Love God

Good morning.

My name is Justin.

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

We are uh kicking off a new series for the new year.

It's going to be a vision series for 2022 where we're looking at uh the heart's affections.

And we're calling this series Five Loves, and we're looking at five pillar loves uh that the Bible shows should be fostered and cultivated in our lives.

It's a love for God, a love for uh the church, a love for the city, a love for truth, and a love recklessly.

And so uh these are the five loves that we're gonna be going over over this next five-week sermon series uh to be able to try and point our hearts' affections in the right direction starting uh this new year.

And so as we kind of open this up and we start navigating through this, we want to kind of reflect and talk a little bit about like why are we here as Sacred Mission Church?

What are we doing within uh this city?

You know, we have a 10-year vision where we want to see 1% of the Mason Westchester area reached with the gospel of Jesus.

We want to see 1% of the Mason Westchester area uh uh brought into the kingdom of God, impacted by gospel preaching, gospel living, uh, so that many might come to uh faith in Christ and find the hope of the gospel for their lives.

That that's about a thousand people.

If you take the two uh cities together and their population, we're hoping in the next 10 years to reach about a thousand people uh with the gospel of Jesus.

In that, we're also hoping to plant at least four churches in four target areas uh throughout this northern greater Cincinnati area.

We want to be a church planting church.

We want to be raising up leaders uh who can uh shepherd and lead, proclaim the gospel, serve faithfully, and we want to see churches planted uh throughout the northern greater Cincinnati area uh for gospel saturation.

Uh the more churches that we have faithfully preaching the gospel, faithfully living out uh a missional uh um living with inside their city, the more we're gonna see people come to saving faith in Jesus and the kingdom start to impact and transform the culture that we live in.

So we want to plant churches and we want to be relentless about a simple church model.

At Sacred Mission, we're gonna try and do three things.

We're gonna try and proclaim, produce, and plant.

That's it.

We're gonna proclaim the gospel, we're gonna preach the Bible, uh, we're gonna preach the good news of Jesus, right?

That this proclamation of hope and joy uh uh to all people.

Uh we're gonna produce disciples, uh, those who understand God's word, who are rooted in the scripture, who are growing in their affections for God and for one another and for their city.

And then we're gonna plant.

We're gonna plant missional communities, mission groups all throughout the greater Cincinnati area, and by God's grace, we'll also plant churches out of those as well.

So we just want to do those three things.

We're not gonna be uh uh big and bulky with a hundred different kinds of ministries that we can offer.

We're gonna stay lean and mean, right?

And we're gonna try and do those three things proclaim, produce, and plant.

Now, what we want to see is the beauty of the church gifted by the Holy Spirit to rise up and start all kinds of ministries from within us.

People who have passions for certain uh people groups or areas of focus for ministry's sake and the way that the Holy Spirit has gifted them to be able to uh have that compassion or to be able to have that zeal for uh that type of ministry work.

We want to see you raised up.

We want to see you coached, uh uh equipped and be able to launch you out to start all kinds of new ministries.

So even though sacred mission is gonna focus on being that kind of simple church model, that does not mean that you as the church should not be striving to do all kinds of different ministries, impacting culture in all kinds of different ways to see the gospel go forth.

We believe wholeheartedly that the Holy Spirit has gifted every single one of you for the work of ministry, not just us who stand on this platform, or not just us who hold the office of elder, or not just us who might be uh on the responsive arts team, but every single one of us who have been brought into the family of God through faith in Christ have been gifted supernaturally by the Holy Spirit for the purpose of ministry.

Imagine this room filled with different ministries that you guys started that was birthed within you from the power of the Holy Spirit, the impact that we could have on the culture around us.

So that's what we're trying to do.

But here's what we have to stay focused on.

We cannot stay focused on what we're doing, we have to stay focused on who we're becoming.

This is critical.

If you really look at like people who become multi-multi-millionaires, right, I would argue that the vast majority of them at the end of that was not the person that they desired to be.

The pursuit of that wealth, the pursuit of that growth, that the pursuit of that power created them to be a person who they didn't really want to be in the end.

You see, when we get focused on the doing, we lose sight of the who we are.

And we can lose sight of that completely in the pursuit of accomplishment.

We don't want to be focused on just accomplishment alone.

We want to have that insight, but in the clear picture of what we're doing, we want to focus on who we're becoming.

So that if by God's grace we reach a thousand people, if by God's grace we plant four churches, if by God's grace we see this whole northern Cincinnati area saturated with the gospel, on the other side of it, we're proud to be the people who we are because we stayed focused on what God desired us to be, who God desired us to be as a people.

So we have four core values that we try to instill and keep in that front focus of who we are.

The first is Jesus first and foremost.

Jesus first and foremost.

That is critical to everything that we do, from the way that we spend our time, the way we spend our money, our marriages, our parenting, the way that we work, in everything, and I literally mean everything we do, Jesus has to be first and foremost.

If the gospel is not transforming every single aspect of your life, then we're missing the reality of what the gospel is supposed to do.

