Close Is Not Close Enough
Notes
Transcript
Introduction
Introduction
Good morning and welcome to Dishman Baptist Church. Please take your Bibles and turn with me to Mark 12, Mark 12. It is a blessing to have you all with us today - it’s good to see some old faces returning and we’re thankful that you have all chosen to spend this Sunday morning with us. We had a beautiful service yesterday as we remembered Yvonne Abbott and thank you to all of you who took time away from your weekend to come and join us for that. If this is your first time here - or your third and you just haven’t filled one out yet - please take a moment to fill out one of the contact cards in the seat back in front of you. We would love to connect with you more, to have an opportunity to get to know you and to share a bit about what is going on here at Dishman with you. This doesn’t mean we don’t want to talk with you directly following the service - I want to forestall that opinion, we would love to have a conversation with you, but there is some information requested on the contact cards that just aren’t part of normal conversation. Now that that awkwardness is out of the way - let’s turn our attention to the Word of God.
We have been journeying through the final week of Christ’s life and for the last few weeks we’ve been camped out on Wednesday. This day was heavy with confrontation as the Jewish leaders were desperately seeking any way they could find to discredit Jesus or to cause Him to run afoul of really anyone. Their first attempt had been to get Him to blaspheme as they inquired into the authority by which Christ performed His ministry. If He had proclaimed that His authority was from Heaven they would immediately have called Him a blasphemer and would have loudly proclaimed it to the people even though it was false.
Then they attempted to conjure up conflict between Jesus and the people or Jesus and Rome over the question of the poll tax. An answer saying they should pay the tax would have offended the people, an answer denying the validity of the tax would have offended Rome and surely would have led to a swift and immediate execution. Last week we looked as the Sadducees sought to challenge Christ on the apparent conflict between a Biblical command and a Biblical doctrine of dubious truth - at least in their minds. Jesus refuted their question utilizing their own primary text and in so doing validated the doctrine of resurrection which we all hope in.
We looked at the first question from the Pharisees and the Herodians as really a useless question. They were already operating within the economy and not a single man there would have refused to pay the tax, they were just asking about a contentious issue with the illicit intent of placing Christ in opposition to either the people or Rome. The second question was a foolish question as the Sadducees chose an outlandish scenario, although it was carefully crafted to create the tension between command and doctrine, to try and trap Christ.
But what of this morning’s question. What sort of question are we coming to this morning? Depending on what commentary you read you will get a different answer. Some see this morning’s question as a furthering of the confrontations - as just one more attempt to get Christ to entrap Himself. The Sanhedrin believed that Jesus message was contrary to the teaching of Moses. If Jesus gave a command outside of the Law, then He would be elevating Himself above the Law He could be proclaimed a heretic and discredited.
Matthew tells us that this man’s question came about as the result of the Pharisee’s huddling up and determining what question would be asked next.
When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they came together.
The question they ask though is not really one that is all that different from one that had probably been asked hundreds of times, and may have even been posed to this very scribe. Let’s read through the passage and then we’ll look at how this passage bears greatly on our lives today.
One of the scribes approached. When he heard them debating and saw that Jesus answered them well, he asked him, “Which command is the most important of all?”
Jesus answered, “The most important is Listen, Israel! The Lord our God, the Lord is one.
Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.
The second is, Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other command greater than these.”
Then the scribe said to him, “You are right, teacher. You have correctly said that he is one, and there is no one else except him.
And to love him with all your heart, with all your understanding, and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself, is far more important than all the burnt offerings and sacrifices.”
When Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” And no one dared to question him any longer.
As I said, the question this scribe asked really wasn’t all that uncommon. In fact this question was often debated among the Jewish religious teachers. One such instance was when the famous rabbis Hillel and Shammai - two of the more prominent thinkers of the Second Temple period - were challenged “Teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot.” This is an attempt to understand what the most important commands of the Torah were.
As I said, the question this scribe asked really wasn’t all that uncommon. In fact this question was often debated among the Jewish religious teachers. One such instance was when the famous rabbis Hillel and Shammai - two of the more prominent thinkers of the Second Temple period - were challenged “Teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot.” This is an attempt to understand what the most important commands of the Torah were..is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor: that is the whole Torah, while the rest is the commentary thereof.” Notice that this is very limited in its scope - the only relationships that matter in Hillel’s opinion are those here on earth. There is nothing in his particular interpretation about how to relate to God.
Jesus answer to this scribe can be examined in three steps. That as Christians we are to be all in, completely devoted, in our relationship with God. Second, we are commanded not to just look up but also to look to the side - to our right and our left. Finally we are given in a round about fashion a definition of what true worship is. This text should provide for us a mirror that we can hold up to examine our own Christian lives and to see how we are fairing.
