It’s about Love and Relationships


Announcements:

“Last Sunday at some point during services, keys were taken from Janet’s coat pocket. If you did this, the right thing to do is to find Janet, return them, and apologize. If you make things right with her, the church need not learn of it. If you’re a young person, I would recommend first going to your parents and letting them know what happened and then going to Janet. It’s important to make things right because God does know even if we don’t at this time, and He has said ‘your sins will find you out.’ It may feel embarrassing to go to a person and admit your failing, but its an opportunity to heal and grow and move the right way.”

  • Doughnut Changes Bible Study Plan Worship Opportunity
  • Voting for Elevator in January

Introduction:

  • *Christmas Happenings*
  • *New Year Happenings*
  • Emphasis to Start New Year – Relationship with God and Relationships with People

Text: Matthew 22:34-40; Galatians 5:14; James 2:8
Theme: It’s about Love and Relationships

Read Matthew 22:34-40

Why the Pharisees decided to test Jesus on this particular point is not mentioned, nor what wrong answer they imagined that He might give. As always, He answered the question very well. No one even attempted to contradict Him on the point.

And then, after answering, He returned with a question of His own that they could not answer.

The result of this back and forth Q&A, which we pick up in the middle of, was that His opponents became too embarrassed to ask Him any more questions from that day forward.

So, what the exact test was, what they hoped to accomplish, we don’t know. And we don’t really need to. All we need to know is that Jesus is perfectly correct in what He has said, and what He has said is that the Mosaic Law and the Prophets depend upon these two points:

Point one is that: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”

Point two is: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets. And Jesus spoke so well on this and other topics that His opponents gave up challenging Him any further in dialogue.

The Greek word that “depend” translates actually means “to hang.” Picture a branching diagram. At the top you have these two commandments. Branching down from these two commandments, you have the various points found in the Law and the Prophets. That’s what’s being communicated. They hang from or depend upon these two commandments.

A similar thought, which is another easy way to visualize it, is like a tree. The trunk of the tree is these two commandments. The branches and leaves and fruit coming out from the trunk are the others.

What Jesus is saying is that the commandments of God find their root in the two points that you should love God and you should love people. They are the logic and purpose and heart of God’s commands and expectations towards us.

In the teens Sunday school class that I teach and during prayer team meetings, we are going through the book of Proverbs. Proverbs is a very pithy book – pithy being “concise and forcefully expressive.” The majority of Proverbs just gives a very simple yet powerful statement and most of those statements don’t have much explanation accompanying them.

Here are a few:

  • “A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” – 15:1
  • “A gentle tongue is a tree of life, but perverseness in it breaks the spirit.” – 15:4
  • “The way of a sluggard is like a hedge of thorns, but the path of the upright is a level highway.” – 15:19
  • “Commit your work to the Lord, and your plans will be established.” – 16:3
  • “A dishonest man spreads strife, and a whisperer separates close friends.” – 16:28
  • “Whoever mocks the poor insults his Maker; he who is glad at calamity will not go unpunished.” – 17:5

Sometimes Proverbs explains the reasons for the wisdom that it shares. Sometimes it doesn’t. It doesn’t say why mocking the poor is an insult to their maker, or why punishment will come to those who are glad for calamity.

It doesn’t say why you are supposed to commit your work to the Lord, or why it is bad to spread strife or be dishonest. Why should I want to turn away wrath or avoid stirring up anger?

Now, I can think up plenty of good auxiliary reasons for why you might want to follow this wisdom.
You should commit your work to the Lord because the Lord knows everything and so His plans are going to be better than yours, hands down every time. You should not be a sluggard because that will lead to your poverty. You don’t want to speak words that cause wrath because that will be stressful for you and potentially dangerous if you stir up the wrath of someone with murder in their heart.

But the true reasons for these words of wisdom, the logic and purpose and heart of these instructions hang from the two greatest commandments: You shall love God and you shall love people.

You are supposed to commit your work to the Lord because you are supposed to love the Lord with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.

You are not supposed to mock the poor because you are supposed to love your neighbor and love your God who made your neighbor. You aren’t supposed to be happy when calamity comes against people, because you are supposed to love people.

