The Big Ten with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the MetaCurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at MetaCurch.

And my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time in your life that God uses it to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

Well, I want to welcome you here.

If it's your first time with us, my name is Clayton.

I'm the lead pastor at Meta.

I'm so glad that you joined us, whether you're here at our Holotus venue, our Petrenko venue, or for anyone who is streaming with us online.

Last week we wrapped up a five-week series called What You Started.

If you missed it, you can get caught up at youtube.com slash metachurch.

Now, for the next few weeks, we're not necessarily in a series.

These are just messages that have been on my heart.

And yet, as I began studying them, I think there's gonna be a lot of connection.

And they're all rooted in this one place in Scripture that honestly I'm a little bit shocked, maybe even embarrassed.

I've been preaching for about 12 years.

I've never taught one single sermon on this passage of scripture, which is crazy because we're gonna be looking at the Ten Commandments.

Like the most obvious place in Scripture, you know.

Even if you're like not really someone who has grown up in church or you don't have a lot of biblical experience, everyone at least knows what the Ten Commandments are.

And yet I think by really taking a closer look at what they are and what they say and how they apply to our lives today, I think there's going to be just some rich, rich insight.

Just in my own personal study, I've been so built up and inspired, and I hope that I can get that across to you as well.

My message today is the big ten.

The big ten.

Would you pray with me?

Jesus, we love you.

We thank you for your amazing love for us.

I thank you for meta church meeting now across multiple locations, but with this same aim to just express your love to anybody.

Anybody can come and be a part of MetaCurch.

I thank you for a safe place for us to wrestle with life's biggest questions.

And I pray that you would be with us, Holy Spirit.

I believe that you are here and you are desperate to speak to us, to encourage us, to challenge us, maybe even to convict us.

And so I pray we'd be humble enough to have open minds and open hearts and allow you to do your work.

We pray all these things in Jesus' name.

And if you want to investigate the Big Ten with me, say amen.

Amen.

Now, I know it's early in the service, and so I don't want to like open things up bragging about myself, okay?

But I do think it's important for you to know that I am a bit of an inventor, right?

There's great inventors throughout time: Tesla, Edison, Ford, Tyner, right?

It sounds good.

It sounds right.

Um, you know, you might be wondering why I'm not like a multi-billionaire at this point.

And if you're wondering that, I'm wondering the same thing, okay?

I've invented uh quite a few things.

I I love inventions, I love shows like Shark Tanks where people bring new inventions on.

A great invention takes a complex problem or a complex set of data and creates a very simple solution.

To me, that's a great invention.

And I've done this several times, but there is one key issue with all of my world-changing inventions, and the one issue, all of my inventions is that they've already been invented, right?

Every time I think of something, I get excited, I start picturing my yacht, you know, and then I realize, oh, I'm inventing something that was already invented 75 years ago.

Okay, I'll give you a couple of examples, as embarrassing as they might be.

Uh, several years back, when streaming really became popular, there was one specific show that I was trying to find, and so I went to Netflix, it wasn't on Netflix, and so I went to Hulu, and it wasn't on Hulu, and so I went to Prime Video and it wasn't on Prime Video, and I got inspired.

That's what great inventors do, right?

We get inspired.

And I thought, what if there was just one subscription?

And that one subscription had all of the channels, it had news, it had sports, it had cartoons, it had entertainment.

Holy crap, I just invented cable, right?

It's like someone already did this, you know?

And I like two hours of time wasted just to realize I literally just invented cable.

It's been around forever.

This one's worse.

Uh a group of friends and I were sitting around several years ago, and I really like to read, and at that time I was reading a lot.

Uh, most months I was reading eight to ten books a month.

I was really knocking out books.

I wanted to be a good leader, I wanted to learn theology, and people would say, just buy a Kindle.

Well, guess what, Jeff Bezos?

I don't like Kindles, right?

I want a physical book, I wanna open it, I wanna stick my nose in it, I'm gonna smell the glue that holds the pages together.

Like, I like a physical book.

But if you're reading that many books and buying that many books, it gets really expensive really fast.