All In
All In
Jesus first response to the scribes question wouldn’t have been all that surprising. Jesus quotes from Deuteronomy 6 a prayer that is known as the Shema. It was called that because the first word is the Hebrew word sema or listen. This verse was repeated twice a day.
“Listen, Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.
Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.
Why this verse though? It would seem so fundamental that this should really go without saying. But it does lay the foundational groundwork on which everything else is meant to be built. Unlike Rabbi Hillel’s answer that starts with our temporal relationships, Jesus quoting of this verse puts things in proper perspective and in so doing reminds us of some important attributes of our God. The first is that He is a personal God. The Lord our God - not some distant being who doesn’t desire to have anything to do with us but our God who desires to have intimate relationship with us. And we shake our heads in agreement and yet how often do we spend time contemplating the nearness of our God? How much more often do we give lip service to the idea of His closeness in our lives and then go off to live in a way that demonstrates that He may not be as close to us as we say - that we are in fact deists in the sense that He really is the watchmaker who spun up the world and then has pulled away to let it run on it’s own.
Or we are so busy courting the world and the pleasures of this life that we don’t have enough to go around. John Piper once said “If you don’t feel strong desires for the manifestation of the glory of God, it is not because you have drunk deeply and are satisfied. It is because you have nibbled at the table of the world so long. Your soul is so stuffed with small things, and there is no room for the great.” Have we so filled ourselves with this world that we have crowded out the space for our God instead relegating Him to the leftovers, the scraps.
The relationship you have with a local relative is not the same as that which you have with a distant relative. It is not that you desire it to be that way - it’s just what happens. Distant relatives get the Facetime calls when it is convenient whereas local relatives get coffee dates and dinners, birthday parties and just time spent together. When we fall victim to the false view that our God is maybe not as personal or imminent then we will have a hard time eliciting the kind of devotion that Christ will go on to speak of in this passage. And some of us have allowed our lives to begin to reflect the idea that God is really far away and not close.
Can we say with the Psalmist
My heart says this about you: “Seek his face.” Lord, I will seek your face.
But as for me, the nearness of God is my good; I have made the Lord God my refuge, That I may tell of all Your works.
We serve a God who is not only close but has chosen us to be His own people. This is not heady theology or something that we should brush off as seminary learning. This is the foundational concept of all of Christianity - that our God desires to be with us. It is most clearly demonstrated in how far He was willing to go - even to the point of becoming one of us to reveal Himself to us
The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. We observed his glory, the glory as the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.
Oh there is so much depth in just this statement - The Lord our God. A personal God. An imminent God. A God whose love for us is such that He would come and dwell with us. Is that the God that you are here seeking this morning? Is that the God that you seek to serve on a daily basis? Beloved, make sure in your mind and your heart that you recognize the closeness of the God we serve, desire His closeness, His nearness in your life as the deer of Psalm 42 pants for the very water that gives it life.
The verse goes on to say that the Lord is one. He is not one among many - He is the only, true God, the creator of the universe, who exists as a triune being consisting of the same substance and essence with no division yet co-existent as three separate, distinct and eternal persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. This is the near God, the One who is our God. And He is not divided or disillusioned in His purpose. He is not distracted by the political infighting, the ethnic tensions or the other issues of the day that distract us. In all things the Trinity operates in perfect unity of purpose and design to demonstrate their glory and to bring about the salvation of man.
We serve a God that is close enough to see all that we do, all that we think, all that we are. He is one perfectly unified in His purpose and design. And we are called to love Him. This all powerful being that could crush and reorder the universe in the span of a thought desires our love. Think about that because it is so counterintuitive as to be shocking to most ears. We could readily understand commands to fear, respect, revere but to love. And how is this love to manifest itself in our lives? This is more than just an attractional love, it is the verb agapao speaking to a love of intelligence, of the will, of purpose, choice, sacrifice and obedience.
It is necessary for us to recognize all of these truths about God first if we are to elicit in our own fallen natures the deep devotion that is called for in this command to love Him. Christ tells us four ways that we are to demonstrate our love for our God and it is a requirement that we be all in as we demonstrate our devotion for Him. There is no part of life that is left out. This command to love God also demonstrates that we are to see God as a person not as some sort of abstract concept such as a “prime mover” or “a first cause”.
The Gospel according to Mark The Test of the Scribes (12:28–34)
Each of the four commandments is prefaced by the Greek preposition ex, meaning “from the source of,” rather than “by means of.” Thus, we are commanded to love God not simply with our whole heart, but from our heart.
