Prime Directive
Introduction
I came across an article recently that was a response to a letter written by someone who was in anguish over trying to figure out how to live the Christian life. This is part of that letter:
"He made us a perfect world that works according to physical laws that we can understand - wouldn’t he also make a religion that anyone can understand? Why is it that only religious leaders claim to understand it? Why do you have to go to seminary to understand it? Doesn’t he love us all? Doesn’t he treat us all the same? Doesn’t he want us all to know Him? Why did he create a confusing religion? Did he create a confusing religion?"
In this morning’s Scripture, Jesus claims the entire Bible hangs on two commands. If you do those two, you’re set.
[The Trap] The religious teachers of Jesus’ day had boiled the truths of the Old Testament into no less than 613 commands and rules.
How one can keep up with that many, I have no idea!
It was common for them to debate which of the commands were more or less significant
Not that any could be ignored, but some were obviously more important than others.
Different rabbis had different thoughts on which might be the greatest commandment.It made sense that Jesus would be asked His opinion on this topic.
However, it is clear that the one questioning Jesus at this point was not someone looking for truth, but someone looking for trouble.
Verse 34 says “the Pharisees had heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees.”
It literally means “Jesus had ‘muzzled’ the Sadducees.”
We’d say, “He shut their mouths, didn’t He?”
The Pharisees and the Sadducees, who normally didn’t get along very well, were united for one goal: get Jesus. They were committed to finding some way to get Jesus to say or do something that would get him in trouble. They didn’t care much about the answers, they just wanted, as the Good News Version has it, “to trap Him with a question.”
In the passage just before this one, the Sadducees had done their best and Jesus’ answer muzzled them. He left them speechless. So the Pharisees decided they needed to take over the job of trapping Jesus.
It says they “gathered together,” for that purpose. It doesn’t mean they just happened to be hanging out at Scotty’s Donuts and started talking about this Jesus guy. They called a meeting to strategize on what they could do to bring Jesus down. They sent one of their guys to go to Jesus pretending to be an honest seeker
Notice how politely he calls him “Teacher” but this Pharisee does not respect him as a teacher. His goal is to get Jesus to say something that would somehow tarnish his reputation.
When you have 613 laws, you’ve got lots of room for disagreement among teachers. Maybe they could twist his answer into something that sounded like He was degrading some other part of Scripture.
His answer was not something they’d never heard. When they heard it, they probably all thought, “Of course! We should have known he’d say that!”
[The Commandment] The greatest commandment that Jesus quotes here was something all pious Jews prayed every morning. Even today, Jews repeat “The Shema,” taken from Deuteronomy 6:
Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.
Those Pharisees must have been so ticked off at Jesus!
He’d done it again!They couldn’t possibly argue over it.And without catching a breath, He gave them more than they asked for: the second greatest commandment:
You shall love your neighbor as yourself. That will be the focus of another sermon. Today, we’re just focusing on “The Prime Directive”: That we love God with our heart and soul and mind and strength.
Over and over throughout the Old Testament, God commanded His people to love Him and obey His commandments.
Deuteronomy 11:1 is representative of more than a dozen verses that command God’s people to:
Love the LORD your God and keep his requirements, his decrees, his laws and his commands always.
Love God and Keep His Commandments: The two went were inseparable:
Like peanut butter and jelly
Rock & Roll
Me and my dog!
Love God & keep His commandments.
If you Love Him, You Obey Him
If you loved your parents, you would do what they told you to do.If you love your God, you do what HE tells you to do. Love and obedience were inseparable.
But there was a problem. The Pharisees had gotten really good at obeying the Law. They had those 613 commandments scrutinized, memorized, codified and analyzed. They obeyed them scrupulously.
But they didn’t obey God because they loved Him, they obeyed God INSTEAD of loving Him. They had substituted legalistic adherence of their outward behavior for loving God with their heart, soul, mind and strength.
Every morning these guys got out of bed, stood, stretched out their hands and said, "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength."
But they missed it; They said it but they didn’t hear it! They didn’t just miss the forest for the trees; they missed the forest for the pine needles! They became legalists instead of lovers.
You know what a legalist is? A legalist is someone who picks up the Bible, or whatever they use for religious authority, And they study it and try to figure out, “What’s the least I have to do to make it? How little good do I have to do, and how much bad can I get away with and still get to heaven?”
The Pharisees were masters at these games:
They knew how many ounces you could carry before it was officially considered “carrying a burden on the Sabbath”
Or how many steps you could take before your walking could be considered work
It is imperative for legalists to have these rules, so they can know just how much good they have to do and just how much bad they can get away with.
What’s the difference between a legalist and a lover?
True love makes no attempt to calculate how little can be done for the beloved; love thinks of how it might give more, how it might do more, how it might demonstrate their love more fully to the beloved.
A newlywed couple was struggling with debt as their first Christmas together drew near. While their friends bought each other big, expensive gifts, they had agreed to exchange gifts that didn’t cost any money.
The woman recalls, “A hundred times I forced myself not to buy the perfect jacket for Peter." But she kept her promise.
But on Christmas morning, she found a large package on the kitchen table. "But you promised you wouldn’t spend any money on me!" With a big grin, her husband answered, "I didn’t. Not one penny."
Instead, he had sold his racquetball racquet, his most cherished possession, to buy her a blender.