And I was with a couple of friends who also are kind of avid readers, and uh, you know, we were talking about like, man, we go on Amazon and we go to Barnes Noble, and even half-price books, when you're buying that many books, it gets really expensive.

And you might know where this is going because we spend like three hours, like, what if there was a place where instead of buying books, you could just rent them or check them out for a little while.

Three hours later, we're like, oh no, we just invented the library, you know, like 1,500 years too late, we invented the library.

So uh anyway, I'm a world-class inventor of things that have already been invented, unfortunately.

Uh, I love inventions, I love complex data sets that come down to a very simple, elegant solution.

And life is hard because almost everything we try to do has a lot of complexity to it.

And when there's a lot of complexity, this thing happens to us psychologically, it's called analysis paralysis.

There's too many options of how to go about something, and so we end up not doing any of it.

I'll give you a couple of examples.

Uh, when you set out to lose weight, there is billions of dollars of gadgets and diets and gizmos and pills and magic solutions.

When you start looking at all the things you can do, let's just talk about diets.

You want to go on a diet?

You can go paleo, you can go keto, you can go carnivore, you can go South Beach, you can go Ginny Craig, is Ginny still even around anymore?

I don't know what Ginny's been up to lately.

You can go vegan, you can go vegetarian, right?

At the bottom though, right?

All of this data to parse through of like, what's the best option for me?

You know, and and there's influencers and YouTube videos, and you can go, it's like you gotta run every day.

And other people will be like, don't run, because when you run, then all of a sudden your body retains fat.

So you don't run, you jog, and then other person's like, don't jog.

You gotta get on a treadmill, and they're like, no, treadmill, that's bad for your knees.

So you gotta get on elliptical, and it's like, I don't know what to do, you know?

So there's this baseline guiding principle.

And if you know the guiding principle, then you can lose weight no matter what program you choose, what diet you choose, you have to burn more calories than you take in.

Period.

So if you start with that guiding principle, then you can make things work.

We live in the age of like self-improvement, you know, and so people want to learn how to play an instrument, or they want to speak a new language, or they want to, you know, build a new hobby in their life or something.

And then you're like, okay, I'll speak a new language, you know?

Well, there's 47 apps to choose from, and there's a million tutorials, and there's 75 webinars, and it's just too much data, you know?

And so it's like, how do we get to these bottom guiding principles?

Like, if you want to add something new to your life, the guiding principle is you have to practice consistently and with intention.

Whatever app you use, whatever process, whatever new thing you want to add to your life, even if you're using the wrong methods, if you practice consistently and with intention, you will get better over time.

It's beautiful when you find a simple solution to complex data sets.

And I feel like this happens in our relationship with God.

Because part of the miracle we have as the people of God is the Word of God.

The written word of God preserved and protected across the millennia for us.

It was inspired by God.

That is what we believe, it's inerrant in its original writing.

It's our rule for faith and life and living.

It's so incredible, but it's dense, you know.

I don't know if you grew up with grandparents who are like, my Bible's this big, but my grandparents' Bible was this big, you know?

Like, it's dense, right?

And it can be very intimidating.

That's part of what we try to do in our training here at MetaCurch.

Like, we do two semesters a year of the Movement Academy, and we have a whole section in there to build your confidence in approaching God's Word.

Really, the the problem for most people is they're just not reading the Bible.

And I'm talking about Christians specifically.

Most Christians are not consistently reading the Bible.

And then for a lot of people who are reading the Bible, sometimes they find themselves even more confused.

And there's so much data in the book.

And you get to some parts, like we know there's an Old Testament and there's a New Testament, and you can read something in the Old Testament and the New Testament, and they almost seem like they contradict each other.

Like in the Old Testament, when someone is caught in sin, it says that you should stone them to death.

And in the New Testament, when someone is caught in sin, Jesus just forgives them and sends them on their way and tells them to sin no more.

In the New Testament, it says to love and pray for your enemies, and depending on where you turn in the Old Testament, it might tell you to pray for the complete annihilation of your enemies, right?

Those are kind of like competing messages at best, and we don't know exactly how to take all this data and find the simple, elegant solution to orient our lives around so we can move forward with confidence in building our relationship with God.

And so I want to build out a little bit of context.

