Loving God

Kids are a great example. I’ve often observed with my own children, who are certainly not unique in this regard, where you can give them a task - let’s say setting the table for dinner.

Some days they do what I call ‘fluffing’ around. Basically it involves no focus whatsoever, and it results in things taking a very long time. They’ll get the knives out of the drawer, and five minutes later you realise they are still putting the knives out, with only being half way around the table.

Of course, you get flabbergasted, and start if this table will ever be set, after all, they still have the forks, spoons and cups to go, let alone the drinks, salt and pepper.

But then on other days it is completely different. It’s like the kids are on a mission. They go quickly and within moments the job is done.

The difference is their focus. I have no idea why one day they have it and the next they don’t, but then again, when I look at myself, I guess I do the same thing. Some times it takes forever to do a simple task, whereas at other times I move quickly.

Now, you might need a psychology degree to figure out why focus is sometimes there and sometimes not, but what is obvious, is that there is a definite correlation between focus on getting the job done.

Although there is a catch - it’s not just any focus, it’s focus on the task at hand. For example, I sometimes might try to do some household chores while the football is on. Depending on whose playing, there’s a good chance I’ll become very focused on the football - the focus is there, but it doesn’t help with the chores which tend to go rather slowly.

The church needs to love God

Now I want to make an argument that we find the same thing with church. That is without focus, as a church we will just drift aimlessly - although there is an important caveat on this, which is really an extension of the argument I made two weeks ago, and that is, that the focus we have can’t just be on doing things better, in other words, not just singing better songs and having better coffee, but on something far more important.

You see, using the logic that I’ve been leading to, if our focus is on better songs and better coffee, there’s a good chance we’d succeed in doing that, but you would have to ask, what for?

If good coffee is what you’re after, well, there are plenty of good cafes around. And if you just want good songs, well you can buy your own CD’s, and then you don’t have to worry about someone choosing that song you really don’t like.

However, as great as coffee and good songs are, they can’t be our focus - our focus needs to be something far greater.

The focus that we need is on God - and I’m going to suggest that the best way, maybe even the only way to keep a focus on God is through worship.

Now an important clarification that I’ll expand upon throughout this message, by worship I don’t just mean the songs we sing. Singing is an act of worship, but worship is so much bigger than this.

Well, to help us explore this idea I’m going to use the short passage that I read earlier from .

Context of Passage

As always, it’s important to understand the context in which the passage comes.

We find ourselves in the last week before the crucifixion of Jesus. A few days earlier Jesus had entered into Jerusalem on a donkey, with a kings welcome. From the Sunday in which this happened, through to the Thursday evening when Jesus gathers the twelve for the last supper, we find an intense time with Jesus being peppered with questions from all quarters, many of which were aimed at tripping Jesus up.

Immediately prior to our passage this morning, it was the Sadducees turn, and as verse 34 remind us, Jesus succeeded in silencing them. But now it the Pharisees turn.

Now something we need to remember about the Pharisees, the get a lot of criticism from Jesus, and rightly so, but

Well, one thing that the Pharisees were known for, was being really meticulous when it comes to understanding the law. They had numerous experts whose job it was to essentially study the law and figure out how it should be applied.

Unfortunately, they often fell down the trap which is a trap for many experts, which is to over complicate matters.

To understand this, we have to go back to the first five books of the Bible. It was these books, known to the Jews as the Torah, or books of the law, which guided them.

You could call the centrepiece of this law being the 10 Commandments which we find in , and repeated again in . But the law didn’t stop with these 10. If you’ve ever read Exodus from chapter 21 onwards you’ll see a bunch of laws that on first reading can seem rather random. A rough analogy is to think of this as being like our common law, that is, the laws of our land that come about due to precedents from other cases.

The problem with whenever you start getting into very specific situations, the precise nature of your situation changes, and so the Pharisees found they needed to come up with new laws to help them apply this to their own situation.

It is reported that by the time Jesus came around, the Pharisees had complied a formal list of new laws that numbered 613.

