Love for God

Introduction Good morning, church. If you are a guest with us this morning, I want to thank your for choosing to worship with us today. Since it’s now February, I want to talk to you all about love. As with any important theological discussion, it may be helpful to get the opinions of some children first. So, let’s watch this video of children explaining Love and Valentine’s Day. [YouTube Video] Of course, there are a lot of things I enjoy about that video. One of the things I noticed, and this is true whether you’re talking to children or to adults, is that there is sort of this tension between romantic love and love for everyone else in your life. I suppose it’s natural for us to think of romantic love more around Valentine’s Day, but for many people that is their primary idea of love. Even more specific than that, we tend to think of love as that initial honeymoon emotion. We think of the swooning, having butterflies in our stomach, and being utterly obsessed with this other person. But we rarely seem to think of love in terms of life-long faithfulness. We don’t think so much about how love is the choice, even when we aren’t necessarily feeling it, to put someone else’s needs, wants, and desires ahead of our own. Bridge This month, our preaching team is going to be taking a broader look at Christian love. We’ll talk about romantic love in a couple weeks. We’ll also hear sermons about how to love other people in our lives, our friends and our enemies. Although, before we get to any of this, we’re going to speak this morning about how we love God. Not just the feeling of intimacy with Him, not just the affection that we wish to show Him, but the consistent faithfulness and devotion which it is our pleasure to show him. As we examine our texts this morning, we’re going to point our three ways to love God. Body This morning we’re going to be focusing on Deuteronomy 6:4-5, which says: [Deut. 6:4-5] This verse is what Jesus was quoting in Matthew and Mark when he was asked what Greatest Commandment was. Mark’s account says this: [Mark 12:28-30] Notice where is says “most important.” This is a good translation, though a slightly more literal translation would be “which commandment is the first?” I like translating it as the “first commandment” because I think it highlights a second layer of meaning to the verse. That is our first way to love God this morning, “Love God first.” The first meaning that we can draw, which I think the ESV translations demonstrates the best, is that our love for God comes first in order of importance. The most important person or thing to love and the most important command in all of scripture is that we love God. This command is illustrated well in Jesus’s statement in Matthew 10. [Matthew 10:37] Jesus doesn’t share. Remember that both the Old and New Testaments say that the relationship between God and his people is like that of a husband and wife. Now for those of you who are married, imagine explaining to your spouse that you love them about as much as you love your momma. Or maybe you love your spouse about as much as you love your friends. Let me know how that goes. God’s not asking you to love him most, he’s telling you where He belongs. We love God first because to not love Him first is tantamount to adultery. We love God first because we are His bride and it is His right to be loved first. So, Church, let me just warn you: don’t cheat on God. Looking back at our main verse in Mark, I mentioned earlier that reading this as loving God first, highlighted a second layer of meaning to the text. Which is that we love God first, not just importance, but in sequence. Put another way, we can’t love others fully and perfectly until we have first loved God. Over the next three weeks, we’re going to have sermons on how to love others. Next week, we will hear from Victor on how to love others. In his message, Victor will likely say that the love we give to our friends is reflective of the love Christ has for us, as 1 John 4:19 says: [1 John 4:19] But how can we possibly demonstrate the love of Christ to others if we do not first love Christ? The week after that Karl will speak on loving your spouse. I suspect Karl may discuss Ephesians 5 where Paul reveals that marriage is just a big, divine object lesson on our relationship with Jesus, but how can we possibly model our marriages off a relationship with Christ of which we are not a part? Then the week after that, Tobey will be speaking on love for our enemies. Tobey will probably say that we are to model the love that Christ had for us in our sinful state, as Romans 5 says: [Romans 5:8] But Church, you cannot model that which you have not experienced. Be it our friends, our spouses, or our enemies, scripture teaches that our love for others does not come from our own independent capacities for love, our love for others is meant to be an extension of our love for God. Do not forget, love is a fruit of the Spirit. As Christians we do not love like the rest of the world, allowing our love to be based on our feelings, but instead we allow the Spirit to show His unconditional and perfect love through us. I want you to imagine that you have some of these cups in front of you and each cup is someone that you love. And then the water that you pour into the cup is the amount of love that you have for them. I think we have the temptation to see that we have our little water jug over here and God is just one of our cups. So we’ll give God a little love, just like we would anyone else. See, God isn’t just one of the cups, God is the faucet. And if we love God little, if we only barely turn on the faucet, the water is only going to dribble. Sure, we’ll be able to put some water in the cups for our loved ones, but not that much. We’ll have to pick and choose to we can show love to because there just won’t be that much love to go around. Yet, if our love for God is great, if we are totally and completely devoted to him, our faucet will be on full blast. We’re going to have enough water coming out of that facet to overflow all the cups. If we love God like he deserves, if we love Him more than all others, we will have a better capacity to love others more. If you want to love your friends better, if you want to love your spouse better, if you want to love your enemies better, focus on loving Jesus more. But looking back at our main text in Mark 12, notice that Jesus says loving God comes first not just among things you love, loving God comes first, before anything else God has commanded. This past fall, I was auditing a class at OCC on biblical interpretation. And one day in class the professor announced that he was going to postpone and upcoming test and the class burst into a celebratory singing of the Doxology, you know, like you do in college. They sang “Praise God from whom all blessings flow, praise Him all creatures here below. Praise Him above ye heavenly host. Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.” After the class quieted down, the professor said “learning to sing that song, and learning to sing that song well, is more important to your understanding of the Bible than anything I can teach you.” Ozark’s founding dean Seth Wilson put it a little more concisely, “who we teach you to love is more important than what we teach you to know.” Bible studies are important and I hope you do them. Sermons are important and I hope you listen to them. Morals and wisdom are essential and I hope you have them. But if those things don’t lead you to love Jesus more deeply, then they’re useless. As it is written: [1 Corinthians 13:1-3] Let’s look back at our main verse in Deuteronomy 6. As we mentioned earlier when Jesus asked which commandment from God was first and most important, he quoted this verse: [Deuteronomy 6:4-5] I want to pay special attention to how this verse says we are to love God, with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our might. What is interesting when you look at the exact Hebrew words used here, yes each of these words—heart, soul, and might—have their own independent meanings, but the Hebrew terms used here are also often synonymous because they all mean you entire self. So, the point in this verse in not so much to love God in these different ways, but instead that you ought to love God completely. That is our second point this morning: love God completely. I’m reminded of the story of the rich young ruler. This rich man comes up to Jesus and informs Him that he has been doing a good job. He has read the scriptures, he knows the law, and he has kept it. He has done and said all the right things, but he wants to know what else he must do to inherit eternal life. So Jesus tells him to sell everything he has, because Jesus knew in exactly which parts of his life God wasn’t welcome. This young man loved God, but he didn’t love God completely. In Acts 20, Paul is speaking to the church at Ephesus and he says this in verse 24: [Acts 20:24] How much of your life are you willing to sacrifice for the sake of Christ? Are you willing to give up your dreams? Are you willing to give up your ideas? Are you willing to give up your comfort for Jesus? I want to be clear here, God is not asking for you weekends. He’s not asking for your Wednesday nights. He’s not even asking for your behavior, your thoughts, or your feelings. Jesus is asking for nothing less than your entire life. Does he have it? I want to look one last time at our main text in Deuteronomy. [Deut. 6:5] Like, I said each of those words refers to a person’s entire being. However, they do have slightly different connotations. So, yes, this command means to love God with our entire selves, but also to love God with each part of ourselves. That will be our last way to love God this morning; Love God in everything. It says first to love God with all of our heart. At the time this was written, the heart was seen as both the center of emotion, but also as the center of rational thought. The heart was considered the center of our conscious existence and with all of that conscious existence we are to love the Lord our God. As it says in Philippians 4:8: [Philippians 4:8] We are not called to simply follow a list of rules, but we are to make our very thoughts an act of worship. We are also to love God with all of our soul. The soul was thought of as the inner self or our spirit. So, with the very essence of who we are, we are to desire our God. When I think of what it means to love God with all of our soul, I think of the 42nd Psalm. [Psalm 42:1-2] “As the deer pants for the water...” Is God’s presence a fundamental need for you? Is being in communion with God central to your existence? Lastly, we are called to love God with all our might. In the things that we do, with all of our ability, we are to do everything as an act love, as an act of worship. Colossians 3 says this: [Colossians 3:23-24] I know we have lots of different jobs represented here. Some of us work in ministry professionally, some of you are educators, others work in health care, and of course I could go on for some time with all the other careers represented. I’m sure some of us love our jobs, while others of us love our jobs a little less. I think sometimes we can get caught up in whether or not we are making a difference. We get concerned as to whether or not our work “really matters.’ Whether we are really making people’s lives better or whether we are really making the world a better place. Let’s recognize that God doesn’t make those kinds of distinctions. God is not impressed by whether or not you have lots of employees or how much influence you exert. If we really want to “impress God,” if we really want to do something important, then what we ought to do is the menial task. We ought to do the uncomfortable, boring, seemingly useless job that no one else wants to do. As Jesus said in Matthew 23: [Matthew 23:11] If you want to love God with your actions, then love others with your actions. Make yourself less, so that you can make Him more. Conclusion Just like little children thinking about Valentine’s Day, I worry that we can make loving God all about the emotion. The feelings are important, don’t get me wrong, we should feel a strong emotional connection with Jesus. But it’s not enough. God isn’t just asking for your emotions; he’s asking for everything. The greatest command in all of scripture is to Love God with everything you are and everything you have. Love God with everything you are and everything you have. He’s asking for everything that you think. Everything inside of you. Everything you do. If you realize this morning that you haven’t been loving God like you should. Let’s pray about that. I invite you to find myself or an elder and we’d be happy to pray with you. As Karl comes up and leads us in this last song, prayer cards are going to be placed on the front of the stage. I invite you to come take a card and pray for that request each day this week. Before he does that, let’s pray as a family now.