Love the Lord Your God

Building a house requires a firm and solid foundation, before you can put up walls and a roof and fill the inside with furniture and decore. it must at its core be rooted in a strong foundation unwavering and uncracked, sometimes when you have lived in a home for a long time it is easy to take the foundation for granted and assume everything is alright, when in actuality it is crumbling beneath you but you have become oblivious to this reality, or are simply unaware

In Florida of all place we know this to be true : as sinkholes are a real issue throughout the area (just think about our own property.

So help us lay this foundation we will explore 4 texts over the month of April:

This week: Deut. 6:4-9

Week 2:

Week 3

And Finally Ephesians 2:1-10

Each Text helping us lay a firm foundation of faith around the truth of God and the life of his church

Our first text set the initial foundation as this is the text that has been the central tenant of the faith for all generation:

Christ himself in the Gospels refers to it as the greatest of commandments:

Deuteronomy 6:4–9 ESV

“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

Set the context:

Deuteronomy is a series of 3 sermons given by Moses to prepare the people to enter the Promise land, it was meant to remind them of where God had brought them and where he was taking them.

Our text today immediately follows the re-giving of the 10 commandments

I. Know the Lord (4)

Deuteronomy 6:4 ESV

“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.

A. Thorough Hearing His Word & understanding it

(Jesus calls this the greatest of commandments: , , .)

-Text is referred to as the Shema : because of the first word in the text: hear

-Explore the importance of listening: We hear gods word to know him, we don’t get to come to him on our own terms but on his.

-Deuteronomy lays out for the people the reality of who God is and to a degree how we must be a people who seek him to know him and to experience him, through his reveled word, not through our own desire of who he should be or what he should be like.

2 Timothy 3:14–17 ESV

But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

What Is the Trinity? God Is One

The Christian faith has to be the enemy of all natural spirituality, because Christianity must be true to its own self, true to the God who is there, and true to what reality really is like. And it must express itself in a Trinitarian form. It is not enough that we believe in God, as do these spiritualities, however vaguely. We must believe in one God who, in his being, is not confused with creation and who is also tripersonal—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

2 tim 3:14-17

-It is through the word of God that we know him and believe in him, it is thorough hearing his word from scripture that we truly see him most clearly

-And on this point the first reality we come to in hearing the word is the fact that we serve one God: and as scripture reveals over time he is tri-personal (the eternal three in one). Now this trinity as it is called is seen and veiled in the OT:

What Is the Trinity? God Is Tripersonal

For centuries, rabbis were perplexed by some Old Testament passages that seem to point to multiple persons in the Godhead. For example, what are we to make of the plural pronouns in the early chapters of Genesis? In the creation account, there is the statement, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Gen. 1:26). God says about Adam, “The man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:22). Still later, at Babel, God says, “Let us go down and there confuse their language” (Gen. 11:7). What are we to make of the word “us” in these passages? What are we to make of the three supernatural beings who visit Abraham a little later (Gen. 18:1–21) and whom he worships (Gen. 18:2–3)? And, perhaps most importantly, what are we to make of the many appearances in the Old Testament of the angel of the Lord, who, in some passages, it is quite clear, is divine and yet also distinct from Yahweh (e.g., Ex. 14:19–22; Judg. 6:11–24)?

Know the Father, Son & Holy Spirit

What Is the Trinity? The Trinity Defined

That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance; for there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost is all one.… So the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. And yet there are not three Gods but one God. The Godhead of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost is all one, the Glory equal, the Majesty coeternal.… And in this Trinity none is afore or after the other; none is greater or less than the other, but the whole three Persons are coeternal together and coequal.… The Unity in Trinity and the Trinity in Unity is to be worshipped.

-We are to examine the scriptures to test and ensure the reality of all that is taught and all that we experience (we need to hear and from hearing the truth we can properly act on that truth like the Bereans: (Acts 17:11)

B. Through Understanding his Word

-Now as we begin we see what it means to hear the word

II. Give yourself Fully to the Lord (5-6)

Deuteronomy 6:5–6 ESV

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.

-The very over flow of the knowledge of God as reveled in scripture should be a love for Him.

-This is not a soulless compulsory love, But rather as you see the fullness of God reveled and experience the fullness of his mercy and saving grace the logical and emotional outcome of that should be a response of love

The three fold phrase (heart, soul might, appears 8 times in the book of Deuteronomy alone, connecting us to the effect that our worship and life with God is more than a passive experience or a merely emotion, or mental one. It will encompass all that we are and all that we are to be

Ill; 2006 survey by George Barna Found that only 15% of those who claimed to be bor-again believers said that God and his will were their first priority in life. (this should be scandalous to us and yet clearly this is the majority of “american evangelicalism”

-So if God is not the first priority to you then the whole of this text should be a wake up call to your faith: God didn’t save a part of you on the cross through the death and Resurrection of his son, nor does the spirit only dwell within a part of your being but the whole, and within that framework their is the knowledge that all of us is due to him as an outworking of this reality.