Now on one level you might think that this was just a means of contextualising the original laws to their own situation. There is a sense in which there is a necessity to this. If you want to apply the way of God to your own life, then you need to think about what this looks like.

The problem that occurs when you do it in the way the Pharisees did, the end product can miss the big picture.

This is exactly what happens when your focus moves from where it should be. There focus should have been on God, and from that obedience would follow, but instead they had a focus on obedience and thought that worship of God would flow from that.

Well, anyway, they hadn’t realised the error of there way, and as these Pharisees had experts in the law who had studied the whole thing for a very long time, I think they were pretty confident that they would be able to trip Jesus up.

So they got one of their expert and put him up to Jesus with the question: “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

I suspect that in their minds at this point, their thinking that whatever Jesus says, they’ll find a way to trap him up.

Well, this is one of those things I really love about Jesus. He has this ability, better than anyone else that I’m aware of in history, to engage these conversations in a way that states his point and completely avoid the little rhetorical traps that lesser minds hall down at.

You see, rather than stepping down into specific laws, Jesus instead essentially steps back and looks at the law as a whole, and in particular, what the purpose of the law is.

You see, the whole purpose of the law is to show us what a right relationship with God should look like. You see, all the laws can be brought back to this purpose. And so Jesus answers:

‘“Love the Lord you God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: “Love your neighbour as yourself.” All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.’

The interesting thing is that what Jesus says are not new ideas that no one had heard before. In fact, they were direct quotes from the Old Testament, or more precisely, the first five books of the Bible that the Jews referred to as the Torah.

Most notably, we have a quote from . This verse in Deuteronomy states:

Deuteronomy 6:5 NIV (Anglicised, 2011)

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.

Now just so its clear, this was by no means an obscure verse, nor is it obscure to Jews today. It is part of what is known as the Shema prayer.

The Shema, which traditionally a Jewish person would recite daily, is actually which in English says: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one”.

My understanding is that more commonly that would just repeat that verse, but when included in their prayers, would recite the following verse as well.

In other words, for a Jewish person, this verse is one of the most well known verses. In fact, I’d suggest even better known then is known among Christians today.

So the interesting aspect to all this is that in Jesus’ reply, he is not telling them anything new, but opening their eyes to what should have been really obvious to them in the first place.

That is, that if obedience is what they are attempting, then their focus should not be on 613 rules extrapolated by mere humans, but on loving the Lord their God with all their heart soul and strength, or as Jesus slightly adjusts it, to their heart, soul and mind.

As Jesus ends in verse 40, when you combine this command, with the second, that is, to love your neighbour as yourself, you find that all the law and prophets hang off these.

I’m not going to go into the Ten Commandments in detail now, but if you take the time to look at them, the first four (or possibly five depending on how you look at it) all point us towards loving God, and the remainder point us to loving others.

This little episode with the Pharisees, an episode that was aimed to trap Jesus, instead allowed him to highlight what is really important - that we should love God. This is what our focus should be and when we do this, everything else will follow suit.

Loving God

Now, I want to briefly look at the aspects of heart, soul and mind that Jesus refers to because I believe this will greatly impact how we are to show our love to God.

In each of these words we can dig a little deeper by examining how it would have been understood during the time of Jesus. It’s probably worth pointing out that it’s not about the different parts of our bodies, but rather some different ways we can think of relating to God.

Heart

Firstly, we’re told to love the Lord our God with all our heart. Now in some ways, this language is still used today. A young boy in love with his sweetheart might say to her that he loves her with all his heart. But what does that even mean?

After all, it’s not saying that this internal organ that’s pumping blood around our body is somehow in love.

Rather, ‘your heart’, tends to mean that innermost personal centre of your being. So loving someone with your whole heart essentially means it’s getting personal.

Soul

The next one is about our soul. Now it’s easy to reduce this to the idea of that part of our being that survives after death. Now there is truth to that, but when it says to love with all your soul, it’s not talking about some after-death idea, rather your soul in many ways is your life. It’s that force within us that energies us.

