You may be thinking, boy this series is sure a lot about what we must know, and must do, when do we get to some teaching about God’s love and grace. Well, part of me wants to say, we have had so much of that we have become mushy Christians who do very little for the Kingdom. Another part says, well, legalism is no good either, people feel bad enough without piling a bunch more to dos on them.
But there is another part that keeps coming up that says: “Why do you think I gave you my grace and the gift of the Holy Spirit?” My grace is sufficient, but sufficient for what? To keep you going forward in your mission in spite of insults, hardships, persecutions, and difficulties. It’s not just a get to heaven gift. It is meant to give you God’s power in your weakness so you can do things you could never do without it. That’s the whole point of Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 12.
Last week I mentioned that one of things we must do as disciples is love. Love God, and other people. In fact according to Jesus, these are the two greatest commandments that all the others hang on. Well, I think most of us who know the bible at all realize this is true, but what is not so obvious is how we are to do this?
Now doesn’t it seem kind of unnatural to talk about how a person should love as if there’s a strategy? Shouldn’t it be a spontaneous emotional response to someone that comes from the heart? There’s no real how to, otherwise isn’t it kind of artificial?
Well I guess in an ideal world that would be true, and certainly our romance centered culture sees love that way for the most part. But as far as Biblical, God centered, Agape love is concerned, there is much more to do with behaviour than with emotion. Not that emotion can’t play a role, but the kind of love God is talking about is often counter-emotional. What’s that? It goes against how we feel, at least at the beginning.
Let’s just start by taking Jesus as an example, because this is really where we are going to plant ourselves today. Does our cultural version of love look like the love Jesus demonstrated when he went to the cross? Let me take you to the Garden of Gethsemane the night before his crucifixion where Jesus goes off to pray. We pick this story up in all three of the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke.
Not many people at this point have shown Jesus much love. They have used him, mocked him, tried to persecute and kill him. But at least 11 of his chosen 12 disciples have remained close to him. They have been the closest things he has had to friends, and of course in a short time even they are going to abandon him.
Now remember he is God and based on how we have treated Him since the Garden of Eden, he has very little reason really to love humanity. The only reason he loves us is because we are his creation. I guess the closest thing we can compare with is our own children. Most parents can continue to love their children even if they become disobedient, rebellious, and not very nice.
But often there comes a time when we may have to punish them or even disown them or let them go to their own ways to protect ourselves and others in the family. In our hearts we usually continue to love them though, simply because we created them, of course with God’s help.
Let’s pick up the story in verse 30 of Mt 26 after they have had supper (Read vv 30-46).
What I want you to notice there is that Jesus knows they will abandon Him. The only resemblance of friends he has are going to leave him at the time that he needs them most, and I will submit to you that that is very representative of human love. As long as the other person is meeting our needs and wants, we are willing to stay with them. When this is not happening the way we would like, often we detach from that person, and this is reflected in divorce rates both inside and outside of the church. But we do the same with friends too.
And Jesus who was also human and could experience emotion, is obviously quite discouraged as reflected in his prayer. He doesn’t really want to go through with this whole dying on the cross thing for these 11 people who in the final analysis are going to abandon him, never mind the multitudes of others that he is going to die for who downright hate him and are going to put him through a cruel and humiliating death.
Now let’s stop there. To the best of your ability put yourself in Jesus’ position. Would you have gone through with it? You know what humanity is going to do to you, you have the power to get out of it if you really want to. You are sweating blood as we read in Luke’s gospel, because you are so emotionally distraught, the people so close to you can’t even stay awake to support you through this emotional time.
But Jesus says, “My soul is very sorrowful. I am so sad right now that it feels like death. Would you remain here and watch with me?” Then he goes a few yards off to pray and when it says he fell on his face, it basically means he collapsed and he says three separate times, “Daddy can you make it so that I don’t have to do this? But if not, I’ll go through with it.” Here’s evidence that repetitive prayer about the same thing is acceptable.