We're obviously going to the Ten Commandments, but without the context, can't make sense of the commandments.

And so what we often aren't taught is that scripture lays out two very separate and very different covenants.

We know we call it the Old Testament and the New Testament, but the word testament can also be translated the old covenant and the new covenant.

We aren't taught that all of Scripture is playing out God's plan sequentially, and that throughout the pages of Scripture, God reveals Himself to different people differently at different times.

Here's the major breakdown I want us to understand for our conversation today.

The Old Testament covers a covenant to a nation.

One nation.

The New Testament covers a new covenant to all nations.

I want to talk first about the Old Testament, which covers a covenant to one nation, specifically the nation of Israel and the Jewish people.

The Old Testament of your Bible is technically the Jewish scriptures.

As a matter of fact, if next Saturday you went to the local Jewish synagogue and you looked at what their scriptures are, their scriptures are the Old Testament of our Bibles.

You will often hear me say about the Old Testament, I'll just call it the Jewish scriptures, because that is most specifically what it is.

And maybe you've picked up on that in your Bible reading, maybe you've heard me talk about that through the years, but why does it matter?

Remember that the Old Covenant was to one nation.

It was written specifically to Israel and to the Jewish people.

And within the Old Covenant, they were bound to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of laws.

To be exact, the Jewish law had 613 rules, regulations, and commandments.

This law was designed to guide people towards holiness, justice, and relationship both with God and with others.

These laws guided and governed every aspect of life, from worship and sacrifice to the civil laws.

A famous rabbi said the commandments in the Old Testament were given to correct every single facet of human character.

That's how expansive the 613 laws are.

Now, these are the Jewish law.

They were given to the nation of Israel.

They were in place for a specific time and for a specific purpose.

They were incredibly strict.

They were exclusive and often excluding.

They were meant to protect the nation and to set them apart in a world of evil and hostility.

And the promise to that one nation is if they would set themselves apart as holy, that God would bring forth a savior to bless all the nations of the earth.

And that is what happened when Jesus came and died for our sins and rose from the grave and ascended back to heaven, promising to return for us.

Now, as I'm sure you can imagine, 613 laws are a lot of laws to keep memorized and at the front of your mind, right?

I pass a speed limit sign and it says, hey, the law here is 70 miles an hour, and I forget it as soon as I see it, right?

Like 613 laws, that's a lot of laws to remember, and they they guide and govern everything you do.

They govern your marriage, they govern your relationships, they govern how you interact with your employer or with your employees, they govern everything that you do in the marketplace.

And so, as you can probably imagine, from time to time you might be in the marketplace about to do a very specific kind of transaction, and you might forget, like, what was law 547?

Like, what exactly was that one, you know?

And it could be very, very easy to, in this huge, cumbersome list, to forget one and not exactly know how to play things out.

And that is in part where the big ten come in.

And so if you were an Israelite living under the old covenant, you would have the 613 laws, and you would, from the time you were a little kid, commit to memory the big ten.

You would know them backwards and forwards.

And in essence, the big ten or a cheat sheet are what we're calling a guiding principle.

And so if you're in the marketplace and you're about to transact and you can't remember the specifics of law 547, you can walk through the ten commandments and you know them.

If you're living in the old covenant, you're a Jewish person, you know the big ten.

And so as you walk through the big ten, if you are in step with God's heart through all ten of those commandments, even though you can't specifically remember law 547, if you're in step with the big ten, you can be confident that you are also in step with the 613.

In other words, you have the 613, and they are distilled and in essence encapsulated by the Ten Commandments.

And so let's look at the Ten Commandments in their original writing in Deuteronomy 5.

They go like this: number one, do not have any other gods besides me.

Number two, do not make an idol for yourself in the shape of anything in the heavens above or on the earth below or in the waters under the earth.

Do not bow and worship to them, and do not serve them, because I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, bringing the consequences of the father's iniquity on the children to the third and fourth generations, to those who hate me.

But showing faithful love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commands.

Number three, do not misuse the name of the Lord your God, because the Lord will not leave anyone unpunished who misuses his name.

Number four, be careful to remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy as the Lord your God has commanded you.

You are to labor six days and do all of your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.

