a people who love and keep God's word.

Listen, we're not going to be a church that just tries to be nice to people around us.

That is an endeavor I have zero desire to be a part of.

I want to be a church who loves and keeps God's word so uh um healthy and whole in our life that the fruit of that is to love others the way that Christ loved us.

Do you see the difference between the two?

There's a lot of churches who are trying to just be nice to people and they're forsaking intimacy with God because they're not fostering a love and obedience to his word.

The world can be nice to them.

Let the world be nice.

That's not our endeavor.

Our endeavor is because we love God so deeply, because we have such rich intimacy with Him through our obedience to His Word, that we are able to not be nice, but to love our neighbor in such a way that they see the hope and light of the gospel and by grace might become saved.

That's what we're aiming for.

And we cannot do that genuinely in which the ways the scripture calls us to, if we don't love him first.

And we will fail to love him if we do not have a deep love for his word and an uh uh uh obedience to his commands.

And so I hope for us that we would be a people who start here.

As we look at this series to love the things of God more, we have to start here because it is from a relationship with him through his son, by his spirit, that we're gonna be able to get everything else right.

But if we don't get this right first, we're gonna operate in a works based righteousness that is condemning, frustrating, hopeless.

We have to work from the gospel first.

Amen?

Amen.

Let's pray.