Sermon for CATM – A New Year, A New Day – January 3, 2010
I’ve heard recently some interesting New Year’s resolutions: "I have resolved not to do drugs anymore, because I get the same effect just standing up really fast."
“I will stop sending e-mail, ICQ, Instant Messages and be on the phone at the same time with the same person”.
"I have resolved to live in my own little world, because at least they know me here." Perhaps we can aspire to something a little better.
It’s a new year. It’s a new day. The year of our Lord 2010. God’s mercies are new today. And this is, for us, an opportunity to begin afresh, to consider where we are in life and to face the challenges of life and of faith with a renewed vigour and passion.
But if we’re serious about being renewed, where do we begin? Is there somewhere where God wants us to start? And if there is, how in the world do we find it?
There’s an old story about a professor who was assigned to teach an introductory class about time management for 1st year university students.
Without saying a word, he walked into the classroom and set a one-gallon, wide mouthed glass jar on the table in front of him.
Then he produced about a dozen tennis-ball-sized rocks and carefully placed them, one at a time, inside the jar. When the jar was filled 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 filled 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.”
Have you ever picked up your Bible because you knew you ought to read it but then just put back down in frustration because you didn’t know where to start?
Well, if you’ve ever wondered what was most important to God, you’re not alone. What mattered most to God was a topic commonly debated among Rabbis in Jesus’ day.
One of the teachers of the law came and heard Jesus arguing with the Sadducees.
Seeing that Jesus gave good answers to their questions, he asked Jesus, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?" Mark 12:29 "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."
God’s Laws are very similar to Russian nesting dolls. Have you ever seen those? They’re these wooden dolls that open up and there’s another doll inside.
You open that one up and there’s another one. Each doll contains another until you get down to the smallest one.
Well, God’s Laws are like that. You start with the entire Bible, open it up, and inside you find the 613 Torah laws.
When you dig into those, you can narrow it down to the 10 Commandments—God’s basic laws of right and wrong. And nestled snuggly inside the 10 Commandments are two very simple principles: Love God. Love people.
That’s what matters most to God! These are the Greatest Commands. These are the big rocks!
As simple are those two commands may be, they are THE place to start when we’re thinking about a new day, a new year and a renewed commitment to living for God.
Sometimes we get the idea that a fresh commitment to God means first that I determine to get my behaviours in line. That I confront my bad habits; that I try to remove from my life everything that’s getting in the way of my walk with God.
We get stuck on “I…I…I”. We maybe feel like we’re not very disciplined, we don’t read our Bibles enough, we don’t give enough to charity, we don’t do this or don’t do that.
The problem with this way of thinking is that the solution I’m looking for is bound up in me, in my attitude adjustment or behaviour adjustment.
That’s perhaps where self-help books get their meat from, but for the Christian, the solution is both easier and harder than this.
Jesus says here that of all the commandments of God, of all the things that God has said for you and I to do in order to please Him, the most important things we can do is to love Him.
What God wants from you first and foremost is your love. Way before good deeds, before your improved self-control, before getting your life together, God wants your love.
In the first part of his answer, Jesus quotes the Hebrew Shema, or Deuteronomy 6:4-5, “Listen, people of Israel! The Lord our God is the only Lord. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength.”
Throughout the Bible, the word for heart (kardia) encompasses the physical, emotional, and spiritual life of human beings.
The heart is the source of our feelings and emotions. Feelings like joy, sorrow, depression, despair, happiness, and cheerfulness are all said to originate in the heart.
To love God with all your heart then, means to love him deeply and personally—like the love shared between a father and son or a husband and wife.
I have a confession to make. I love my wife. I’ve been deeply in love with Barb for over 23 years. My heart is fully given over to her. No other woman comes close, in my view, to her beauty, to her loveliness, to her beauty of character.
There is no one I could rather spend time with. No one who so captivates me and makes me want to be a better man and husband.
During the day when I’m busy at work I often think of her. I love to plan months in advance for us to do special things. I love to surprise her. I love to talk with her, to sit wordlessly with her. I am utterly and completely in love with my wife.
That is heart-love. That’s what God wants from us because God wants nothing less for us than what is best for us.
There’s a certain abandon to love that is from the heart, the love that Jesus speaks of in this verse. It sometimes throws caution to the wind, responds intuitively more than rationally.
After I’d known Barb only about a month, I knew I wanted to marry her. I knew I wanted to spend my life with her.
It’s NOT an intellectual thing. I didn’t make a list of Barb’s good qualities over her bad qualities. I didn’t do a statistical analysis of women who had her genetic make up and her personal history. I was in love. I’m still in love.
Heart-love allows us to abandon ourselves to God too. The key here is that your can only heart-love a person. God is a person. He is a person who can be loved.
But how I can I love some I can’t see? Whole books have been written addressing that question with pointless skepticism. It is nevertheless a good question.
People who are in love with God see Him and feel Him everywhere. They feel His presence as they breathe their first waking breath of the day. They see Him in the eyes of an infant.
They see Him in the beauty of Creation.
They understand that, as the Apostle Paul says in Romans chapter 1, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made.
Are you someone that says: “I’ll believe it when I see it”, or “I’ll believe in God when I see God”? If you are, my challenge to you is very simple: open up your eyes, man. People who are in love with God see Him in the poor and needy, the beggar on the street, we see Him in the person locked behind bars.
Jesus said: (Matthew 25: 35) For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’
That’s one way we see and experience God. Many of us experience God tangibly in the Eucharist or in our devotions. We feel His presence, His personality, His character, in the songs of worship we sing. We feel His acceptance as we come to Him in humble confession
We see His actions and attitudes and behaviours when we read the words of Scripture. We see Him as we fix our eyes upon Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith.
