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Do you ever wonder what we are doing here?
For many of us, church has just always been a part of what we do, and we come because that’s what our parents did.
We have never really questioned why we are here or what our purpose is.
Perhaps there is no greater time for us to stop and evaluate that than today.
After service this morning, we are hosting a ministry fair, where we are giving you the opportunity to talk to some of our team leaders about opportunities to serve here.
But why?
Because you are bored?
Because we are trying to earn brownie points with God?
Why do we have service every week?
Why do we have events and activities and meet together to pray and look at God’s Word?
Why do we invite our friends and our neighbors into a relationship with Christ?
We could give a variety of answers this morning to that question, and each might highlight some aspect of what we are trying to accomplish.
However, at our core, we as a church have expressed our purpose with one simple phrase: our goal is love.
We base that off of 1 Timothy 1:5:
For years, we have said that this is our goal as a church, and this morning, we are going to look at it a little more fully.
We aren’t breaking away from our study in Mark, because Jesus addresses this very issue in Mark 12:28-34.
You can go ahead and start turning over there.
Let’s briefly recap what we have seen recently in Mark.
Two weeks ago, we were called to avoid empty activity and stay close to God through faith-filled prayer.
Last week, we were challenged to keep Christ at the core.
This week, we are building on those ideas to explain a little more clearly what it looks like when Christ is the cornerstone.
Jesus has been debating again with the religious leaders, and they have been trying to trick him up.
However, one comes to him with what may have been an honest question.
Jesus’ response to him is simple, life-changing, and incredibly difficult.
Let’s look at the question in Mark 12:28...
Out of all the commands in the Bible, which ones were the most important?
You see, the scribes had identified 613 separate commandments in God’s Law.
There had been a debate about which ones were the most important, which highlights the fact that we have always been about just getting by--“What’s the least amount of effort I can put in to pass?”
Jesus responds with the top two: love God with everything you are, and love others like you love yourself.
Simple, isn’t it?
If you just love God and love others, you’ll be good to go.
It may be simple, but it is far from easy.
Let’s look at these two commands, and from them, draw a clearer picture of what we mean when we say “Our goal is love.”
1) Love God with everything you are.
Jesus starts with the most important relationship we all have: our relationship to God.
Here, he is quoting from Deuteronomy 6, a passage that devout Jews would quote twice a day.
They would have been familiar with these words, but they still weren’t living them out.
Jesus starts with the reminder that God is one god.
We do not worship multiple gods, each responsible for different aspects of life.
Instead, we worship the one true God.
Why would he bring that up here?
Here’s how one commentator explained it:
the obligation to love God is based on his oneness.
Because he is one, love for him must be undivided.
God is undivided, so our love must be undivided.
Isn’t that the point of the command Jesus gives?
He says that we are to love God with everything we are and everything we have.
This fits with what we have been learning, doesn’t it?
If Jesus is the cornerstone, the core of who we are, then our love for him should involve every single aspect of who we are.
By the way, Jesus isn’t giving us a clear division of the nature of man here as he says we love him with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.
Instead, he is just reminding us that we are called to love God with every single part of who we are.
Why?
Why should I love God?
We could give thousands of reasons, including the fact that you are alive and breathing right now.
However, one of the reasons that is most powerful and helpful for our study this morning is found over in 1 John:
This is the central picture of God’s love for us, and we go back to it every week because it never loses its power.
You and I were made by God to live in a relationship with him, yet we chose to do our own thing and turn our back on him.
That alienated us from God and brought death into our world.
We died spiritually and had no hope, so God showed us love by sending Jesus to die in our place.
After he had been dead for three days, he rose from the grave and now offers us life.
The God of the universe, who calls the stars by name, who shaped you and formed you before you were born, knew your heart was turned away from him, so he gave his only Son to win you back.
When I understand the depths of what God has done, every aspect of my being should overflow with love back to him in response.
This clears up any confusion for us about what “love” means, doesn’t it?
So often, we think of love as a soft, tender feeling we have towards someone else.
Although there is tenderness in love, it isn’t about feeling!
It wasn’t that God felt love for us, so we feel love for him; it is that he acted lovingly towards us, so we act loving in response.
The love God showed us was sacrificial, hard, painful, unending love that called him to die on our behalf.
Is that how you would describe your love for God?
Does your love for God drive you to sacrifice everything you are for him?
Does your love for God reflect that same love he showed us?
I am afraid that we sometimes focus so much on God’s love for us that we forget our side of the equation.
Yes, God is infinitely merciful and gracious and loving, and he really did die in our place, but we can easily be tempted to take advantage of that.
Yes, God served us and continues to as he extends grace and helps us grow and live and be who we are, but that doesn’t make Jesus your personal slave.
It’s the other way around.
The love God has shown you should give you such a deep sense of indebtedness that you are overjoyed to sacrifice everything you are and hope to be for him.
You exist to honor and glorify the God who made you; he doesn’t exist for you.
What does this look like practically?
Let’s think about it using the terms Jesus used here.
Although they aren’t clearly defined or divided, they can help us think about what it would look like for us to love God this way.
First, we love him with our heart, which speaks to the core of who we are.
Loving him with our heart can leads us to desire him more than anything else and develop a greater dependence on him.
We are called to love him with our soul, which speaks to our spiritual strength.
Loving him with our soul leads us to stay closely connected to him in prayer, recognizing that he can enable us to live the life he wants as he guides and equips us.
We are called to love him with our minds, which speaks to our thought processes.
Loving him with our minds leads us to study his word and get to know him better.
As we do, he transforms the way we think to allow us to make decisions and evaluate life from his perspective, giving us wisdom we could never have on our own.
Jesus also says we are to love him with our strength, which speaks to our abilities.
Loving him with all our strength means we give up control of every talent, gift, ability, and resource we have to give him glory.
See? Simple, isn’t it?
Just take everything you have, everything you are, and give it back to God out of a heart that recognizes the incredible work he has done on your behalf.
That’s the first and greatest commandment.
Jesus wasn’t done, though, as he explained the second most important command:
2) Love everyone like you love yourself.
Jesus went a step beyond what the scribe asked and told him the follow-up.
This command is a natural extension of our love for God, isn’t it?
If God loves every person on the planet, and we love him, doesn’t it make sense that we are to love every other person?
But wait, Jesus just said we have to love our neighbor, right?
So doesn’t that just mean the people close to us?
Wrong.
We don’t have time to look at it fully, but in Luke 10, Jesus tells a story that clearly indicates that every human being on the face of the planet is your neighbor.
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