Secondly, we need transformation, obedience, and righteousness.

We want to be a people who are transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit, conformed into the image of Christ through obedience and righteousness.

We believe God's word, and we believe that we're supposed to submit to God's word in joy-filled obedience for the fullness of our flourishing.

Right?

God's law, we too much think of like a road bump or a hurdle that we have to jump over.

Biblically, understanding God's law, it's more like a trellis that a vine grows up.

The law is there for the flourishing of ourselves, not to oppress us and push us down or cause us to stumble along the way.

It's actually for our good.

Also, we want to see devotion to word and doctrine.

We want to love the scriptures.

We want to foster a love for God's word, and we want to stay faithful to the ancient church, realizing that we're not doing anything new, right?

I love the little statement.

If it's new, it's not true.

When it comes to the church, that's pretty accurate.

We want to stay rooted to the ancient church, rooted to pure doctrine, uh, tethered to those traditions in certain ways, while staying fully in love with the word of life, the scriptures.

And lastly, affection, God and neighbor.

We want to be a people of radical affection for God and radical affection for our neighbor.

We look, we should be.

I love the song that Pastor Jordan led us in at the very beginning.

There's joy in the house of the Lord.

Did you come here this morning with joy?

With joy inexpressible.

Some of y'all looked real inexpressible this morning.

But I believe you still have joy.

But joy should be something that radiates out of us, that, that, that, that impacts the people in our sphere because we have the hope of the gospel.

We have life.

We have the favor and blessing of the Father.

We've been redeemed and renewed and restored by Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit.

We should be a people of radical affection for God and neighbor.

So this series is geared to help us focus on the people we believe God wants us to become.

Right?

We're gonna stay laser focused on the accomplishment, the, the, the, the reaching people with the gospel, planting of churches, raising up leaders.

We're gonna stay laser focused on that.

But where we need your help, especially as a leadership team, we need the congregation to understand and know not what we're trying to accomplish, but who we're trying to become.

And for accountability's sake, as we pursue these accomplishments, let us stay white-knuckled on the reality of who we believe God wants us to become as people.

We want to steer our hearts toward the things that he calls us to love.

And if these affections are true for us, right, if these five loves are true for us as people, I believe that flourishing of his kingdom will naturally come.

Right?

If we were recklessly in love with God, if we were madly in love with his church, for the city, for truth, right?

If we loved these things, then wouldn't the kingdom just break through?

So our hope is through this series to stir our hearts' affections toward those realities.

There was an Indian missionary named uh Sadhu Sandar Singh.

He lived to about 40 years old, where he mysteriously died around the foothills of the Himalayans.

But he was a convert, very young in age, uh ostracized from his family for his conversion to Christ, and he made it his life's mission to bring the gospel to the people of India, specifically in the Himalayan region.

And he says this about man's heart.

He says, Man's heart is the very throne and citadel of God.

And when he enters there to abide, heaven begins.

Our hearts are the throne of our very existence.

Whatever sits on this throne has rule and reign over us.

And there's been this battle from the very beginning.

From within the garden, there has been a fight for who would sit on that throne.

It was either gonna be God, our creator and maker, the Lord of heaven and earth, or it was gonna be the enemy, or it was gonna be us.

Who was gonna sit on that throne?

Who was gonna rule and reign in the very existence of man?

You see, God is the rightful inhabitant of that throne.

He is our creator, our Lord.

But a battle ensues that began in the garden for others to be seated upon it.

So to love God is to ultimately have Him seated on the throne of our being.

If we're talking this morning and opening our series with love God, what we're trying to accomplish and work toward is that God sits and resides on the throne of our being.

We need to remove and put to death all imposters who would try and take his place.

And that's the job of the enemy.

The job of the enemy is to work to dethrone God from our hearts.

Uh John Calvin, he was a reformer in the 1500s.

He said that the heart is an idol factory.

It constantly is trying to produce impostors of who would sit on that throne in God's place.

So, with the power of the Spirit, we put those idols to death.

We practice putting to death the very impostors who would try to dethrone God in the heart of ourselves.

And so we enter into the text this morning and mark where Jesus is challenged by this group of scribes.

There's these people who are trying to catch him up in his answers and his understanding of God's word.

And so he's already kind of fought through a handful of different uh questions, and he's been challenged and he's overcome every single one.

And all of a sudden, this scribe, who's believed to be of the Pharisee camp, because the previous conversation was about uh the actual um uh resurrection.

You see, the Sadducees they did not believe in the resurrection.

Uh, so they were questioning him on it, and he kind of uh overcame their questions.

He was able to argue well and put them in their place, and then all of a sudden, this next scribe comes up, and we believe that he didn't have any problems with the resurrection, so we would imagine that he came from the Pharisees' camp and he had an honest question for Jesus, the first out of many that had honesty behind it, a true seeker of understanding.

And this is what he asked him which commandment is the most important of all?

Which commandment is the most important of all?

So as we dive into this text, what we would see is that Jesus tries to answer him in sincerity.