Do not do any work, you, your son or daughter, your male or female slave, your ox or donkey, any of your livestock, or the resident alien who lives within your city gates, so that your male and female slaves may rest as you do.

Remember, you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out of there with a strong hand and an outstretched arm.

That is why the Lord your God has commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.

Number five, honor your father and your mother, and all the parents say hallelujah.

Honor your father and your mother, as the Lord your God has commanded you, so that you may live long and that you may prosper.

Y'all thought that was just a Star Trek.

You may live long and you may prosper in the land that the Lord your God has given you.

Now we got the quick hitters, all right?

Number six, do not murder.

Number seven, do not commit adultery.

Number eight, do not steal.

Number nine, do not give dishonest testimony against your neighbor.

Number ten, do not covet your neighbor's wife, or desire your neighbor's house, his field, his male or female slave, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

If you could learn and follow these ten commands, and as a good Jewish person under the old covenant, you would learn them.

You would have them memorized.

And if you could follow them, then you would almost by default live out the rest of the Jewish law.

Now, it's important for you to know as we try to figure out what this means for us in a new covenant, that the Big Ten breaks down into two broad categories.

The first four are commands to honor God.

That is, to put God first, to not make or worship idols, to respect God's name, and to keep the Sabbath holy.

These are commands to honor God.

Each of these is formed to have help you have an appropriate and a loving relationship with your Heavenly Father.

God comes first.

We serve and worship him and him alone.

We don't worship our wealth, our careers, our spouses, our children, our addictions, or anything else.

We don't misuse God or His name to advance ourselves or for unholy means.

We set aside time to focus on the Lord and to ensure that we are fully relying on Him, not our own strength, our understanding.

The first four are commands to honor God.

The next six are commands to honor others.

That starts with honoring your parents.

The commands to honor others, number five, honor your parents.

Number six, do not murder.

Number seven, do not commit adultery.

Number eight, do not steal.

Number nine, do not lie.

And number ten, do not covet.

This is how we exist in a civil society.

This is how we honor the people that God has put us on earth with.

It starts with the recognition that the family unit is of utmost importance.

There is no coincidence that right after the four commands on how to honor God, we next go to honoring our parents.

Respecting and obeying our parents is the ground level for how we learn to respect and obey the Lord.

Next is do not murder.

This simple but crucial command has informed every legal system on earth.

This is why we are told that we have an inalienable right to life.

The right to life is not one right among many, it is the preeminent right upon which all of the other rights are centered.

Seventh, we're to be faithful to our spouses.

Again, family is the cornerstone of society, and healthy families are crucial.

The covenant of marriage in Scripture is a direct parallel to God's covenant with us through Jesus on the cross.

God always keeps his promises, and the expectation is that we would as well.

Do not steal, do not lie, do not covet.

These are things that break down society and break down relationships with others.

And society cannot flourish if these are not upheld and aspired to.

And so two broad categories within the Big Ten.

There are four commands to honor God, and there are six commands to honor others.

This was an elegant solution to not just understanding the heart of the Jewish law, but to living it out.

A way to take this huge data set, six hundred thirteen laws, and to break it down into ten.

And if you can follow the ten, if you can get the ten right, then you are on track to understand the heart of God.

So the question then is what about us?

We do not live under the Jewish law.

In the New Testament, Scripture makes that very abundantly clear.

All over the New Testament, this is talked about, one of the clearest verses is in Hebrews chapter 8.

Hebrews 8 · chapter mention

It says, by calling this covenant, the one we're under, new, he has made the first covenant obsolete.

And what is obsolete and outdated will soon disappear.

So strong words demonstrating that we are no longer held under the weight of the 613 Jewish laws.

This is critical to remember as we approach Scripture.

I'm gonna remind you, the Old Testament covers a covenant to one nation, while the New Testament covers a new covenant to all nations.

We are not the Old Testament nation of Israel.

We are not living in anticipation of the Messiah coming.

We are living in light of the fact that Messiah Jesus came, lived a perfect life, died to pay the cost of our sins, rose again, showing that he could ensure us life after death, and then ascended back to heaven with a promise to return.

We are not living prior to the church age.