What is he really saying here? “I don’t want to love these people like that, I don’t want to experience the sacrifice that you are asking of me. These people don’t really care about me. But Father, I love you, I trust you, and whatever you tell me to do, I will do.” Is that what you would have done? Or would you have said, “I don’t have to put up with this, these people don’t care about me, I’m getting a divorce, I’m out of here, you can save them some other way Father.”
Love God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength, and love others as yourself. It was Jesus love for God the Father that made him go through with this. Did he love people? I don’t believe in my studies that he ever said he loved anybody, however, his actions sure made it look like he did.
He said I have loved them, but he never to my knowledge said “I love you” to anybody specifically. And the people that wrote about him after his death certainly believed he loved people based on what they saw and experienced with him.
But the truth of it is, his loving actions toward people were, to put it in the simplest terms, I. Submissive Servanthood, obedience to His Father. God so loved the world that he sent his son. “Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible tells me so”. Yes it does, but Jesus never said he loved you. But he did love you through his obedience to God.
Here’s the point I’m trying to make, and then I will show with Scripture why I believe this. The human part of Jesus was no different than the human part of us. If he had acted on his feelings, and thoughts, and used his human perceptions of what was going on around him, there is no way he would have done what he did, just as we can’t fathom doing what he did for people who hate us.
Listen, it is humanly impossible to love like God does. You can’t do it. So why does Jesus give the command to love others as he loved us? How did he love us, by obeying what the Father told him to do. It is humanly impossible to love like God, but it is humanly possible as Jesus demonstrated, to obey God’s commands. Not easy, but possible, especially if the Holy Spirit lives in us as he lived in Jesus.
So let’s go make sense of this in a passage that I have preached on more than once. These words of Jesus are from John 14 and 15. I won’t read the entire passage, but I will pull the verses that I want to show us for our purposes today. This is not to back up my point of view, but rather where my point of view comes from.
Starting with John 14:11: “Believe me that I am in the Father and the father is in me, or else believe on account of my works themselves. Truly, truly I say to you, whoever believes in me (which is how we get saved) will also do the works that I do. And greater things will he do because I am going to the Father so I can send the Holy Spirit to you.” In other words so I can enable you to do what I did through the Spirit that I have.
Verse 15, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments”. Translate, if you don’t keep my commandments, you don’t love me. Now go back to the greatest commandment, Love the Lord your God with everything you’ve got. Now this is such a difficult concept for even his closest disciples that he says it two more times in verse 21: “Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me”. And in verse 23: “If anyone loves me they will keep my word.”
So we see here that Jesus is showing us how to love the Father in how he completely obeys everything the Father tells him. Then he says, “you must love God like I do, and because I am God, here is how you can do it, by obeying me who you have seen. I know it’s tricky to love someone you can’t see, but I am him, and you see me, and you see how I love, and how I am going to love in a couple days when I die for you on the cross. And this love is simply obedience to God”.
Just previous to this passage in chapter 13 of John, he gives what he calls the new commandment. Let’s listen closely how he starts it in verse 31. “Now the Son of Man is glorified, and God is glorified in Him”. Why? Because the Son has completely obeyed the Father even unto death. And here’s the new commandment I give you in verse 34, “Love one another as I have loved you, because this is how I will be glorified”, another way of putting, this is how people will know you are my disciples. Glorify me, the way I glorified the Father.
How does Jesus love us? Not by telling us he loves us, not by buying us flowers or giving us a car at graduation. Not by protecting us from natural consequences. But by telling us the hard but loving truth and sacrificing himself for us, not just for the sake of doing it, but because that is what God his Father told him to do.
So before I drag this out too long. How are we to love? By doing what Jesus tells us to do. In doing that we will be loving him first, and because of doing what he says, we will be loving others as he did. Do we get that? Later in his letters, John who heard Jesus face to face and wrote all this stuff down says, love not in words but in deeds.
OK, so let’s get practical here. We come to the understanding through Jesus own words that loving is equated with following Jesus commands. I don’t know how we can argue with this if we believe the Bible. So now the question becomes, what are the commands?
Obviously at their core, the 10 commandments are about loving God and loving others. Here they are on the screen. Notice the first four are about loving him and the last six are about loving others, and even to some degree about loving yourself, because doing the things he forbids also hurts you.