A sincere question deserves a sincere response.

And he's asking him a question on which one is the greatest.

Now we have to understand that there's 613 laws, there's 613 commands in the Jewish tradition.

Now, this scribe isn't necessarily asking which one out of those 613 is the greatest one.

What he's really asking is what one would summarize the totality of all 613 into one.

And Jesus responds to him this way The most important is hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.

And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.

So our summary of verses 28 through 30 would be that every part of our lives should endeavor to love God.

Every part of our lives should endeavor to love God.

All of your heart, all of your soul, all of your mind, and all of your strength.

Now, before we dive too deep into this text, we have to really wrestle with something.

Jesus is asked, what?

What command is the greatest?

He responds with love.

Now, in our worldview, to have those two things reside within the same sentence doesn't make any sense.

Command to love, those two things couldn't be more opposite from our worldview.

You're gonna command me to love?

Isn't love an emotion?

Isn't love something that I feel?

Isn't love something that has to be uh produced within me for me to be able to actually uh lay it upon another individual?

Well, that's our way of thinking.

That's a romanticized real false reality of what love really is.

Jesus says that the greatest command that demands our obedience is to love him.

You see, Jesus is asked what the greatest command is, and he answers it with love.

In our modern worldview, command and love would not be permitted to reside within the same space.

The very phrase, though, you shall, mimics and echoes the reality of the Ten Commandments.

You shall have, you shall, you shall not.

All Ten Commandments have these you shalls and you shall nots.

These are prescriptive commands that we don't have the freedom and ability to not obey and not submit ourselves to, uh, that God has handed down to his people.

So when Jesus answers the very question of the scribe, he begins with this prescriptive reality.

You shall.

It demands adherence, obedience.

But to follow it with love seems completely foreign, if not, if we're honest, completely unacceptable.

You shall love.

You see, it's in this very paradox that we see the beauty of what truly is love.

It's a worked for, labored for, striving to attain reality for those of whom deserves it.

Love is not meant to be offered to the whim of our emotions, it is to be fought to be given to the deserving.

Every aspect of love is rooted in covenant.

Those who deserve it, those who God declares we owe it to.

That is the root of love, is a command to obey, not an emotion that dictates our response.

Every aspect of what love is in the scriptures is the fulfillment of obedience.

You see, God alone is most deserving.

So it is in the labor of obedience we seek to lavish our love on Him.

It has nothing to do with your feelings, it has everything to do with His worthiness.

So the greatest command resolves in what?

Loving Him.

If we're going to be an obedient people who fulfills the commands of God, then we must submit ourselves in obedience to fulfilling the call to love him.

But let's unpack this command to see the beauty in what God is calling us to.

The opening call here that Jesus makes is hear, O Israel.

This is uh out of the Shema that we see in Deuteronomy.

It's this uh this call that God makes to his people, where he reveals to himself, the uh his people who he is.

And so it's the same kind of echo that we see in Proverbs 1:8.

Proverbs 1:8

When we see uh Solomon, who wrote the book of Proverbs, he starts off in chapter 1, verses 8, verse 8, saying this, hear my son, your father's instruction, and forsake not your mother's teaching.

What he's saying here in Hear, O Israel, is the same as a father who would say, Child, son, daughter, come and sit near to me and let me instruct you in my ways, in the ways of wisdom, in the ways of knowledge, in the ways of love.

We need to see here a loving father desiring to bring his children intimately near to instruct them with the words of life.

This is the call of a father who longs so much for his children to know him that he gathers them into himself to reveal to them who he is.

You see, that's the beauty of this Shema command that Jesus is quoting here in Mark chapter 12, is that begins with a father bringing his child intimately near to instruct him.

Mark 12 · chapter mention

And what does he do?

He doesn't start off with telling the child what to do, he starts off with telling the child who he is.

Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one.

You see, God never tells us what to do before he reveals to us who he is.

Because it is our response to who he is that dictates what we do.

In our action and behavior, in our obedience, it is all predicated on the revelation, the understanding of who God is in the first place.

And so, what is God telling his people?

He's saying, I am the Lord your God, there is no other.

He reveals himself as the only one.

You see, in Deuteronomy 6, where this Shema is first introduced, what we're seeing in the narrative story is that the people of Israel had just come out of 400 years of slavery in Egypt, where there was a multitude of gods to worship.

And they were drawn, their hearts were drawn away at times to worship false gods and to worship these golden idols and images.

And so God has them alone out from the oppressor of Pharaoh, and what does he do?

He reveals himself to them.

There is no other, my children.

I am the only God.

Israel's coming out of this 400 years of slavery.

They've been a people who served and worshipped many gods, and God, Yahweh, was revealing himself as the only true one.

He's consecrating himself from the multitude of other gods that have fought for the affections and heart thrones of his people.

And so he starts off children, come near.

All those other gods are fake.

They're idols, they have no power.

I alone.

In the true God, declaring once and for all that Yahweh alone deserved to be seated there on the throne of their heart.