Let’s look at each of these areas that Jesus mentions and examine ourselves to see how we fare.
Heart
Heart
In the ancient world the heart was the seat of the identity, it was the seat of the thoughts, words and actions. In our modern vernacular you will often hear heart referred to as a person’s determination or their ability to persevere when challenges are increased. You will hear about an athlete’s heart as he or she overcomes an injury or some other adversity to excel in their particular discipline. It is the sure confidence that is so invested or devoted to something that continues to provide the impetus needed to continue when all else says to choose a different path.
For Mark’s readers in the first century, it would have been very easy to acquiesce to the demands of the Roman government, to confess Caesar as another god and to continue to live without persecution. In our own day we live in a society where anything is acceptable - well almost anything. The one thing that is not tolerable is the exclusivity of Christianity that says that Christ is the only way and that as God He has a certain claim over our lives and the way they should be lived. When the challenges mount, when the adversity comes will we have the heart, will our hearts be so devoted to Christ, will our identity be so wrapped up in Him that we will say “on this confession I stand, I can do no other.” Or “choose for yourselves this day whether it is right to obey God or man, but for us we are unable to stop speaking of what we have heard and believe.”
Soul
Soul
Jesus moves on to the soul - the seat of our emotions. While agapao is not the attractional sort of love, that doesn’t mean that does not encompass our emotions. Which begs the question - what are our emotions towards God? Do we really love Him the way we say we do? And how do we define that love in the modern context in which we live? We know that we should love Him - but do we really? Often it seems that Christians emotions toward God waver between a healthy respect that you might have for a particularly benevolent authority figure, an unrighteous anger because we aren’t getting our way or a petulant arrogance that says we know the way things should be run and if He would just let us be we could get along quite nicely. But none of these is the love that is called for here.
Nor should this be characterized by the fickle give and take of the human flow of emotions. This is not half-hearted devotion that is demonstrated here but a fully devoted, fully vulnerable emotional commitment to the One who made a full commitment to us.
Love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.
This sets the boundaries and the litmus test for our emotions towards God. But alongside our emotions must be our intellect.
Mind
Mind
Contrary to the world’s opinion, Christianity is not a religion that requires you to check your mind at the door. Instead it is a belief system that incorporates the best the mind has to offer as he seat of the will and of understanding. While there is much of Christianity that cannot be understood or grasped, there is enough that our minds even if fully involved will never reach the end of what can be grasped during this lifetime. It is why we can look at the same passage of Scripture a hundred times and still find it just as fresh and informative on the hundred and first.
But this is more than just intellectual assent to the tenets of the faith. The mind also speaks to the seat of the will - in a different manner than the heart. There is an intentionality in view here. The sort of intentionality of a young lover toward the object of their love. It is something that has to be worked at with a determination that says I will sacrifice, I will commit to this relationship. In a sense this will has to run hand in hand with the drive and determination of the heart - but it takes both entities full investment to be successful.
Are we intentional in the way we relate to God? Are we mentally invested in our relationship or is it just an emotional roller coaster or a blind devotion to something not grasped? Married couples have a habit of losing intentionality toward knowing and studying one another - have we fallen victim in the same manner in our relationship toward God? Are we committed, as Paul wrote in Philippians, to knowing Christ? Are we willing to forget what is behind and press on toward what is ahead in the desire to press on toward the goal of a heavenly call in Christ Jesus?
Strength
Strength
Finally Jesus speaks of our strength. This is in reference to our physical energy or our function. What do we do as a part of our relationship with Christ? Bekah and I went to dinner with a couple of friends on Thursday night and in the course of the conversation we talked a bit about our kids. They said one thing they have come to recognize in their children is the vast disparity between taking behaviors and giving behaviors. Basically that the majority of their kid’s energy was spent in receiving care and taking rather than in giving back to the family. And it is unfortunate that the same can be said of the Christian church. We have developed an entire generation of takers - of those who come on Sunday, sit in the seats, hear the Word but never give anything back to the church in terms of service. Yes, they still give their tithes and offerings but that is a subject for another week - I’m talking about serving the body of Christ. Every single one of us was given a gift for serving the body and, while there may be some listed in 1 Corinthians that are no longer operative on a normal basis, none of those gifts were to be a benchwarmer. Each of us was gifted in a way to benefit the common good and for the edification of the body. Some of us need to start exercising our gifts and demonstrating our love for Christ through the use of our gifts.
A Christian’s love for our God is an intelligent love, an emotional love, a willing, intentional love and an active love. And these loves are not meant to solely characterize our relationship to God but to one another as well. Christ doesn’t stop at telling this scribe just the most important command, He reaches to another Old Testament text to share the second greatest as well and in so doing He encompasses both the vertical relationship of a believer to God and the horizontal relationship of a Christian to those around us.