The wife was moved to tears. Not because she was so excited about getting a blender! She didn’t even want a blender! She was moved to tears because her husband had sacrificed something of that was precious to him in order to give something to his wife. Not only that, but the grin on his face showed that his sacrifice had been gladly made. He wasn’t thinking, “You better love that blender, because I gave up my racquetball racquet for that.” He was just so happy that he was able to give to his beloved.
That night, she prayed, "Thank you, Lord, for making us ’poor.’ Otherwise, I never would’ve known how rich I am." Poor in pocket, but rich in love.
That’s the difference between a legalist and a lover: a legalist gives only to get something back – he wants an even exchange; a lover happily sacrifices what’s most precious to him in order to give to the one he loves.
I said last week that more than anything else, God wants to be in a love relationship with you
He wants your love more than He wants your obedience, more than He wants your service!
But if you love Him, you will do those other things
You’ll do them gladly
Augustine, one of the Fathers of the early church, told Christians to LOVE GOD AND DO AS YOU PLEASE
That sounds kind of shocking, doesn’t it?
I mean you can’t just go telling people that they can do whatever they please!Imagine what our world would be like! But Augustine wasn’t saying, like the 60’s slogan did, “If it feels good, do it” He didn’t say, “Just do as you please.” HE SAID: LOVE GOD AND DO AS YOU PLEASE. There’s a huge difference!
Because if you love God – not if you just say you do, but if you truly love Him – then you want to do His will.
You will seek His will; You will want Him to show you his ways, because you will trust that they are best for you.
Love Takes all we’ve got. To Love God and do as we please may seem, at first glance, to be way too easy.
Doesn’t it seem like the legalist, with his list of rules and his clipboard is working a lot harder at things?
But let’s think about that
Do you remember the story of the rich young ruler?
The man who asked Jesus what he should do to be saved,
who confidently asserted he had kept all the commandments since his youth.
And Jesus says, “OK. Then just sell everything you have, give it to the poor and follow me.”
We’re not told if the man said anything. I think Jesus left him speechless. All we’re told is that he was very sad, because he had great wealth. And he walked away.
That man no doubt had tithed every bit of his income.
And Jesus said, “OK, you’ve given me 10%, now give me everything.” That man was willing to give his 10%, but not his all.
That story has prompted much discussion among Christians for centuries. Does it mean all of us should all sell everything we have and follow Jesus?
I don’t think so, because Jesus didn’t tell everyone to do that, just this one young man.
I think Jesus cut through his self-righteous legalism and revealed the man’s lack of love for God. He had wanted to know “What good thing must I do to inherit eternal life?” That is, “How little good can I do and get into heaven? I want to do something to secure my place in the hereafter, but I don’t want it to be too much of an intrusion on my lifestyle.”
But Jesus wouldn’t let him get away with that.
God wants children who love him with everything they’ve got; not children who are always trying to see how much they can get away with. There is an indissoluble link between love and obedience
Because if we love God, we will want to make him happy
At one point while I worked for a large corporation, their motivational slogan was “We want to delight our customers!” What management was trying to communicate with that slogan was that our goal wasn’t just to find the lowest level our customers would accept, but to serve them in a way that they would say, “WOW! That’s great! That’s better than I expected or even hoped for.” If our goal was to “delight the customer,” we would do our jobs with excellence
Of course being told to “delight the customer” made those of us in the trenches kind of gag. But that was because we didn’t love our customers. Where I worked, we didn’t even know our customers!
But if we knew them, and we loved them, we would want to delight them with our service.
That’s what it means to:
LOVE GOD AND DO AS YOU PLEASE
On the surface, to “LOVE GOD AND DO AS WE PLEASE” sounds easy: it’s easy to remember; it’s not easy to do!
Legalism is harder to remember and keep track of, but
it’s way easier to do.
Legalism gives 10%; love gives 100%
Legalism fits neatly into a life filled with other things; love sacrifices everything else for the sake of the beloved.
Suddenly what sounded so easy becomes the hardest thing in the world! The great commandment is that we love God in such a way that it impacts every thought, every action, every attitude, every fiber of our being. That’s hard! How in the world can we love God like that?
In 1 John 4:19 we get the answer: We Love because God first loved us. We don’t have to “work up” love for God
If we take the time to study His Word, to pray, to learn about who He is, to worship Him, we begin to experience the intoxicating love of God, we begin to love Him in return. We love Him because He first loved us.
Did she say, “The intoxicating love of God? How can you compare the love of God to getting drunk?”
Because when we drink deeply of God’s love it begins to affect our actions. If we drink in enough of His love, it will totally control our behavior. Alcohol does the same thing. When alcohol controls one’s behavior, it is destructive to the one who drinks and usually everyone around them. But when we drink in the love of God to the extent that it controls our behavior, it is magnificent.
If we truly love God: with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind, with all our strength, we can do whatever we please – and it will be pleasing to God.
Conclusion
There is a story about a struggling artist who brought one of his paintings to a world-renowned painter who served as the younger man’s mentor. The painting was of the face of Christ.
The older man studied it for a few minutes, then said, “If you loved Jesus more, you would paint him better.”
The goal of the Christian life is to paint a picture of Jesus with our lives. When people look at us, they ought to see Him.
We cannot do that by following a list of rules; We can only do it by loving Him with everything we have, loving Him with everything we are,
loving Him with everything we say, loving Him with everything we think, loving Him with everything we do.
LOVE GOD AND DO AS YOU PLEASE