This wasn't simply a declaration establishing some sort of dominance over the other lesser gods.

It was a loving God who alone would never stop loving them.

That's what he was revealing himself as.

Though Israel came from a multitude of gods who are all demanding for their affections, all of those lesser gods would come up infinitely short to ever love them in return.

It is God, Yahweh alone, who is their true God and true lover of their soul.

You see, that's the issue with us as human beings, right?

With this battle for who would sit on the throne of our heart, we are often persuaded or convinced that these lesser gods, these idols, these false gods, would actually fulfill something in our lives that we're longing and looking for.

And so we give them a shot.

We say, okay, let's see if you can maybe give me what I really want.

And so they take the place on the throne of our heart, and ultimately they always disappoint us.

They're never able to come through with the promises that they make to us.

Because ultimately, at the end of time, when we pursue them to serve us, the rolls flip at some point, and we end up serving them.

We end up bowing down to them and worshiping them instead, and they demand more and more sacrifice from us.

It is God who is calling his children to himself because he is saying, Not only am I calling you to love me, but I'm calling for you to love me from a perspective of I will always love you.

God's loving kindness, his steadfast love is permanently and eternally on his people.

It never fails, it never comes up short, it's never lacking or found wanting over his people.

And so his call, his command for us to love him is backed by a guaranteed, eternal, blood-purchased promise that he will never stop loving us.

You see, the opening phrase of the Shema is the same thing God speaks to us today.

You have sought to be loved by a multitude of lesser gods who demand that you love them.

Come, child, and know me, your true God alone, who loves you with a never failing love.

Now that God has called his children near to instruct them on who he is, he instructs them on their only befitting response.

His love for them is meant to be, is meant to be met by their love for him.

A love that has produced an obedience from their entire being.

And we see this from this you shall, this command for them to respond.

Obedience to God is to fully love him as he has revealed himself to be.

Our love for him does not dictate our obedience.

Our obedience should drive a deeper love for him.

We often don't see this the way that love should work, right?

We think that the more we actually love someone, the more faithful that we'll be to them.

The more that we are in love with someone, the more faithful that we'll be to that relationship.

And then what happens?

When that love wanes, when that love softens, then we see how truly devoted that we are to that individual because they're no longer meeting our needs.

You see, our understanding of love is very self-serving.

When it's an emotion that we should feel, and it's the other individual's responsibility to keep that flame burning.

That's self-serving.

That's demanding that the other person serve you and your needs rather than the biblical form of love where we lay down our lives for the good and benefit of others.

You see how the Bible turns love and our Western understanding on its very head.

We should seek to obey God through loving Him, not let our feelings dictate how we love Him.

We often don't see this to be the way that love should work.

But God sees it differently.

Love is predicated on faithfulness.

Let's look at Ephesians 5.25.

It says this husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.

Here we see the command to love a wife.

The faithfulness of the husband is not fulfilled in his love for her, but in the reality that he is in covenant with her.

And this is the only proper response to that covenant.

What if acts of obedience, faithfulness, are actually what produce love in our hearts rather than working to have love produce faithfulness?

We would have more active pursuit of the ones we set out to love and have a more fruitful affection for them in the end.

So here's what I think the Bible's telling us.

If we want a white hot love for God and for one another, that deems that we pursue them in faithfulness.

We are obedient unto that reality.

We seek to serve and love them and lay down our lives for them.

And love is fostered and cultivated in response.

You see, we have things backwards.

We want love to produce the faithfulness, the serving, the obedience, and all those other things.

That's not what the Bible shows us in the least bit.

We're not simply commanded to love God, but God shows us that we're also to love Him with our entire being: our heart, soul, mind, and strength.

So our heart, we talked about this as a throne of our being.

Right?

Our heart is the throne of our very being.

This is not simply speaking to the center of our emotions and feelings, but to the center of our very lives.

It is the heart that informs and produces the feelings and emotions after it has already been set in its intentions.

So we have to be intent to love God because God is deserving of our love.

We often focus on the emotions we have rather than working to deeper our understanding of why we are having them in the first place.

To love God with our heart is not to feel like loving him, but to shape the intentions of the heart to be set on loving him.

We do this through working to know him for how he has revealed himself to be.

We do this through prayer, worship, and fellowship with the family of God.

Our hearts need to be persuaded of who God is.

That is their only ability to flood us with loving emotions.

You see, that's why God in the Shema starts with the revelation of who he is.

He's calling us to know him, to understand him, to know him intimately as he has revealed himself to be, that a love might be fostered and cultivated for him.

We're also supposed to love him with our soul.

What makes us who we are.

Our soul is our life, the defining of our personality and uniqueness.

We're to love God with every aspect of what makes us.

Look at Psalm 103, the psalmist David, he says this, Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name.

What David is saying there is, all that is me blesses you.

The uniqueness of how you've made me, of how you've wired me and formed me in my mother's womb, how you've created every aspect of my personality, of my interests, of my ability, all of that that makes me me blesses you, loves you.