We are living in the church age.

We are in the new covenant era, so do the Big Ten still apply to us.

I mean, they seem like good ideas, right?

Don't steal.

Like, are we just free to lie as much as we want?

Can we murder as long as we get away with it?

It seems obvious that we are still held to many, if not all, of the Ten Commandments.

See, part of how we figure out what parts of the Old Testament we are still held under today is by looking carefully at the teachings of Jesus and the apostles that Jesus commissioned.

And so much of the Jewish law, it doesn't make it, it doesn't come across into this new covenant encompassing all nations.

But we have to pay careful attention because some people get this idea.

Like the Old Testament, it was tough back then.

It was harsh.

Have you read Leviticus?

Just like if you haven't read the Bible and you're gonna start, don't start in Leviticus, okay?

You're gonna get so depressed so fast.

Leviticus is important.

Let's start somewhere else and work our way there, maybe.

Leviticus is the Jewish law, it's all 613 of them.

It's dense, right?

And so people have this idea.

In the Old Testament, it was so tough.

God was like, you know, having a bad, you know, century or something, and he seemed really frustrated.

And then Jesus came, and Jesus is like way happier, and then like God was like okay with us now.

And now like the New Testament is like love, and all the standards really dropped in the New Testament.

That is how people talk about what Jesus said.

In the New Testament.

And I want to suggest it is the exact opposite.

While we are not held to the 613 laws in the Jewish Code, every time Jesus did talk about one of the laws, he did not lower its standards, he raised it.

So Jesus would say things like, You have heard it said, do not murder.

But I tell you, if you have hatred for your brother in your heart, you're already guilty of murder before God.

That's not in the Old Testament.

That's new.

Jesus said, You've heard it said, you shall not lust, but I tell you, if you even look, you should not commit adultery, but if you even look at a woman with lust, you're guilty of adultery before God.

That's New Testament.

That's not in the Old Testament.

The Old Testament, a lot of times, is more about your outward acts.

And Jesus makes it about your heart.

Jesus was very disruptive when he came to earth, and a lot of people were wondering, what is Jesus' relationship to the law?

What does he think about it?

How is he gonna handle it?

And Jesus came and what he did is fulfill the law for us.

What that means for us today is we don't have to fulfill the 613 laws.

We don't have to live a perfect life.

We are called to put our faith in Jesus, the one who did.

He perfectly fulfilled the law by actually living a perfect life.

So the religious elite saw Jesus as a huge threat.

He was out of their control, he had a huge following.

And they tried to find ways to trap him.

We're gonna look at a passage today that's gonna really help us understand how the Big Ten apply to us today.

And what was happening is different religious leaders were coming up to Jesus and they were asking him questions to entrap him.

And what they didn't know is that Jesus is God in human flesh.

He has all knowledge, he has perfect wisdom, and so he easily answered these questions, and everyone would go running because they had nothing to say against him.

Finally, we're gonna look at the last question.

In Matthew 22, 36, they asked Jesus, teacher, which command in the law is the greatest?

Jesus.

What is the greatest commandment?

Now, this was a trap.

Whichever behavior he addressed would leave other behaviors seeming less important, whatever rule he prioritized would implicitly devalue other rules that people had as something that meant a lot to them.

613 choices in the law he could have chosen from.

Ten commandments in the Big Ten.

What would Jesus choose?

What is actually to Jesus the greatest commandment?

In verse 37, Jesus said to him, Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind.

This is the greatest and most important command.

Now, Jesus could have stopped there.

This is an unimpeachable answer.

See, one of the things that the religious leaders like to do is they like to look at all of the laws, 613 laws, and then they would deconstruct them and they would categorize them so they could understand them in categories, and then they would rank them, and they would spend hours and days and weeks and months sitting in their ivory tower while people were on the fringes of society dying without hope.

And they would have these very, very ethereal conversations about which commands should be in priority over any of the other ones.

And they would have these arguments and these intramural debates, and they really didn't do anything.

And and this is this is the pull of religion to just make you waste your time on things that don't actually build the kingdom of God while there are people dying without hope, and you just have your little intramural conversations that don't matter and don't do anything, right?