Being a sluggard is bad because it is unloving to God and to your neighbor as you neglect your responsibilities toward them.

You give soft answers because God wants you to live in peace and love with your neighbor, not at war.

This is also why we don’t snatch keys out of people’s coat pockets. An ancillary reason is the potential for jail time if you don’t make it right, which is what happened to three other church thieves who thought they would not be caught, but the real reason is that God has told us to love our neighbors.

Love for God, love for neighbor: Those are the big reasons why. Those are always the big reasons why, says Jesus. Now, I’ve said before that Christians aren’t under the Mosaic Law, but this isn’t the Mosaic Law. The Mosaic Law is built upon this – this is something outside of the Law. The Law and Prophets hang on this.

Although Christians aren’t under the Mosaic Law, we are expected to still be living this way. Because of the work of Jesus on our behalf, the priesthood has changed, the sacrifices have changed, the rituals have changed: but the heart of God has not changed. And God’s core expectation of His people is this still today:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
This is referenced multiple times in the New Testament. First, Jesus our Lord and Savior says it and no one could successfully contradict Him on that, so that’s enough by itself. But also, the New Testament commands can all be traced to one or the other, usually both of these commandments.

Both Galatians 5:14 and James 2:8 specifically quote the second one as summing up God’s expectations upon Christians and their behavior towards others. 1 John gives love for God as one of the key evidences that genuine salvation has taken place.

So here’s something I find very nice about the first and second commandment: they are easy to remember and not difficult to understand. Life can be difficult. Sometimes it can be hard to know what is the right thing to do or the right thing to say.

This helps to simplify things beautifully – If you are faced with some tough decision, just ask yourself: “Which choice best loves God and loves people?”

You might have never read proverbs. You might be relatively new in the faith and not know much at all yet about what’s right and wrong. You might know the Bible really well but you still know there’s plenty of hard choices out there. But this simplifies things wonderfully:

“Which choice best loves God and loves people?” If you choose to do what shows love to God and shows love to people, chances are very good that you will be on the right track for what God wants you to do in life.

Ever wonder how people living in countries where they don’t have ready access to the Bible can still manage to live exceptionally godly lives? The Holy Spirit working in people’s lives with these two commandments can do miracles.

Link:
Well, as these commandments are so central to God’s expectations for believers, they are going to be our focus going into the New Year. We’re going to be focusing on a loving relationship with God and loving relationships with people. We’re going to start our focus on the first one – loving God. One of the richest and most fruitful ways to grow in this is through personal Bible study.
Personal Bible study is in many ways superior to preaching for your growth. Preaching is God’s word spoken to the congregation as a whole. It is food for us all. It guides us collectively and unites us in fellowship around God’s truth. It helps us all to jointly grow together in similar ways and share a lot in common. It gives doctrinal grounding and correction to the body as a whole. It’s a wonderful and necessary thing.

Some messages might hit you right on. But some messages might be more for others in the congregation. And also, most of us just get one sermon per week. That might be sufficient for us congregationally, maybe, but it’s definitely not a lot for what’s meant to be a personal relationship with God. It’s not much of a relationship if you only tend to it on Sunday morning.

But personal Bible study. You can take your time, you can go verse by verse, and you can ask questions. You can pray devotionally as you go along. You can stop after a commandment and pray to God and say “search my heart, O God, and know my heart, and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”

And I will tell you something else about preaching too – nobody grows more from my sermons than I do. You hear it maybe 30 minutes on a Sunday. I hear it almost every day through the week, hours a day it goes through my mind and I reflect. And I have to dig in and understand as what I present must be truthful. Like in this sermon, I am confronted for days and hours by the commandments “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” That’s good for my soul.

All that to say, I grow most from my preaching because I am the one doing the digging and grappling to prepare it. You can have that too. My unique privilege is that I can have more hours per day to focus upon it than you. Or at least some of you, some others of you might have more time than I do even! But everybody has at least some time for personal Bible study and they can experience the same blessing through it.

That’s what it is like when you do your own personal Bible study. You will be the one digging and understanding and reflecting daily and hourly on truths. You will be the one daily facing the commandment “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” This will do wonders for your personal relationship with God and help you to grow in your love for Him. It will be very good for your soul.