And so we are going to, in certain ways, express and show our love for God uniquely because of the way that He has made us.

I know that in relationships, you guys don't often show love or receive love in the exact same way as the other person, right?

Sometimes it's like one person uh speaks English and the other speaks Mandarin.

You guys are talking in ways that you don't even understand one another.

Because you speak and receive love very differently.

That's because God's made you unique.

And that's wonderful.

And with that uniqueness, we are called to love God.

All that is me, uniquely me, will bless and love you.

No one can take your place in loving God.

No one.

That's why he saved you.

That's why he purchased you with his blood.

Yes, ultimately he purchased the church collectively, but you are a unique, critical aspect of that bigger reality.

Look at 1 Corinthians.

Paul labors to help the church in Corinth understand, yes, you are part of the body, the collective church, but man, you're the hand, or you're the eye, or you're the foot, or you're the nose.

It doesn't mean that you're just the collective body of the church isn't just this blob of a thing.

We are unique parts and aspects of it that makes it function to the way that God has designed it to be.

So all that is you should love the Lord.

He's not calling a generic group to love him generically, but calling collected, unique individuals to love him.

He also says, with our mind, our intellect and meditations.

In our intellect we must strive to understand God so that we might love him for who he has revealed himself to be, not some fabrication of a false God that we desire, but do we love God as he is?

You see, this is the beauty of where we find ourselves as the church.

We serve a God who has revealed himself through his word, not concealed himself to leave us to speculation and our best guess.

And so in our intellect, we dive into that revelation of who he is so that we might know him better, so that our love for him might be greater.

We serve a God who is relationally intimate by making himself known.

And ultimately, he's made himself known through the person and work of Jesus.

It says that Jesus is the exact image and imprint of the invisible God.

Jesus is God with skin on him.

And we can know him, and we can know him intimately in relationship, and that takes our intellect.

We talk all the time.

The question is not whether you're a theologian or not.

The question is, are you a good one or not?

All of us are theologians.

All of us have assumptions or understandings or uh thoughts about God and who he is.

Every single one of us do.

We're created with that reality.

The real question is, are you a good theologian in that you search the scriptures for understanding, that you use your mind to love him for who he is.

Imagine in a relationship with one another, that would you love one another for who they are, or would you try to create the other person to be someone they're not that you might love better?

Right?

We don't try to love false representations of one another.

We work to try and love the true representation of one another by what?

Seeking to know them and understand them more intimately.

I need to know my wife.

The more I know what makes her afraid, the more I know what makes her happy and cheerful and comforted, the more I know what makes her anxious or angry, the more I know her, the better I love her.

Or I could always try to make her someone that she's not and completely be dissatisfied.

Frustrate her, anger her, oppress her in many ways.

That's not our job.

Our job as husbands, as men is to unfold the reality of who our wives are, that we might intimately know her and love her in response.

Same with God.

God has revealed Himself that we might know Him.

Not just fabricate some wild idea of who we think he should be, not just resolve and speculation of our best guess of what God might be.

He says, No, children, come near.

I am the Lord.

There is no other.

But also in our meditation, in our meditations we allow God to become the flood that overtakes our thoughts.

I love this in Psalm 1, 1 and 2.

He says, Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor seats uh sits in the seat of scoffers.

But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.

You see, this meditation of the mind, what the psalmist is saying is it creates a love and joy within the heart of the individual.

For who?

For God.

If we want to love God, then we will meditate on him.

We'd meditate on who he's revealed himself to be.

How many of your thoughts have been meditating on just garbage over this last season?

How many of your thoughts have been meditating on the state of our government, on the state of our culture, on the state of this virus, on the state of whatever, the job insecurity that you're facing, or the financial hardships that you're having, or the way that your kids are just, you know, kids.

How much of your meditations have been on those things?

And guess what that's happening?

That's working to dethrone God from your heart.

And it's putting an imposter there.

And that's gonna make you seek what?

False saviors.

When you're meditating on those certain things, here's the reality: the articles that you read start being what?

Geared towards solutions to the things you're meditating on.

Why is that?

Because you're looking for a savior.

The posts that you watch on that you look on social media, the YouTube videos you watch, the what the news information that you're looking for, what are they?

They are solutions to the meditations of your thoughts.

Ultimately, you're looking for a savior to get you out of your hell.

That's idolatry one-on-one.

What should we do?

We should meditate on God.

We should meditate on his word, on who he's revealed himself to be, on the saving work of Jesus, on that he sits on the throne of heaven and earth, that the earth is his footstool, that he is Lord of lords and king of kings, and nothing, nothing is ever gonna thwart his plan.

To meditate on the Lord is to love him with our mind.

And then in our strength, he says, Our strength is what gives us power.

Think about this.

There is a reality in our world where certain things give us power.

Maybe it's beauty, maybe it's strength, maybe it's a position that we hold or wealth that we have.

Power comes to us through certain things.

Some of that thing we chase down to obtain, some of that thing is just given to us, right?

Some of us are just naturally good looking.

Power comes with that.