A. Heart (the logcal center of the human experience in the Hebrew)

A. Heart (the logical center of the human experience in the Hebrew)

A. Heart

Deuteronomy: An Introduction and Commentary b. Yahweh Is Our God, Yahweh Is One (6:4–9)

The heart was regarded as the seat of the mind and will as well as of a wide range of emotions

Lebab: Inclination, conscience, understanding. mind,

(heart here is not our emotions)

So when we speak of giving ourselves over to our savior and living every moment for him the first aspect we see is a giving over of the mind and our understanding of the world around us.

Romans 12:1–2 ESV

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

-Our Minds are now shaped by the cross and through that sense we see and respond to all of life

-The evening news

-The relationships we invest time into

-the movies we see (and how we respond and engage with them) We should never be simply passive receivers

-The way we speak

-the jobs we take or the people we may date or spend time with

-the activities you children invest their time in

B. Soul (life and vitality)

Deuteronomy: An Introduction and Commentary b. Yahweh Is Our God, Yahweh Is One (6:4–9)

The term soul is difficult to define, but it seems to refer to the source of life and vitality, or even of one’s ‘being’

-Nephes: life, living being, personality, desire, emotion, appetite

-Here we come to the emotional center and vitality of our lives being shaped and lived for God alone

-Think abut the things you long for (your appetites) are the shaped by God or by the world.

-In Paul talked about his battle with this very aspect of becoming like Christ

Romans 7:17–20 ESV

So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.

Romans 7:25–8:4 ESV

Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin. There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.

Romans 7:

:25-8:4

-Take a second and think about what a person sold out for Christ looks like in your imagination why do they look and act that way, why do they speak that way, why do they respond in the ways they do, Now examine that picture against scripture and then yourself.

-IF you imagine matches up with scripture it should be a reflection of Christ himself, but unlike the perfect christ it feature a continued battles with sin which means there emotions will reflect a brokenness and a desire for repentance and holiness. It is one that can boldly stand in persecution and yet be broken and weep over their own sinfulness, and rejoice at the exorbitant grace God poured out for that sin

C. Might

Deuteronomy: An Introduction and Commentary b. Yahweh Is Our God, Yahweh Is One (6:4–9)

The two terms heart and soul between them indicate that a man is to love God with unreserved devotion. To give more weight to the demand a third expression is added, with all your might, i.e. ‘with all your strength’.

-Meod: Strength, power, force

Here we see the two culminate into an active ingredient. We are not passive in serving God, we are active with everything we have. In the good and in the bad we push ahead unflinching towards God alone.

-Active will leading us onward

-and active passion to purse god and put sin to death

-Ill: There are two types of people who are given a task one who knows the task and accomplishes it out of compulsion and one who throws them-self into the task with everything have

-God here is saying that those who know me will be those who throw themselves into the pursuit of me. They know and have experienced something far better that this world and long for it with all they have. it is not a cultural or passive faith it is one that engages the mind and will leading to and overflow through the emotion and drive of our lives.

TR; And it is from this active life that we are able to proclaim his riches

III. Proclaim the Lord (7-9)

Deuteronomy 6:7–9 ESV

You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

A. In Your Home

-Baptism Catechism

-If you have children God places it on you to teach them the reality of who he is (and if the faith is active and flowing as in vs 5-6 then this should be a natural process)

-When you sit at the kitchen table where is the lord in your speech, where is his mercies in your morning coffee and on your car rides to school. When you stare at another paper that needs to be written, graded or prepared how do you see God in that moment, how do you experience his grace in that second, how does the world around you see god through your approach to such events.

-When you are out and about what do the words you speak say about the God you serve

-When your night comes to an end what is it your mind meditates on (as you stare blankly at the ceiling wit nine thousand things running through your head how many of them reflect on God’s work)

B. In the World

False Application:

Matthew 23:5 ESV

They do all their deeds to be seen by others. For they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long,

-Jesus actually mocks the pharisees who took the literal approach to this text while ignoring the reality

-We should be reminded of the work of God and seek to remember these truths we have the scriptures readily available to mind them on our arms and eyes.

Conclusion:

Know that the Lord our God is One in unity and in being, yet distinct in consciousness (the mystery of the 3 in 1 trinity)

But from this we have experienced the hope of faith through the saving work of God as Ephesians teaches us:

Ephesians 1:3–14 ESV

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will, so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory. In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory.

Ephesians 1:3–9 ESV

Father has called us, the son has saved us through his blood, and the spirit has sealed us for redemption.

Those who believed and repented have experienced the one true God because you heard the truth and since you heard it now live out the great commandment delivered to us in the Shema

-Live for the Lord with everything you have, place him first don’t be apart of the 85% who give lip service to god but have no desire to prioritize him over their own desires, be driven to seek God above all else and lay the true foundation for your life to be built upon

This is the first foundational stone you must lay, all else flows from this reality, from here we will be able to grow, but without this the rest is a moot point.

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