Look Up And To The Side
Look Up And To The Side
If you were to ask the world what the greatest problem facing much of society right now is the answer would be that we simply don’t love ourselves enough. The real problem is that we love ourselves to much. Even those who say they do not love themselves still wear nice clothes, they still make sure they eat, they brush their teeth, get sleep, they get out of bed and in general take pretty good care of themselves. Now this is not to say that there is not a real problem of depression and that there is real suffering and sometimes self-loathing involved with that. But by and large most individuals in society love themselves very well. In fact, it is the manifestation of this self-love that leads to many of the problems we now face. We love ourselves so much that we think we deserve better, better treatment, a better job, a better education, better pay, better whatever. So we are very good at loving ourselves.
This command of Jesus to love your neighbor as yourself is not a call to love yourself better. This is not a different way of saying that you can’t love others if you don’t love yourself. Instead Christ’s point is that we are to love others as well as we love ourselves. It means caring for the condition of others. It means recognizing the struggles others are going through and if there is a way that we can help then we should. But it is also not a call to blind love that completely ignores Biblical life standards and willingly accepts both the sin and the sinner without qualification or expectation for change.
What a change could be effected in our world if we loved the way Christ expects us to love? And this love is not simply extended to our neighbors but also to our enemies and to those who disagree with us. To many in our world have no true concept of what this love entails because we as the church have not done the job of demonstrating it for them. Often we’re not even competent at loving one another in the church and so we have no ability to love those outside the church.
And yet we are called to love one another - and how do we do that? First we leave no soul untouched. Jesus loved all unconditionally but He never left them in the same condition they were in when they met Him. Yes He loved the lepers, the tax collectors, the prostitutes, the woman at the well - but not by lowering Himself to their level, He always brought them out of their life of sin, calling their sin what it was and challenging them not to sin any longer. We should certainly love the abortionist and the mom who is seeking or has had an abortion, we should love the gender confused, the homosexual, and the racially motivated (whether black, white or any other color) but we should love them enough to inform them of their sin. How is that done lovingly - by remembering that your sin was no different, that there are no qualifications in Romans 6:23
For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
And recognizing what you have been saved from, what you have been delivered unto is the motivator of love within our hearts. How can we fail to love our neighbors? But that is just the people outside the church true.
Second, we must demonstrate the same kind of love within the church. There is an old spiritual song that we sang around campfires “We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord
We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord
And we pray that our unity will one day be restored
And they'll know we are Christians by our love, by our love
Yeah they'll know we are Christians by our love”
Right now the world knows Christians more for what we’re against and for our hurtful rhetoric and actions than for our love - and this affects our worship. Christ finishes His statement by saying there is no command that is greater than these - and yet they are the two commands we struggle with the most. A key passage in the Mishnah, ’Abot 1:2, teaches, “The world rests on three things: the Torah, sacrificial worship, and expressions of love.” Jesus does not merely set love above Torah and sacrifice, he ignores them altogether. Love is our inner commitment to God that is expressed in all our conduct and relationships. Those who do not show love to others can hardly claim to love God
The True Definition of Worship
The True Definition of Worship
The scribe responds reiterating what Christ has said but then carries Christ’s thought even further. He says that to do these things is far more important than all the burnt offerings and sacrifices. For Mark’s readers this was a confirmation of what they were meant to be doing. At the time Mark wrote, the temple was inaccessible for worship, either because a brutal war was going on and it was occupied by brigands and besieged by Romans or because the war had ended and the temple was reduced to ashes. The statement by the teacher of the law reinforces for Mark’s first readers that the temple cult was irrelevant for fulfilling God’s most vital demands.
God’s desire was always for the heart of His people not for the sacrifices that were all to often offered half-heartedly.
For I desire faithful love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.
How often though might we do the same thing? We offer our time on Sunday mornings but that is the only real commitment we make to the Lord.
Conclusion
Conclusion
This scribe is so astute in his observation that Christ says “You are not far from the Kingdom of God.” But here’s the thing - close is not close enough. History does not tell us what happened to this scribe. Was he like the rich young ruler - could he rightly identify what was required of him but having identified it couldn’t take the steps to be secure? Or was he like Nicodemus, who church history tells us did become a devoted believer even to the point of losing his fortune and his place on the Sanhedrin because of his profession of faith in Christ.
What of us today? Do we truly love the Lord with all our heart, our soul, our mind and our strength? Do we love Him from our heart, our soul, our mind, our strength? Or are we going through the motions and offering sacrifices but not delivering what He truly desires of us?