Jesus calls us to a heart-love for God, a profoundly emotional connection to a person. A person Who, when our eyes are truly open, we can see without a lot of effort.
“But that’s so subjective!”, I hear someone complaining. You know what? What we’re talking about here about is love. Love IS deeply subjective, deeply personal. And loving God IS deeply personal. And the Shema is a call to an intimate love-relationship with God.
Jesus also calls us to a soul-love of God.
The word soul (nephesh) refers to the entire life of a person—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life. Perhaps, the best way to understand it is that your soul is both who and what you are.
If someone where to ask you who you are, you might give them your name. But that’s not very descriptive. If I wanted to be more specific, I might say, “I’m a father, a husband, a pastor, a teacher, a musician.
“Most importantly, I’m a follower of Jesus.” Loving God with all your soul means allowing God to define who and what you are.
The word soul also means something that differs from the body and is not dissolved by death. It is our whole eternal selves.
The love we give God with our soul is a love that happens profoundly in the right now, the immediate present.
It’s a love that happens in the future of your life, and it’s one that will be gloriously intact and vibrant a million years from now. It is where what is eternal in us touches the eternal God.
Next, Jesus adds a word that wasn’t originally in the Shema. He says to love God with “all your mind.” The mind (an English word translating several Greek or Hebrew terms) is the center for intellectual activity.
This is where we do all our thinking and learning. Loving God with all your mind implies centering your education on him—learning and growing in our capacity to fathom his vastness and mystery. Studying him until overwhelmed by his power, his love, his grace, his beauty.
A love relationship with God satisfies the heart, the most emotional part of us. A love relationship with God satisfies the soul, the day to day and the eternal part of us.
And loving God satisfies the mind, the rational part of us. On one level it’s true to say that a way of loving God with our minds is to honour Him with the way we use our minds.
Talking about this, Philippians 4:8 says: “…Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable--if anything is excellent or praiseworthy--think about such things”.
We’re called to love God with our minds, with all our understanding.
There are so many people out there in the world who were raised in the church and simply accepted the teachings of the church unquestioningly.
Once they moved out of the cocoon of the church and were faced with so much that they had no idea was out there, including the relentless hostility the Christian faith faces in the contemporary public square, they abandoned their faith.
They feel overwhelmed by all this information and criticism out there that they accept uncritically and so they throw the baby out with the backwater. And their potential, frankly, for living life in profound and intimate relationship God is shot.
So loving God with our minds means working out our questions and our doubts in open and honest dialogue with God and with the body of Christ.
I hope you are never hesitant to ask questions, to pursue things so that you know what you know and why you know it.
I encourage you to take a course or two or more that we offer here at CATM so you can directly work through your questions for God in a thoughtful community of faith.
Learn about the life of faith. Know what you believe and why you believe it. That is what it means to love God with your mind.
And then, Jesus says to love God with “all your strength.” Strength here has nothing to do with the amount of weight you can bench press.
It signifies your energy output—your work, your job, whatever it is that you put effort into.
Paul eloquently explained what it means to love God with all your strength when he said, “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 NCV).
When we put all of these pieces together, the passage explodes with significance. Essentially, Jesus is saying to love God with all of yourself—every fiber of your being.
John Piper, author of Desiring God, sums it up this way, “Take all of your longing and focus it on God until he satisfies it completely.” As we draw nearer to God, he comes nearer to us. As we learn to love him more, he opens our hearts to greater love.
Max Lucado explains, “God rewards those who seek him. Not those who seek doctrine or religion or systems or creeds. Many settle for these lesser passions, but the reward goes to those who settle for nothing less than Jesus himself.
And what is the reward? What awaits those who seek Jesus? Nothing short of the heart of Jesus.”
And that’s where renewal begins. It begins with Jesus. It begins with loving Jesus. It works its way out in our lives as we, together as the body of Christ, enact the second part of Jesus answer: to love our neighbour as ourself…to love all people, including our enemies.
He is emphatic that love of God is to be total. Love of God is to encompass every aspect, every power, absolutely everything there is of us. ‘All’ leaves nothing out. It is not to be part of your heart, or part of your soul, mind and strength – No! it is to be ‘all.’
He then follows this with the practical outworking of loving God – love for your neighbour.
It is interesting that in answer to the question of who is my neighbour Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan, but that’s another sermon for another day.
You see for Christ Jesus the two commandments are complimentary. Love of God must be seen and shown in love of your neighbour. Love for your neighbour is perfected in love for God.
So…where are you at today? Do you want to refresh your relationship with God? Do you want to, perhaps, for the first time, give your life to God; to make your commitment to Jesus? To enter into this most profound love relationship you will ever experience?
In a moment we’re going to celebrate the Eucharist. If you would like to pray with someone before you receive communion, Pastor Ronda and I will be over to the side as others serve.
If you want us to pray for you as you renew your commitment to Christ, or if you want to receive Christ today to mark a truly new beginning to your life, we are happy to pray for you.
Indeed, let us pray. Holy God, thank you for Your loving care of each of us. Thank you that You know each person here and You make Yourself known to us in Jesus, Your Son. God we come to You thirsty, we come to You in humility.
We come to You so thankful for the gift of eternal life that comes to us through the holy sacrifice of Jesus Christ for us.
Today, this first Sunday of 2010, we do embrace afresh your love, and we do renew ourselves, we renew our commitment to love you and to serve you with our whole being. Holy Spirit, fill us anew with Your presence.
Empower us to live for You and to follow You with greater passion, greater abandon and greater love. Fill each one here today, we pray, to overflowing, and may our lives, every part, be for You.
For Your honour and glory we pray, in Jesus’ matchless name. Amen.
[Thanks to a few different pastors on Sermoncentral whose thoughts contributed to this sermon. I did not track which thoughts were from which writer (my bad) as I was preparing the message.]
