Core Commandments
Notes
Transcript
When someone says, “At the core,” what do you think of?
Perhaps an apple, or the center of the earth.
When you talk about it in terms of an idea, “at the core” are those principles that form the foundation for the rest of the philosophy or argument, perhaps boiled down to their simplest forms.
So, then, if I asked you what is at the core of everything we say and do as a church, what would you say?
You might respond with the statement we often use to describe our purpose: Our goal is love, right?
We base that off of 1 Timothy 1:5:
Now the goal of our instruction is love that comes from a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith.
For years, we have said that this is our goal as a church, and for the next two weeks, I want us to go beyond that and look at what is at the core of this idea that our goal is love.
This morning, we are going to see that as we look at the core commandments that Jesus gives us as a church.
Everything we do will trace back to the two commandments we look at this morning.
Next week, we will see that those commandments also come with a core commission—this is the mission God has given us as he sends us out into the world.
To find the core commandments God has given us, I want you to open your Bible to Mark 12:28-31.
As you are turning over there, let me bring you up to speed with what is going on in Mark at this time.
Jesus has been debating again with the religious leaders, and they have been trying to trick him up.
However, one comes to him with what may have been an honest question.
Out of all the commands in the Bible, which ones were the most important?
You see, the scribes had identified 613 separate commandments in God’s Law.
There had been a debate about which ones were the most important, which highlights the fact that we have always been about just getting by--“What’s the least amount of effort I can put in to pass?”
Jesus’ response to him is simple, life-changing, and incredibly difficult.
Let’s look at the question in Mark 12:28...
Jesus’ response is what gives us our core commandments: love God with everything you are, and love others like you love yourself.
Simple, isn’t it? If you just love God and love others, you’ll be good to go.
It may be simple, but it is far from easy.
Let’s look at these two commands, and from them, draw a clearer picture of what we mean when we say “Our goal is love.”
1) Love God with everything you are.
1) Love God with everything you are.
Jesus starts with the most important relationship we all have: our relationship to God.
Here, he is quoting from Deuteronomy 6, a passage that devout Jews would quote twice a day.
They would have been familiar with these words, but they still weren’t living them out.
Jesus starts with the reminder that God is one god. We do not worship multiple gods, each responsible for different aspects of life. Instead, we worship the one true God.
Why would he bring that up here? Here’s how one commentator explained it:
The New American Commentary: Mark (5) About the Greatest Commandment (12:28–34)
the obligation to love God is based on his oneness. Because he is one, love for him must be undivided.
God is undivided, so our love must be undivided.
Isn’t that the point of the command Jesus gives?
He says that we are to love God with everything we are and everything we have.
By the way, Jesus isn’t giving us a clear division of the nature of man here as he says we love him with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. Instead, he is just reminding us that we are called to love God with every single part of who we are.
Why? Why should I love God?
We could give thousands of reasons, including the fact that you are alive and breathing right now.
However, one of the reasons that is most powerful and helpful for our study this morning is found over in 1 John:
God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his one and only Son into the world so that we might live through him.
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 is the central picture of God’s love for us, and we go back to it every week because it is so central to everything.
You and I were made by God to live in a relationship with him, yet we chose to do our own thing and turn our back on him.
That separated us from God and brought death into our world. We died spiritually and had no hope, so God showed us love by sending Jesus to die in our place. After he had been dead for three days, he rose from the grave and now offers us life.
The God of the universe, who calls the stars by name, who shaped you and formed you before you were born, knew your heart was turned away from him, so he gave his only Son to win you back.
When I understand the depths of what God has done, every aspect of my being should overflow with love back to him in response.
This clears up any confusion for us about what “love” means, doesn’t it?
So often, we think of love as a soft, tender feeling we have towards someone else.
Although there is tenderness in love, it isn’t just about feeling!
It wasn’t that God felt love for us, so we feel love for him; it is that he felt loved and then acted lovingly towards us, so we act loving in response.
That’s why I love the way the CSB translates John 3:16, a verse we will look at more in depth in the weeks to come.
For God loved the world in this way: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.
The love God showed us was passionate, sacrificial, hard, painful, unending love that called him to die on our behalf.