So this is what they were doing.

The one consensus everyone had is that there were laws to obey and honor God, and that those were always at the top.

Those were in a different galaxy.

So the debate was over the rest of the laws.

Jesus could have stopped here.

Love the Lord your God, this is the greatest and most important commandment, but Jesus wasn't done.

In verse 39, he says, the second is like it.

Love your neighbor as yourself.

Many translations say the second is like unto it.

What Jesus was doing here was showing a dynamic equivalence between loving God and loving others.

I want to point out a few things.

We have the 613 laws, and those were distilled down into the big ten commandments, and now Jesus has distilled that down into just two.

And remember, the big ten had two categories: commands to honor God, that's the first four, and then commands to honor others, that's the next six.

Well, what did Jesus say is the greatest command to love and honor God and to love and honor others?

Jesus is saying, you have the whole 613, and that gets taken down into ten.

I'm gonna give you two, which means if you actually get these two right, you've gotten all of it right.

And that's not my opinion, that's exactly what Jesus says in the next verse.

He says in verse 40, all of the law and all of the prophets, that's the rest of the Old Testament, depend on, hang on, are bound by these two commands.

Love God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.

In other words, if you live these two things out, if you live to truly love God and love others, the rest will take care of itself.

In essence, what Jesus did in this moment is he gave the new covenant a new law.

Not 613 rules and regulations, two commands.

Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.

If you love God, you will obey the teachings of Jesus and the apostles.

If you love others, you will honor them and respect them, you'll put their needs ahead of your own.

If you love God, you'll worship him and him alone.

You'll set aside your life as holy to worship him.

Love God and love others.

These are the greatest commands.

Now that's pretty incredible already that you go from 613 to 10, and Jesus says, You think 10 is good.

You think 10 is easy to memorize.

Check this out.

Love God, love people.

End of story, right?

Get that right.

I've got two for you.

If you can do these two things, you can change the world.

But it wasn't just how Jesus brought down this complex data set to the simplest possible solution.

That's amazing, all on its own.

But then it's how he did it.

You see, to everyone, they had one point of agreement when they went to try and rank order the laws and commands, and their one area of agreement was there are laws to honor God, and they are above and beyond everything.

And part of what happened over time is Jesus came and he was very frustrated because instead of seeing a movement of God's people in dynamic relationship with God, understanding their father's heart, he saw a religion.

And he was always telling the religious leaders things like you are whitewashed tombs.

You look real nice on the outside, but on the inside it is death and decay and disorder and bacteria, like you are disintegrating on the inside.

Woo! You look nice on the outside.

You check all the boxes on all of the laws, go through all of them.

You are nailing the letter of the law, but you don't know the first thing about the heart of the law.

See, religion will convince you that you can just do all the religious things that like bring honor to God and then not do anything to help your fellow man.

And Jesus is dismantling that idea.

Jesus is saying, you can be in the temple every day from morning till night, but if that doesn't translate into your love for the people who are on the margins of society, God doesn't receive it as honor.

You can come to every service, every program, you can have perfect church attendance, but if it doesn't translate to you showing up and loving the people that you work with, it does not impress God.

God is not impressed with your Christian t-shirts if while you're wearing them, you are judging the world around you.

God is not impressed with that.

If you want to show love to God, Jesus says you must show love to the people around you.

And this would have been seen as blasphemous in Jesus' day.

The idea that you could put loving God on par, you could put an equal sign in between loving God and loving people and make the claim the only way you can actually accurately love God's people is out of an overflow of your loving relationship with God.

And not only that, but the only way you can demonstrate love towards God is to love God's children.

I've said this before.

You can tell me that you love me, you can show up every week to meta church, you can give your offerings every month, you can Facebook that I'm your favorite pastor.

If you treat my kids poorly, we're done.

You cannot claim to love me and hate my children.

It doesn't work that way.

Someone can't claim to love you and mistreat your children.

They don't understand the first thing about you.

And religion says I can just check these boxes and I can do all the religious rites and follow all the traditions and wear all the paraphernalia and talk the right way and dress the right way and act the right way and think the right way, and then leave the doors and treat people terribly.

Never engage with the world.

