Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

Last week was a paradox for me.

On one hand, I don’t know that I’ve ever left our church under greater conviction than I did last week.

As I wrestle with how often I love the forgiveness of God and the rewards of God and the gifts of God and even the temporal, fleeting pleasures of earth more than I love him with all of my heart and all of my soul and all of my mind, and I realize that I’ve never kept the Great Commandment perfectly for five seconds in my entire life, it’s devastating.

It’s devastating to bring that type of self-centeredness and that perversion of love into the presence of perfect love and holy God.

But then, on the other hand, I don’t know that I’ve every left our church more certain of the presence of God than last week.

I looked at your faces, and I saw a church that wants to love God.

And, I thought, “How rare!

This is a sermon that can get you fired!

And yet, my people, they receive and they love it because they genuinely want to come before God with a purer love and greater love that only He can provide by his grace in the Kingdom Gospel!”

And, this is the type of paradox we should find ourselves in every week when we gather with God’s people.

It’s one of the reasons we should aim to come every week.

We should on one hand find ourselves convicted by the Spirit through word of our sin that we might be ever more in the image of Jesus, and yet we should leave always encouraged and excited because Jesus is sufficient for our weakness and failings, and the Gospel never leaves us in despair!

And so, this morning, I ask you: How have you done with the Greatest Commandment this week?

Have you sought to find all of your happiness in God and to center the entirety of your calendar and energy and budget around him this week?

Did He consume your thoughts as a healthy obsession, captivating you so that you could see his kindness and be aware of his presence, even in the most mundane of moments?

Brothers and sisters, let us not be a church that leaves the sermon at church but that applies it when we leave, and it is in the application of this Great Commandment that Jesus takes us yet deeper this morning.

God’s Word

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Which Law is the Greatest?

“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”

So, if you’ll remember back to last week, we’re still on Tuesday of Passion Week, and we’re still in the midst of this smear campaign where the leaders of Israel are working to turn the crowds against Jesus so that they can have him arrested and ultimately executed.

And, it’s not going very well.

The Sadducees have just failed, and the Pharisees are tired of failing so they send in one of their big guns, an expert, their Matlock, their super lawyer.

And, it was a common question in that day to ask, which law out of all the laws was the very weightiest law?

Out of all 613 laws, which law was the heaviest, the weightiest, the most important?

That is, what is man’s greatest duty before God?

Now, it’s most likely that it’s his goal to show that Jesus, by his answer, doesn’t believe or uphold God’s law and that instead Jesus has come to abolish God’s.

It was a common charge against Jesus leveled at him by the Pharisees, and if they could get that charge to stick they would have him dead to rights.

No Jewish crowd would be able to tolerate a prophet, a teacher, and certainly not a Messiah who abolished God’s law.

Depend ALL the Law and Prophets

“You shall love the Lord your God” But, Jesus answers without hesitation and in a way that Matthew tells us silences every listener.

He quotes the law that every Jew was most familiar with.

The very one they and their children quoted every morning and every evening.

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”

You see, Jesus reminds them that they only had the law because God loved them and was their God and obligated himself to them, and if they loved him back then their own definition of love, their own commitment to the covenant they made in response to God’s love would compel them in obedience to all of God’s law.

This wasn’t about begrudging, meticulous law-keeping.

This was about passionate, joyful love which led to obedience.

Extra Credit

“And a second is like it” But then, Jesus does something strange.

Jesus answers a question that wasn’t asked.

Jesus goes for extra credit.

Now, I want you to think about this setting.

They’re asking Jesus this series of perfectly crafted questions for the purpose of tripping Jesus up and causing him to say something that is off center.

If I’m Jesus, I would look straight ahead and give strict yes and no answers.

But, here’s Jesus expounding on the questions that He’s been asked!

He’s like, “I’ll do you one better!

I’ll not only tell you the greatest commandment, but I’ll tell you the second greatest also!” And, do you notice what He says about it?

He says that it’s ‘like it.’

That is, it’s almost just as great as the first one.

This duty is ‘like’ the duty that you have to love God with all of you heart and all of your soul and all of your mind.

Let that sink in.

This isn’t some social activist saying this.

These are the words of Jesus, God incarnate!

For Jesus to compare anything to your love of God is radical and extreme to the highest extent.

This is our cue that if we’re going to follow Jesus we better listen up and buckle up.

There are difficult and radical words to follow.

Love Your Neighbor as Yourself

“Love your neighbor as yourself” So, here’s what he says: Love your neighbor as yourself.

That is, seek after the well-being of your neighbor with the same intensity and the same ferocity as you seek after your own well-being.

Seek after your neighbors’ happiness as your seek after your happiness.

Seek after your neighbors’ place in the world as you seek after your place in the world.

Seek to eliminate your neighbors’ loneliness as you seek to eliminate your own.

With the same passion and with same zeal and with the same study and with the same intensity that you take care of you and you seek after what is best for you; seek after what is best for your neighbor!

Love your neighbor as yourself.

This is radical, but it isn’t new.

You’ll notice in verse 40 that Jesus says that all of the law and prophets “depend,” or “hang” on these two.

If you take the ten commandments and you divide them, the first four have to do with your relationship with God and the final six have to do with your relationship with others.

If you take the whole of God’s word, that is, everything that God has ever said, it will literally fall into one of two categories, your relationship with God or your relationship with people.

So, Jesus had not come to abolish the law, Jesus had come to fulfill the law, in fact to unite the law, as the true Mediator of the Law, as the One who could bring people into perfect relationship with God and with one another forever as the One who is entirely God and entirely man!

The Combustion of the Heart

Why would Jesus make it a point to go a step further in answering a question that wasn’t asked?

It could be that Jesus wanted to be certain to show that there was not a single dot or iota of the Law that He did not uphold or fulfill, and this is likely part of the reason.

But, I think there’s more to it than that.

Because, you see, in the Temple complex one of things that had made them so upset with Jesus had been his refusal to send away the blind and the lame but to instead welcome them with love and compassion and to heal them.

And, this was a legacy that his disciples would carry forth as they were establishing his Kingdom on this earth.

And so, I think Jesus was showing this Pharisee proof and evidence that the love of God was not in his heart even though the love of the Law was.

Because just like you can love forgiveness and not God, you can love the Law and not God, but you can’t see a love for God, can you?

You can’t see what’s in a man or woman’s heart, can you?

We could drive around our community today, and it would be very difficult to find many people that would say they don’t love God, even if there is no fruit.

But, you see, these two commandments are so interlocked that you cannot have one without the other.

The second greatest commandment is the clearest fruit and the clearest evidence of the first.

You can’t see it, and you can’t measure it, but when a man or woman loves God, combustion happens in their hearts.

There is an internal combustion beneath the surface of new passions and new hungers and new affections and new attitudes.

And, you can’t see this combustion.

It’s a smoldering wick in the heart of the believer.

But, do you know what happens?

It sets everything around them on fire!

Their relationship with their wife changes.

They change at work.

They change in the way they relate to their kids.

They’re much quicker to seek forgiveness.

They used to be stingy, but now their generous with others.

And so, you can’t see the combustion in the heart, but you can see the fire in the relationships.

This is why Jesus brings it up.

I deserve It, They Don’t

But, this doesn’t come easy, does it?

The biggest issue with loving our neighbor as ourselves is that we feel responsible to ourselves, and we fill like that we've earned our generosity and we deserve our kindness.

After all, we're the ones that put in the long hours at work and diligence to put money away and to invest wisely.

We are the ones that do all of those things; so, we are the ones who deserve to be rewarded.