Valentine’s Day Thoughts

 

28 One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”29 “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ 31 The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”  Mark 12:28-31

There is a story you all probably know already about a teacher who wants to teach about time management to his class. He walked into the room and put a glass jar on the table. Then he took out about a dozen rocks and put them into the jar one at a time. When the jar was full to the top and no more rocks would fit inside, he asked, “Is this jar full?”

Everyone in the class said, “Yes.”

“Really?” he said. Then he reached under the table and pulled out a bucket of gravel. He dumped some gravel into the jar and shook it, causing pieces of gravel to work themselves down into the spaces between the big rocks. Then he smiled and asked the group once more, “Is the jar full?”

By this time the class was starting to catch on. “Probably not,” one of them said.

“Good!” he replied. Then he reached under the table and brought out a bucket of sand. He started dumping the sand in and it filled all the spaces between the rocks and the gravel. Once more he asked, “Is this jar full?”

“No!” the class shouted.

Again, he said, “Good!” Then he grabbed a pitcher of water and began to pour in the water until the jar was full to the brim. Then he looked back at the class and asked, “What is the point of this illustration?”

One eager student raised his hand and said, “The point is, no matter how full your schedule is, if you try really hard, you can always fit something more into it!”

“No,” the teacher shouted, “that’s not the point. The truth this illustration teaches us is this: if you don’t put the big rocks in first, you’ll never get them in at all.”

He made his point. The problem is—sometimes it is hard to know what the big rocks are supposed to be in our life. We need to know what the most important thing and we need to give them priority in our life.

What about Jesus? Have we ever wondered what is important to Jesus? Many of the teachers of the law were debating what was the most important law for Jesus. It is unbelievable that they identified 613 specific commandments in the Old Testament. We can narrow it down to the 10 Commandments. Which one is the most important? Which one took top priority? They would debate endlessly.

They wanted Jesus to be involved in the debate, so they asked Him. Jesus’ answer to this question would show a great deal about his own heart and the heart of God, the Father. Jesus set down where to start, what matters most to God, what big rocks should be.

When they asked Jesus, “Which of the commands is most important?” He answered that the most important commandment is the command to love.

Love the Lord your God (29)

29 “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’

Jesus’ answer is a quote from the Old Testament. This is the Shema from Deuteronomy 6: 4-9:

4 Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 5 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. 6 These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. 7 Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 8 Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 9 Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.

Each word from this sentence is significant. Throughout the Bible, the word for heart (kardia) includes the physical, emotional, and spiritual life of a person. The heart is the source of our feelings and emotions. Feelings like joy, sorrow, depression, happiness all come from the heart. To love God with all your heart means to love God deeply and personally—like the love between husband and wife and parents to their children.

Love the Lord your God with all your soul. The word soul (nephesh) refers to the entire life of a person—sleeping, eating, working, and walking. Everything about us. Our soul is both who we are and what we are. If someone will ask you who you are, you might tell him your name. But your name does not describe who you are. If you want to be more specific you might say what is your work, where do you live, you are married, and you have a family with three children. Most importantly, you will say that you are a follower of Jesus. Loving God with all your soul means that God defines who you are and what you are.

Jesus then adds the word that is not originally in the Old Testament. He says to love God with “all your mind.” This is all about our thinking and learning. Loving God with all your mind implies centering our education on him—learning and growing in our ability to know Jesus deeper. We need to study about God, we need to learn more about Jesus until his love, power, and grace overcome us.

And then Jesus says to love God with “all your strength.” The strength here has nothing to do with the amount of weight we can lift. This is about how and where we put our energy—our work, our jobs, and our daily activities. Paul explains what it means to love God with all your strength when he says, “In all the work you are doing, work the best you can. Work as if you were doing it for the Lord, not for people (Col. 3:23).

When we put all these truths altogether, this passage has a big impact in our lives. Jesus is telling us to love God with our whole self—every cell, every fiber of our being. It is a hard command. It’s hard enough to love a spouse or children who we can see and touch. How are we supposed to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength? We can do this through the help of the Holy Spirit.

How can we love someone who we do not know personally? We can love God with all our whole being we know Him very well. As we know Jesus more and more, we learn to love him more, and He opens our hearts to greater love. God wants us to know him, not to know doctrine or religion or system or creeds.

This is a challenge for us. Where does our knowledge of God come from? From his Word and from His people God uses to teach us about God and about Jesus. We need to study God’s word deeply and listen to the good teachers of the Word of God. Furthermore, we need to apply everything we learn about Jesus in our lives.

Hopefully, it’s becoming obvious why Jesus said that this is the greatest command. But Jesus not only gave the greatest command, but he also gave the second greatest as well.

Love Your Neighbor (31)

31 The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”

When Jesus said, “The second command is this: ‘Love your neighbor as you love yourself,’” he was still quoting from the Torah—Leviticus 19:18 to be specific. And this was also an often-misunderstood passage.

Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.

During Jesus’ lifetime, the teachers of the Law were busy arguing what is the meaning of the word neighbor. For most of them, a neighbor was a Jew who faithfully followed the Law. People who were not Jews were considered enemies.

Jesus wanted to broaden their definition of neighbor, so he told them the story of “The Good Samaritan” to teach them that a neighbor is a person we meet who needs help. The question is not “Who is my neighbor?” but “Am I a good neighbor?” Loving our neighbor means loving and helping the people around us.

Loving our neighbor is the second greatest commandment, second only to loving God because loving people is just an extension of loving God. Jesus couldn’t have given us the greatest command without giving us the greatest command, because the two are always together. Loving people is evidence that we love God.

How do we show our love to God? We can use our words to express our love to God through our worship, prayer, or singing. We can even spend quality time with God through devotionals or Bible reading. We can show love to God by loving the body of Christ—the church. Furthermore, we can show love to God by serving the church and serving the people.

How do we give gift to God? We give gifts to God by giving to the church and by giving to other people. When we serve, touch, and give gifts to other people, we are doing it for God. Jesus says, “I tell you the truth, anything you did for even the least of my people here, you also did for me (Matt. 25:40).

Loving God means loving people. It means going out of our way, giving our time and using our resources to help the people in need around us. When we do this, we are fulfilling the greatest commandment. Ultimately, we fulfill it when we share with them the love of God. When we share our loving relationship with God to our neighbors, we obey the greatest commandment.

How do people around us know that we are Christian? We may answer that people know because we go to church. Or because we believe in Jesus, that he died for our sins and that we have eternal life. We can answer because we read and believe the Bible. We may answer because Jesus change my life and I’m now a new creation. These are all correct answers, this is so true. But Jesus says that “all people will know that you are my followers if you love one another” (John 13:35).

Our greatest testimony as Christians is our obedience to the greatest commandment: To love God with all our heart with all our soul with all our mind with all our strength and to love our neighbor as ourselves.

Conclusion

Perhaps the question is we need to ask is how we love. The Bible is very clear about this in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8:

4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. 8 Love never fails. --1 Corinthians 13:4-8

While reading this, we realized that no one among us here can do this. When it comes down to the most important commands God has given, not one person has ever kept them fully in all of history. No one except Jesus. He is the only one of us who ever lived the commands to love God and love people. We can only love like Jesus if He is the King and Lord of our life.

In fact, it sounds so true when we replaced this passage with the name of Jesus. Jesus is patient and kind. Jesus is never envy, not proud. He never dishonors others, not self-seeking, not easily angered. He keeps no record of wrongs. He does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. He always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Jesus never fails.

Adopted from Pastor Scot Bayles’ message.