Frankly any moral person would agree with the last 6 commandments, the first four are a little more troublesome for those who don’t believe in the one true God. But is that it, the Ten Commandments? Sure Jesus didn’t break any of those, so we shouldn’t either. But when we get to the New Testament and especially Jesus own words, are their other commandments we must keep to show our love for Him. If this is beginning to sound like last week, bear with me.
Well, we already mentioned two commandments, loving God and loving others as Jesus loved us. And the other famous one is what we call the Great Commission which is stated in a couple different ways, but boils down to going into the world making disciples and teaching them to obey Jesus’ commands. It’s really the same as the great Commandment in action. And I think we can go back to last week’s message and say that prayer and Bible intake are also unavoidable commands. There may be a lot of other less explicit commands, like I said, but let’s not overwhelm ourselves today.
Really, the best way to determine Jesus’ commands is to look at what he did. He didn’t break any commandments, he prayed, he knew Scripture very well, and he went all over the place spreading the word about himself and teaching people to obey God.
That’s how he loved God the Father and loved people. I want to show you three specific things he did and commanded that are related to this love.
The first is II. Being Genuinely Generous. Now he healed some people, he fed some people, so he wasn’t against meeting needs of people who had real needs. But these were always avenues to teach and proclaim God’s truth and help people come to faith and be forgiven of their sins, because he had much more than stuff to give them. His words are the words of life, they are more valuable than anything else he could give them. We have these words. This generosity is essentially being other-centered versus self-centered, always having in our mind the salvation of a person’s soul, that affects everything we do and say when we are around others. It is a genuine desire for other’s well-being.
He fed them so he could teach them longer, and he healed them to demonstrate the power of faith in God, and who he was. If you look closely, yes he had compassion, but he also had the ability to heal everyone, to feed everyone, but he didn’t, because God the Father didn’t command him to, and the Bible says, yes you should do those things too but it is more important to tell them the truth, make disciples, and have them come to believe in me and obey me. Because the most loving thing you will ever do for someone is tell them about me and help them come to me for eternal life.
Why is that potentially more loving than healing someone’s sickness or feeding a hungry person, or fixing a marriage, or giving someone a job? Well, think about it, the poor single mother and her children who now have a house over their head; the African orphan who has shoes, a school to go to, and a full belly; the businessman who is healed of their cancer. All of those people are still going to hell if they do not have a saving relationship with Jesus Christ.
Helping people and meeting needs is a good thing, but Jesus wants us to know that those are not the only thing, and definitely not even the most important thing. III. Faith –filled Forgiveness is also very important. Hopefully through those acts of compassion they will see the love of God and that may help them believe once they hear the message. But what if one day we give them food without saying anything, and the next day they die? They may have seen a glimpse of Gods love in action, but if they didn’t hear the message and claim his forgiveness and decide to follow Him….
If Jesus was just focussed on making life better here on earth, he never would have died on the cross. His most loving actions prepared people for real life in eternity, and so should ours if we are to love like he did. He mentioned forgiveness of sins often when he healed someone, his death on the cross was for forgiveness, and he commands us several times to forgive others, even to the point of saying that if we don’t forgive, God won’t forgive us. He doles out the measure that we give.
Why do I call this faith-filled forgiveness? Because it’s not easy, we are scared to forgive sometimes, thinking that we will be giving permission for someone’s behaviour, but we trust that God will bless our forgiveness.
It is kindness, pardon and rescue for the other person. If we can forgive something like that and don’t react like most people would, maybe they’ll think there is something to this Jesus.
OK, so where is the heart in all this? Why does Jesus say so much about love being equivalent to obedience? Does emotion not play a part at all? Think of it this way, we are called to IV. Sacrificial Separation or holiness.
Another way we love God is through avoiding sin and being noticeably different from the culture around us. And Jesus, who experienced everything we do, knew that following our emotions would lead to giving in to temptation. The world says follow your heart, follow your feelings, but the Bible says the human heart is deceitful above all things and is meant to be used for loving and obeying God. Don’t follow the passions of your heart, follow me.