Judge those who are different than me.

And Jesus came and he reshaped the fabric of how we understand our relationship with God.

You want a loving relationship with God, you better be in the business of loving God's people.

This is a dynamic and simple solution that raises the standard.

I was trying to think, I'm gonna uh I'm gonna go full nerd, right?

So I don't typically, I go half sometimes, right?

I'm gonna go full nerd.

We're gonna see if we're gonna see if we track, okay?

Um I was trying to think of like the the the closest thing to how startling of a discovery this was.

That God, God doesn't care about your religious pretense, he cares about how you treat people.

That Jesus, God in human flesh, brought equivalence to loving God and loving people, a dynamic equivalence.

And I thought, what what else is there possibly that could make sense?

I think this is a start, okay?

In 1905, Albert Einstein made a shocking discovery, and uh you know this, but you may not know what it means.

E equals MC squared.

And then after you say that, you have to push your glasses up like this.

E equals MC squared.

Simple solution, uh, simple equation, it means energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.

In other words, if you understand mass appropriately, it actually is equal to energy.

Now, here's why that's shocking.

The laws of physics were being discovered and studied for hundreds of years by the time Einstein came to this conclusion.

However, they broke down into two neat distinct categories: things that studied energy and things that studied mass.

And so you had a lot of discoveries: Newton's laws, Maxwell's equations, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics.

All of these things were isolated and they were only studied within themselves.

And so you had laws for falling objects, another for light, another for heat, and so on and so on.

So, for those who have fallen asleep at this point, like let me summarize for you, okay?

In physics, there was a highly complex data set of laws that all seemed completely disconnected from one another, and there was no way to study each of these categories in an interdisciplinary way until E equals MC squared.

And the magic of that equation is the equal sign.

That energy and mass, understood correctly, were interchangeable, that they had a dynamic equivalence.

And if they had an equivalence, then you could study the areas of energy and the areas of mass across one another.

And I'm not a physicist, I'm just someone who plays one on stage right now, but I have no way of even communicating how this reshaped physics and all of the new ideas and the new theories that came out of this, two things that seemed separate, but actually had equality.

Let me say it again: a complex set of laws that seemed neatly categorized and yet very distinct from one another, suddenly shown to have dynamic equality and actually to rely on one another.

That is what Jesus did with the greatest command to love God, and the second is like unto it, to love your neighbor as yourself.

It showed that honoring God was not in competition with honoring others.

Honoring God was not this religious thing that you did, and others were an afterthought.

The two were interconnected and they relied on one another.

And so after this moment when Jesus gives the new law for the new covenant, we could never again claim that we were honoring God by sleepwalking through religious traditions while not taking care of our fellow man.

If you want to prove that you love God, you love the people around you.

Jesus taught this quite explicitly in Matthew 5.

He said, So if you are offering your gift on the altar, and there you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar.

First, go and be reconciled with your brother or sister, and then after you have appropriately loved others, then come back, and God will be waiting and He'll be ready.

You have to understand this is out of our context, but bringing your best sacrifice and laying it on the altar, this was the center of worship, and it was the central way that you maintained your fellowship with God in the old covenant.

The central way you demonstrated your love and maintained your fellowship with God is what Jesus just said.

While you're doing that, if you have offended your neighbor, God will wait.

And see, religion says, give your offering.

Check your box of commands to honor God.

And Jesus says, if you have offended your brother or sister, your offering won't impress God.

You will show your love for God by how you love the people around you.

Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

And love your neighbor as yourself.

And so the last thing that I want to say about this is something I really feel the Holy Spirit impressing on me, which is in today's society, I think a huge obstacle for us in loving our neighbor as we love ourselves is we are a culture of people who don't love ourselves.

And so if my love for myself is the standard by which I'm going to love my neighbor and I don't love or value myself, then I don't have the correct standard.

And so if you are someone who really struggles to love yourself, my suggestion would be: if you have not started a relationship with your Heavenly Father through faith in Jesus, that that is your first step today.

And the reason that those two ideas are connected is because if you want to know how loved you are, and if you want to know how valuable you are, and if you want to know how much worth your life holds, you don't look to yourself and you don't look to your Instagram account, you don't look to your spouse, you don't look to your kids, you don't look to your addictions, you don't look to your wealth, you look to the cross of Jesus Christ.