Some of us, you know, we we we were inherited a bunch of uh uh cash or whatever when you were born.

I don't know what that feels like, but uh you have power there.

Or maybe you hold a position in your company that gives you power.

To love God in our strength is to understand what gives us power, but to lay it down and cause it to serve others rather than to serve self.

We're called to take that which would give us power, prominence, or influence in this world, and use it to love God.

You see, too often we use these things for self-gain and for self-love rather than to love God, right?

We might pursue beauty, we might pursue uh uh athleticism, we might pursue strength, we might pursue wealth or prominence within our uh career.

Why?

To serve self.

But what if we were just faithful and God blessed us, and in the power that He gives us, we serve others for their good, not for our own.

Not to be self-seeking, but to be self-sacrificial.

Now, as we go into the last part of this text, we see something really fascinating.

What we see is that Jesus continues to answer the question.

Right?

The scribe comes to him and he asks him, What is the greatest commandment?

And what does Jesus do?

He answers him, but then he keeps going.

Why is that?

We have to ask that question.

Jesus, why didn't you just stop with the greatest commandment is this?

Hero Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength.

But he doesn't stop there, he continues on.

And the second is like it, he says, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

There is no other commandment greater than these.

So our summary for verses 31 through 34 is that we cannot love God without loving our neighbor also.

We cannot love God without loving our neighbor also.

Why did Jesus continue to extend the answer beyond the question?

Simply because the one cannot exist without the other.

In answering the scribed this way, Jesus answered the totality of the question.

To love your neighbor as yourself is equal to loving God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

You see, Jesus said this at the end of that phrase, he said, There is no commandment singular greater than these plural.

What he was doing is he was lumping them together in this synergistic harmony where they must coexist with each other, dependent upon each other, that we cannot love God and not also love our neighbor.

We can't do that.

We have to love God and love neighbor together.

But see, loving your neighbor as yourself is not advocating for self-love.

He's not saying, hey, you have to get a lot better at loving yourself so that you can love your neighbor.

That's a kind of mantra happening in our culture, and unfortunately, it's creeping into the church and it's extremely toxic.

Hey, come on.

Finally, it's 2022.

Uh it is.

It's a toxic, false reality that we have to work to love ourselves better so that we might love others.

You see, the Bible understands a propensity that lies within us.

We are going to look out for ourselves.

Someone recently said that scarcity is the source of violence.

If you look at this pandemic when they were just out of toilet paper, y'all, come on.

People were fighting in department stores over some toilet paper.

Why?

Scarcity produced violence.

Why?

Because we have no problem looking out for ourselves.

We have no problem with that.

And the Bible understands that reality.

We will look out for number one, self.

So what is the Bible saying?

The Bible's not saying, hey, you've got to work really hard to love yourself better so that you can love others.

The Bible says we know how selfish you are.

Love others in the way that you would want to be loved.

You see, our functioning definition of love your neighbor is that our desire for good becomes the measure of good we also desire for others.

Let me say that again.

Sacred mission's functioning definition for love your neighbor.

Our desire for good becomes the measure of good we also desire for others.

The self-love culture points to a belief that our love for others is rooted in our ability to love ourselves.

But this too often actually leads to selfishness rather than selflessness.

I was reading up on the self-love movement and culture, and uh there was uh someone who was trying to analyze it after getting out of it from a secular perspective, and their prophetic insight was that in the end, the self-love movement will leave a lot of lonely, bitter, unhappy people.

Because they had to cut out anything that did not promote the best sense of themselves.

You see, self love is selfish.

The Bible is selfless.

The biblical view of loving our neighbor is an understanding the relentless and selfish way that God loves us.

If you want to understand how to love your neighbor, you first have to understand how God God loves you.

That he gave up his own son to be crushed under the weight of his wrath that you and I deserve for our sin and rebellion to obtain you.

You see the selflessness of God?

You see the relentless pursuit of us from God?

If we want to love our neighbor better, it is never going to be discovered in loving yourself more.

You have no problem with that.

To love our neighbor better is going to be in understanding a more deeper reality of the beauty and truth of the gospel.

If we're going to be a people who love our neighbor, then the gospel is going to fan the flames of that love as we understand God's relentless love for us.

Look at the way Jesus synthesizes these two commands into one harmonious reality.

There is no other commandment greater than these.

They must coexist for either to be true.

After hearing Jesus' response, the scribe affirms his answer and adds this statement.

He says is much more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.

Think about why burnt offerings and sacrifices exist.

They exist for the purpose of atonement.

Where we have failed to do what God has called us to do.

He provides for us a sacrifice, burnt offerings and sacrifices to make atonement, to grant forgiveness for the ways that we fall short in being obedient to him.

Right?

That's why these sacrifices exist.

They exist because of our disobedience.

The scribe is pointing out here that this law of love is greater to be obeyed than to need forgiveness for failing to do.

Obedience is always better than sacrifice.

Obedience here is to love.

To love God and to love neighbor, these two truths together shows that we are being perfected by God.