The way I like to think of this, is when you find that something extra because of the love you have. I believe that’s because as we love, our life force is energised. Now I know that I risk sounding a little new agey when I talk about our life force, but I don’t mean it in a new-agey kind of way, rather it’s that whatever-you-want-to-call-it within us that keeps us going.

Mind

Finally, in this passage, Jesus refers to our mind. Now this one’s perhaps a bit easier for us to get our heads around. The mind refers to the thinking and planning processes that we have.

To love with all your mind means that it is something you think about.

Now in some ways I think it is a strange thing that today we have made love so much about emotions that it has almost been separated from our rational thinking.

You might be familiar with the argument - ‘you can’t help who you fall in love with’. However, I’m not so sure that argument is entirely valid. I think there is an element to which you can think about who you fall in love with.

Love might be about heart and soul, but it also has to b about your mind as well.

Whole

But while I talk about the three different elements, they do combine to make a whole. The essence of what Jesus is saying is that this love cannot be limited to a small part of our lives, but it must take over our entire being.

Love in Practice

So what does this look like in practice?

Comprehensive Worship

Earlier I mentioned worship, which we’ve unfortunately made into a certain style of music.

Actually, as an aside, I once remember someone even making a distinction between praise and worship. Praise was the upbeat songs whereas worship was the slower more meditative songs. Such a distinction is very misleading, because both praise and worship is something that moves into our whole lives.

You see, the word worship means to the reverend honour that we show. So I think it’s far to say that if we love God we will worship him.

And so, if we’re putting love and worship together like this, this passage shows us that worship needs to be about our whole being - our heart, soul and mind.

When your doing your daily chores - you can honour God by doing the best job you can.

Similarly, when you’re at work, you can consider your hard work as a means of loving God.

When you have a quiet moment to yourself - allow your thoughts to meditate on God’s goodness.

Talk to others about how good God is. Just let your whole life be a reflection of God, and in so doing, you will be honouring God, and keeping the focus where it should be.

When it’s hard

But in saying this, it needs to be said that sometimes we won’t feel like loving God. There are times when we will be angry. There will be times when we feel that God has let us down.

I believe we can use the Psalms as a good example for us here. Like many of the Psalmist, don’t deny those feelings. But, having said that, what you also find with the Psalmists as they lament their hard times is that they still reflect on God, and this reflection leads them to seeing God’s love for them.

And so, I would say that when you do face tough times, don’t deny the feelings you might have, but still keep looking to God because you will find someone who is not pushing you down, but actually holding his hand out in your toughest moment.

In so doing, even though you might not see it at the time, you can actually continue to show God love at all times.

Bringing it together

Conclusion

If I bring this back to the argument I made at the start of all this, if we want to do church well, then our focus needs to be on loving God with our whole heart, soul and mind.

Without this love, we lose the thing that keeps it all together. We lose the very reason for our meeting together.

You see, you need to understand that there is something fundamentally different with a Christian church to other clubs and groups. There are many clubs and groups, many of which are entirely worthwhile reasons for existence, but usually it is around some sort of common interest or cause. But with the church, we have the love that we looked at last week, the love that God has first showed us, and this makes all the difference.

You see this love goes beyond a single cause or interest and ties us together with eternity in our sights. And as we return the love to God, we will get the direction we need.

Loving your neighbour

I haven’t yet spoken much about the second half of what Jesus said - that is, to love your neighbour as yourself. That’s because I’m going to talk about that next week.

But the argument that I want to carry forward is that first we experience the love that God first showed us, second we need to return that love to God, and flowing from this love, loving other will naturally follow.

This is why I’ve spent the first two weeks of May trying to get this focus right. The next two weeks will now move onto loving our neighbour.

As we’ve spoken about before, May is known as May Mission Month, but to understand the mission, we need to understand where it starts - and that is with the love of God.

Conclusion

We need this focus on God. And we need to do that with our whole heart, soul and mind.

Only when we do this will everything else fall in place.

Let’s pray...

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