Christian Education Is Basic. Listen, And Speak, About Jesus

09.25.22 Deuteronomy 6:4–9

4 Hear, O Israel! The LORD is 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 might. 6 These words that I am commanding you today are to be on your heart. 7 Teach them diligently to your children, and speak about them when you sit in your house and when you walk on the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 8 Tie them as a sign on your wrists, and they will serve as symbols on your forehead. 9 Write them on the doorposts of your houses and on your gates.

Christian Education Is Basic. Listen, and Speak, about Jesus

When Jesus was asked, “What is the most important commandment?” in Mark 12, He answered with Deuteronomy 6:4-5. This is it. Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God. The LORD is one! Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. It might seem strange to us. How can you command someone to love someone else? Love doesn’t work that way, does it? You find yourself attracted to someone by the way they look or act, and you find yourself wanting to smile at them and be with them. It comes naturally. It can’t just be commanded.

But sometimes love isn’t always that natural. Think of God’s love for us. It’s natural for Him to love, because He IS love. Yet His word says that because of our sin we are by nature “objects of wrath.” Our sinful nature makes God angry with us. He shouldn’t love US. Yet God’s love overcomes His wrath in a dedicated type of way. He works to love us. It’s an “I’m going to die for you anyway” type of love. This is true with our kind of love too, as Christians. Your spouse comes home from work and he’s grumpy and tired. He doesn’t hardly utter a word and he’s short with you. You realize he’s had a bad day. You dig within to kindly ask, “Is there anything I can get for you?” You don’t do it because he deserves it. You do it because you love him.

Yes, love usually takes work in a sinful world. So the greatest commandment tells us to love the Lord your God with all your STRENGTH. It shouldn’t take work to love God since He is so generous and kind and merciful. It should come naturally, but we are naturally lazy and selfish people. So if we’re going to do it, we have to work at it against our sinful nature. But God wants there to be emotion in our love too. Love the Lord your God with all your HEART. He also wants it to be spiritual; love the Lord your God with all your SOUL. This is an all out thorough love from the inside out.

How can you love someone you can’t even SEE? HEAR! “Shema!” the Hebrew says. It can also mean to “pay attention to, focus on.” Leah named her son Simeon when God LISTENED to her cry for a child and responded by giving her what she wanted. Listening and doing go hand in hand in the Shema. But here God calls on us to LISTEN to HIM, primarily because HE has something to GIVE us. This is what generates faith, when we listen to WHAT He has to give us. Faith comes from hearing the message. (Romans 10:17)

God has something to say about Himself, something very LOVABLE. We read vs. 4. Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God. The LORD is one! At first blush that might not seem like a big deal. What’s so lovable about that? Think about it in the context of being an Israelite. This is in contrast to the many gods that the Israelites had dealt with throughout their history. These were gods that demanded child sacrifice. They were perverted gods that could be “turned on” by temple prostitutes have sex on top of a hill, Baal and Ashteroth. There were gods with different strengths, gods of the valleys and the hills. There were petty gods. They had to be carved and carried around and protected. You had a multitude of gods, sometimes working against each other, and none of them were great. They did evil things and they commanded evil things. So people oftentimes had MANY gods, different gods for different occasions. God is different. God is ONE and ONLY.

This God, this ONE true God, made Israel into a nation through the calling of Abraham to the Promised Land and the miraculous birth of Isaac. He protected them as He brought them to Egypt in a famine, and then rescued them from slavery in Egypt through mighty signs and plagues. He dwelt over them in a pillar of cloud and fire. He personally spoke the Ten Commandments from the top of Mt. Sinai in the midst of fire and billows of smoke. As opposed to the many gods, this God was known as the LORD, the God of the covenant, who was faithful and true to the Israelites. Why was He faithful and true to them? So that He could COME through them, and save the WORLD through the MESSIAH that would come through the offspring of Eve, then Abraham. One God, with one purpose, to save the world through Him.