So our main idea this morning is this that our greatest expression of obedience is to love God and neighbor.

Our greatest expression of obedience is to love God and neighbor.

If I asked you before this sermon what was the greatest expression of obedience you could demonstrate in your life, how might you answer?

Maybe it was to feed the poor or to help the orphan or to do some kind of act of service, right?

Or some other kind of idea.

How many of us would have thought my greatest obedience to the Lord would be to love him and to love my neighbor?

Submission to God and loving him are synergistic realities.

You see, I would submit that obedience actually precedes a deep love for him.

We get so hung up on the do's and don'ts of faith that we forget the biggest do is to love him.

How would our spiritual disciplines change if our goal was to submit to loving him?

Consciously choosing this day and every day to love him.

Right?

When we talk about like reading our Bible or praying or coming to church or serving or going to mission group, praying for one another, right?

Often we probably think of these as ways to earn favor, to earn love.

And the easiest way that you can understand that is that when you mess up or you mess up for consecutive days in a row, how is your posture?

Is your posture you have to make up ground with God?

Or is your posture that you get to work from his relentless love for you?

You see, some of you husbands might have not done a lot of things your wives wanted you to do over this Christmas season, right?

Different house chores, honeydew lists, and you know, you sit there and you watch the UC lose their playoff game, and you know you could get up and do something more productive than watch the bearcats lose, right?

We know that there's things our wives have been asking us to do for months that we have not done.

And what do we do?

When we start to engage with her in relationship, we try to make up ground because we know we feel like we have lost ground and affection with her.

That's not the way that God works.

We don't work for God's love, we work from God's love.

You see, what if reading our Bible was reading not to earn merit and favor and affection from God, but a rejoiceful, joy-filled response from the love that he lavishes on us?

Would not our love for him grow?

Which one's more burdensome and oppressive?

To try and earn his love or to work from his love.

That's why we find ourselves so many times in this rut with our relationship with God because we keep trying to earn something that he's already freely given, and how much more can he show it to us than his son?

You see, to love takes work.

For us to love God is going to take work.

Love in itself is not a feeling or a vibe, but a choice to labor toward, cultivating the feelings that follow the effort.

Our propensity too often is to allow our feelings to dictate our behavior.

We must stop being a people who are ruled by our emotions and rule over our emotions through obedience.

Listen, we're in the top of 2022.

I gotta cut this down.

We're in the top of 2022.

Most of us, to some measure, has thought through or actually made New Year's resolutions, right?

You want to get healthier, you want to get more fit, you want to be better with your finances, uh, you name you want to read more books, you name it.

Here's the honest reality.

Most of you will not accomplish your 2022 resolutions fundamentally for this reason.

You will allow your emotions to dictate your behavior rather than doing what is right no matter what your emotions tell you.

That's the difference.

The fundamental difference between a person who accomplishes their New Year's resolution and one who fails miserably at it is that when you don't feel like working out, you don't go work out.

When you don't feel like eating healthy, you crack open the Krispy Kreams.

When you don't feel like uh reading a book, you watch uh uh that series on Netflix for the umpteenth time.

When you don't feel like, you don't.

If we're really, really brutally honest, we are suffering in our Christian walk, we are suffering in our our relationship with God and with one another because we are allowing as individuals our emotions to dictate and dominate what we know is right.

It's like with our children, right?

How many times have you gotten to a place with your children where you just don't even want to discipline them anymore?

You don't feel like it.

You just are like, look, I'm so done with you that just just go into another room and do whatever the heck you want.

Because you don't feel like doing it anymore.

You know what we're doing?

We're forfeiting opportunities to disciple our children.

We're forfeiting opportunities to bring them near, to sit them down, and to show them what grace looks like, what discipline looks like, what godly authority looks like, what obedience looks like.

That's better for your children.

Rather than saying, I just don't feel like doing this anymore, and I've got to stop.

And you know what happens?

You're allowing them to go undisciplined, but more importantly, undiscipled.

And we get that way with our spouses.

I don't feel like, I don't feel like, church, you and I are guilty culprits of allowing our emotions to dictate our actions.

God is not saying, when you feel like loving me, come on.

God is saying, submit to this command, you shall love me with everything that you have.

The feelings will be cultivated when the obedience precedes it.

In our efforts and obedience, in our efforts in obedience, if we're not cultivating a deeper love for God and neighbor, then we may be working from a work-based gospel rather than the grace-based one.

None of our spiritual disciplines should be viewed as earning God's affection, but as stirring our affection for Him.

Many of us, though, we believe that our greatest obedience is to love neighbor alone.

I gotta push through a lot of this.

Look, some of us we think that loving our neighbor alone is our greatest form of obedience.

Ultimately, we have turned love itself into a God and have sought to be obedient to it, believing that if we simply love our neighbor, we will fulfill the demands of God and earn his affection and have right standing before him.

Many of us attempt this feat without any true love for God.

We seek to bypass loving him as he revealed himself to be, and instead we love an idea of him as we have fabricated in our own imagination.