Is that how you would describe your love for God? Does your love for God drive you to sacrifice everything you are for him? Does your love for God reflect that same love he showed us?
I am afraid that we sometimes focus so much on God’s love for us that we forget our side of the equation.
Yes, God is infinitely merciful and gracious and loving, and he really did die in our place, but we can easily be tempted to take advantage of that.
Yes, God extends grace and helps us grow and live and be who we are, but that doesn’t make Jesus your personal slave.
It’s the other way around. The love God has shown you should give you such a deep sense of indebtedness that you are overjoyed to sacrifice everything you are and hope to be for him.
You exist to honor and glorify the God who made you; he doesn’t exist for you.
What does this look like practically?
Let’s think about it using the terms Jesus used here.
Although they aren’t clearly defined or divided, they can help us think about what it would look like for us to love God this way.
First, we love him with our heart, which speaks to the core of who we are. Loving him with our heart can leads us to desire him more than anything else and develop a greater dependence on him.
We are called to love him with our soul, which speaks to our spiritual strength. Loving him with our soul leads us to stay closely connected to him in prayer, recognizing that he can enable us to live the life he wants as he guides and equips us.
We are called to love him with our minds, which speaks to our thought processes. Loving him with our minds leads us to study his word and get to know him better. As we do, he transforms the way we think to allow us to make decisions and evaluate life from his perspective, giving us wisdom we could never have on our own.
Jesus also says we are to love him with our strength, which speaks to our abilities. Loving him with all our strength means we give up control of every talent, gift, ability, and resource we have to give him glory.
See? Simple, isn’t it? Just take everything you have, everything you are, and give it back to God out of a heart that recognizes the incredible work he has done on your behalf.
That’s the first and greatest commandment.
As I say that this morning, I recognize that there are a lot of us in this room who have heard these truths over and over again.
In fact, if I asked you if you loved God, you would give me an absolute, unquestioned yes.
Can I challenge you to allow God to search your heart to see how you are actually doing?
You and I wouldn’t be the first people to think we are doing well in this area, only to realize we are far from it.
In fact, I want you to keep your finger in Mark 12, but turn over to the last book in the Bible, to Revelation 2.
This is the first letter that Jesus is writing to seven different churches. Most had some good things going, and most had some bad things they needed to correct.
This first one deals with where many of us may be.
Read Revelation 2:1-7 with me here.
We don’t have time to go into great detail, but this is the church at Ephesus—the same one that Paul founded and wrote the letter of Ephesians to. Tradition tells us that Timothy was an elder there at one point, and the apostle John, who wrote Revelation, may have been an elder there as well.
They did several things well: They worked hard and had for a long time, even when it became difficult to follow Jesus in Ephesus. They didn’t tolerate people who continued in sin without repentance, and they especially didn’t tolerate false teaching.
What did Jesus say he had against them? Look at verse 4 again.
They were busy, they were doing the right things, but their heart for God had grown cold.
Perhaps their zeal to defend the truth meant more to them than the God who said he is truth itself.
Their right actions may have led to self-righteous hearts.
As one commentator added:
Christ wants believers’ hearts as well as their hands and heads.
Whatever it was that went wrong, Jesus called them to do three things in verse 5: remember what they did at first, repent, and redo what they did at first.
What is that? Well, when you first came to Christ, you had a passionate love for him that led you to pray, read your Bible, study to get to know him, obey him, and worship him. (see Bible Exposition Commentary on Rev 2:5)
Before we move on to the second core command, let’s take a minute to evaluate: How are you doing with your love for God?
Do you still have a passionate devotion to him with everything you have, or have you pushed God into a corner and forsaken your first love?
Is there any joy in you when you sit down to read God’s Word? Have you been convicted of sin recently and felt the pain of hurting the God who loves you so deeply?
What do you need to give up in order to cultivate a deeper love for Christ?
This core commandment is the bedrock that all the others are based on, so how are you doing?
As you grow in your love for God, though, that will spill out into the second most important command:
2) Love everyone like you love yourself.
2) Love everyone like you love yourself.
Jesus went a step beyond what the scribe asked and told him the follow-up.