Look at Hebrews 12:14: “Make every effort to live in peace with all people, and to be holy; without holiness no one will see the Lord”.
Do you or did you love your parents? If so, is that love the same as you have for your spouse, or girlfriend or boyfriend, or even your children? What’s different about our love for our parents versus our romantic love or our love for our children? Do you find that there is as much emotion in your love for your parents as there is with your spouse or your children?
I think one of the differences is in the area of choice. We choose romantic partners, and we choose to have children (and they’re kind of cute and cuddly), but we don’t choose our parents. Why do we end up loving them then? Because they first loved us right? First by giving us life, then by keeping us alive and providing for us as we grow up. Right from birth it is a self-centered love, that may grow into something different over time, but it is primarily about what they have done for me.
Why do we do what our parents say, well, for those of you that did anyway? Was it because when you were 6 years old you felt love for them? When you were 3 do you think you felt love, did you even know what it was. No, you tend to do things your parents say because it is a mixture of fear, trust, and obligation isn’t it, if we’re honest.
We fear as children that if we don’t obey them they might stop taking care of us and for a young child that is terrifying. We trust them because they’re older and bigger, should know better than we do, and there’s nobody else to keep us alive. And a little later we feel that we owe them our obedience because of all they have done for us. Why does Scripture command children to honor their parents, again it must be because it’s not natural. If we do come to really feel love for them it is because of what they did and do for us. We don’t fall in love with our parents as we do with our romantic partners and our children.
Is this not similar to how we love God? We love Him because he first loved us. So while the emotions of love may be there, they aren’t necessarily, and this is why there is a commandment to love God. If it was natural, like it is when we are attracted to someone, it wouldn’t need to be commanded. The Bible says no one comes to God unless God draws them with His love. And as we come to know Him, more feelings of love may grow. The feelings come later.
Love God with all your heart which means the center of your being including your thoughts and your feelings. With all your soul (breath, Spirit, life force), and with all your mind or deepest thoughts and understanding. Notice Jesus doesn’t include strength or might here as we read in the original Commandment in Deuteronomy. I believe this is because we are now to do it under the strength and power of the Holy Spirit, not our own strength.
Who are the heroes in the Bible? Who does God’s word exalt even though everyone was imperfect? It was people who had extreme faith exhibited by their radical obedience. You can read the list in Hebrews 11. Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Rahab, Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel and the prophets. “These were all commended (Hebrews 11:39 says) for their faith, yet none of them received what was promised”. And of course there’s the big hero, Jesus who is the promise.
Why is the Old Testament important? Well, if you don’t know who all those people listed in Hebrews 11 are, get to it. They are all stories of people who loved God and they loved Him through their faith and trust demonstrated by their actions.
Let me close this morning by leaving you with some questions to ponder: Which is more loving?
To serve dinner at a homeless shelter or to read John chapter 3 to a dying person in the hospital.
To provide a fresh water well for African children or bake a cake for a neighbour with a good Gospel tract attached to it.
Going on a mission trip to help build a church in Guatamala or telling your massage therapist about your salvation.
Obviously these are all acts of love, but which do you think Jesus would prioritize? Enjoy pondering those questions and in this week’s action plan I’m going to ask you to spend some time in prayer asking God to point out a person outside of your family, who you can intentionally love whether you feel it or not. And if you’re really into it, do this every week.
Anonymously buy someone’s lunch when you leave a restaurant, just pick someone in the place and leave a little anonymous note for the cashier to give them, telling them why you did it. Ask your neighbour what they think about Jesus? Start the discussion. Maybe do something for someone who God leads you to that nobody ever does for another person.
Go to a senior’s house or restaurant and ask if you can clean their bathroom, including the toilet. You get the idea. But don’t leave without telling them why you are doing it. Because you love Jesus and you love them. Because you’re passionate about what you have, and desperately want them to have it too.
Some of you will say, well is that really coming from the heart? Well, if not yours then certainly God’s, and certainly from a heart of obedience, and you might be surprised at the feelings you get after doing it.
….Next week I’ll talk about breaking the strongholds that keep you from growing, and loving, and following God.