To love our neighbor as ourselves is synergistic and predicated on loving God.

But it is preceded by the command to love God first.

We cannot rightly love our neighbor if we are not first and foremost working to love God.

Pure and true love for our neighbor can only come from the fountain of the gospel, an understanding and realization of God's relentless love for us.

Working to love our neighbor alone denies the fall and it openly rejects the gospel.

We cannot work to earn right standing with God.

That is why we need Jesus.

So a culture that says that the fullness of our obedience to God is to be nice to one another, to love one another, to serve one another.

If you do not love God first, then you are not fulfilling these commands.

And ultimately, what you're saying is that I can earn my right standing with God through my obedience.

No, that takes the work of Jesus and tramples all over it.

We need a crucified, buried, and risen Savior because we could not love our neighbor.

But some of us we believe our greatest obedience is to love God alone.

In this, we've neglected the reality that loving God demands loving our neighbor also.

There is no true faith where our love for God doesn't spill over into the people around us.

This is why Jesus answered the question in the way that he did.

A love for God demands a love for neighbor also.

You see, we tend to like pulling back from culture, becoming separatists rather than missional.

We pull back in fear, frustration, comfort, self-preservation, but that is not the love of God.

The love of God presses in and empties himself for the good of people.

As we seek to be an obedient people, let us not just work to cultivate love for God, but love for our neighbors also.

A love that causes us to engage with the people different than us, with the love of God and the hope of the gospel.

This morning, church, our gospel truth and conviction is that Jesus is a sacrifice once and for all that we might love God.

When we look back to the scribe's saying, he says, You answered rightly, to love God with all of your being and to love your neighbor is greater than all the burnt offerings and sacrifices.

You see, without Jesus, we would still try to make these amends for where we fell short in our failures.

We would still try to offer these sacrifices, to earn forgiveness and atonement.

Why?

Because we cannot, in our own power, love God and love neighbor the way that He's called us to.

We cannot do it.

So what did Jesus do?

He became the ultimate burnt offering and sacrifice once and for all, that we might actually be able to fulfill the command of God, to love Him and to love our neighbor.

Hebrews 10, 5 through 7 and 10 says, Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said, Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body have you prepared for me.

In burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure.

Then I said, Behold, I have come to do your will, O God, as it is written for me of me in the scroll of the book, and by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once and for all.

Church, the truth and hope of the gospel is that because God so loved us, we can so deeply love him and others.

We have no hope to love God or our neighbor unless we first are receivers and trusting in the fact that he loves us.

And he shows that to us through his son.

So three things as we walk out of here.

Number one, let obedience cultivate love.

Let obedience cultivate love.

We have to really work hard to flip the script and understanding on what love is and how it is cultivated in our lives.

If we're waiting for a feeling to dictate us doing something good, you're going to keep waiting and keep waiting and keep waiting.

I can almost guarantee you that all of your bad habits are rooted in feelings that you have.

And guess what?

Are those good feelings creating good habits?

Are those good emotions creating good actions?

Most likely all of us would answer predominantly no.

There are bad emotions leading to bad habits and bad actions.

Stop being dictated by our emotions.

Stop thinking that when we feel that love, then we will express that love.

No.

Work to love God.

Work to love Him in obedience, in submission to His command, and the feeling of love will be cultivated.

The more you work to love your spouse, the more you work to love your children, the more you work to love your job, the more love will cultivate it in your heart.

Let obedience cultivate love.

Number two, be a people who love God.

We want, this is what we want to be known for at Sacred Mission Church.

We want to be known as a church who radically loves God.

A people who evidently, demonstratively, tangibly love God.

When people talk about Sacred Mission, one of the first things that I want them to know about us as an identifiable marker is that they are a people who love God.

Not, oh man, they're reformed in their soteriology, or oh man, they are bub-buh-buh, you know, super hipster and really cool people that I wish I could be friends with.

Those are all great things and true.

But do people know us as a people who just relentlessly, joyfully love God?

That's what I want us to be known for.

Be a people who love God.

Lastly, love God and love people.

Sacred Mission, we will not be a church that retreats from culture.

We will not be a church who secludes ourselves out away from others.

We will not be a people that pulls back.

We will be a people who press us in to the mess of culture, to the muck of society.

Imagine if Jesus looked down from heaven and was like, yeah, that's a little too messy for me.

I'm gonna stay up here.

You know, the Bible warns and actually extends cursing out against those who make their home in the hills and look down on society and culture and watch them devour one another.

What we are called to do is engage.

The same way that God engaged with us, where God uh uh took on flesh in the person and work of Jesus, what is he doing?

He's engaging with our mess.

We are gonna be a people who not just love God in our comfort retreat, but we are gonna love people in our messy pursuit.

In all of the tangible ways that we could be hurt, in all of the tangible ways that we are putting ourselves at risk, in all of the tangible ways uh that that doesn't make sense, we're gonna love people.

Because you cannot love God and not love your neighbor.

It's as simple as that.

Let's pray.