This command is a natural extension of our love for God, isn’t it?
If God loves every person on the planet, and we love him, doesn’t it make sense that we are to love every other person?
But wait, Jesus just said we have to love our neighbor, right? So doesn’t that just mean the people close to us?
Wrong. We don’t have time to look at it fully, but in Luke 10, Jesus tells a story that clearly indicates that every human being on the face of the planet is your neighbor.
That means your neighbor is your family, your friends, your brothers and sisters at church, the people who live next door, the people who work at Wal-mart, the people you would rather not associate with, and the people in the most difficult places in the world.
That means you are called to love people of every race, struggling with every sin, in every part of the world.
Remember, that love doesn’t mean we dismiss sin and ignore it because we don’t want to offend someone.
Our love is to be like Jesus’, who confronted and challenged people who were wrong and in sin.
That’s the most loving thing we can do!
A love like Jesus’ is the love that actively seeks the good of another person.
That requires time, energy, money, and more.
So, what is the limit Jesus gives on loving others?
Well, you are called to love others like you love yourself.
I have a tendency to analyze things to death, so this has been a hard one for me.
How do you find that balance between taking care of your needs while still loving others like you love yourself?
Here’s how one author puts it:
“...take the energy you have for meeting your own needs and use that as a measure of the energy you use in seeking the good of others. Desire and seek the good of others with the same passion, creativity, and perseverance as you seek your own.” (Matt Perman, What’s Best Next)
Let’s put it this way: how many of you have had a health issue that you couldn’t get a diagnosis for? You went to doctor after doctor, researched, made all kinds of calls, and kept going until you figured out what was wrong.
Ever had something happen to your finances? You called the bank, you met with whoever you had to, and you kept pushing until they fixed the issue, didn’t you?
What God is calling you to do is apply that same passion, creativity, and energy to helping someone else.
That’s loving others like you love yourself.
That’s what the Bible teaches us to do, isn’t it?
Do nothing out of selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility consider others as more important than yourselves.
Everyone should look not to his own interests, but rather to the interests of others.
Doesn’t this fly in the face of our current cultural thinking?
“Make sure you take care of yourself first. Nobody else is going to look out for you.”
Did Jesus do that? No! His love for us took him to the cross, so why would we think he wouldn’t call us to put others ahead of ourselves?
Here’s the interesting thing: There is somebody looking out for you—the God of the universe who raised Jesus from the dead and lives inside you if you are a Christian.
We are called, then to live lives of radical generosity towards everyone we can.
Around here, we have taken this command and broken it into four different parts.
We say that we are called first to love our families. That means we act in loving ways towards our wives, kids, parents, grandparents, cousins, and beyond.
We next focus on our church family. If we aren’t loving our church family, the group of people who are saved by the same loving God we have been saved and who have been called to the same purpose we have been called to, then how in the world can we love people who hate Jesus and his message?
With those areas in line, we then move out to loving our community and our world.
This area gets into the heart of the core commission we will look at next week.
To get you thinking, though, let’s talk about this for a bit.
Here’s a question: how many people do you have a genuine relationship with that don’t know Jesus? When is the last time you opened your home to someone you don’t know to be saved?
What are you doing to help the world around you? We live in a time where we can no longer claim ignorance of what is taking place in the greater world outside these walls.
People are hurting, they are sick, they are impoverished, and so often, we are too scared and too self-absorbed to get involved.
Think about the last person you saw who seemed to be struggling with a sin issue you hate. How did you respond to them? Ignore them, shun them, get creeped out?
Is that how Jesus reacted to any of us? Didn’t he eat with tax collectors and sinners? Didn’t he stop and have a lengthy conversation with a woman who hopped from marriage to marriage and was living with someone who wasn’t her husband?
By the way, didn’t Jesus also sit with the religious people who thought they had it all together? His harshest words were for them, and they had the least room for him.
These two commandments are at the core of who we are and what it means to follow Jesus. How are you doing at fulfilling these?
Remember: we can only love God because he loved us first. Have you ever entered into a relationship with God that is based off the way that he showed you that love?
Where have you left your first love, replacing “being with God” with “doing for God” and letting your love grow cold?\r