What we call the gospel, the good news, is that the God of the universe loved you, and I am talking to you.

Not just y'all, not just all of us, where you can exempt yourself out and think, you know, these really like well-dressed people, that's probably who they're talking about.

Probably not me.

You.

God loved you so much that he stepped out of heaven and into the midst of our pain and brokenness and was tempted and tried in every way that we are in, yet was without sin.

And his perfect life made him the perfect sacrifice.

And Jesus went to the cross to pay the price of all of our sin that separates us from our Heavenly Father.

Scripture says this is how you know that God loves you, that while you were still sinners, Christ came and he died for you, he gave his life for you.

Jesus rose again three days later, securing his ability to promise you life after death.

Forty days after that, Jesus ascended back to heaven and he promised he would return.

And so, what happens when we put our faith in Jesus is we now have a new metric.

We look to the cross, and at the cross, you realize how loved you are.

You were loved so much by your heavenly Father that God himself came down and gave his life for you.

You look to the cross and you realize that your value and your worth is not found in anything in this world.

It is found in what Jesus did to redeem you and bring you back into his family.

And only by looking to the cross of Christ can you accurately begin to love yourself.

And when you can accurately love yourself, then you can love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and you can demonstrate how much you love God by loving your neighbor as yourself.

As we close across our venues, if you would pray with me right where you're at, and you just bow your head and close your eyes.

There's nothing magic about that.

It just creates a little bit of space for reflection, for application.

I wonder if you have been caught in the trap of thinking that the way you show your love for God is through religious exercise, through traditions, through checking the boxes in your spiritual life.

And maybe today for the first time you realized true love for God demonstrates itself by radical and unconditional love for the people around you.

Notice Jesus didn't say, and love the people who are easy to love as you love yourself.

Love your friends and family.

When Jesus was on earth, he clarified this.

He said, Love your enemies.

Pray for those who persecute you.

Jesus did not come to lower the standards of the old covenant, he came to raise them.

What would it look like for you to truly demonstrate your love for God, who might he be calling you to love radically and unconditionally?

I wonder if there's anyone here today at one of our venues or joining us online who has never had a moment in time where they have put their faith in Jesus.

Maybe you haven't taken that first step of coming into relationship with your Heavenly Father.

Jesus didn't come to start a religion, Jesus came to offer relationship.

There are no hoops to jump through, you do not have to clean yourself up, you don't have to attain a certain level of morality.

Jesus is ready today to meet you exactly where you are.

He knows you better than you know yourself.

He knows your sin, your mistakes, the damage you've done, the people you've hurt, and he loves you.

When you put your faith in Jesus, believing he is your hope for this life and your eternal life, a few things happen.

Your sins are forgiven, all of them.

Past, present, and even future sin is covered by the righteousness of Christ.

Because of that, you're given eternal life with your Heavenly Father, a gift that no one and nothing can ever take away from you.

And scripture says that on the cross, Jesus paid the price of our adoption back into the family of God.

All of that can be yours today, and all it takes is believing that Jesus is who he says he is, and he's done what he says that he's done.

If you're here at one of our venues today and you know there's never been a moment in time where you have consciously decided to put your faith in Jesus, and you're ready to do that today, I want to give you the opportunity to do that.

With everyone's eyes closed, I want to ask you just to simply raise your hand up as a symbolic gesture.

And by raising your hand today, you're saying, I choose to put my faith in Jesus.

Amen.

For those who raised a hand, I want you to know we can say with confidence in God's word that God sees your faith and accepts it.

Your sins are forgiven.

You've been given eternal life, and you've been adopted into the family of God.

And all I want to do is very simply help you acknowledge this moment through a prayer.

I'm gonna ask those who raised a hand to repeat this prayer with me, and I'm gonna ask all the believers across our venues to pray this as well.

Let's pray like this.

Jesus, today I choose to put my faith in you.

I believe you are God, that you died for my sins and rose from the grave.

I thank you for loving me and forgiving my sins.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

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Man, I love you guys, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.