Loving Others

I want to read a passage this morning from Matthew chapter 22, if you'd like to find that and hold it for a few moments. I'll be using it a little while. In this story, Jesus was confronted by people who were questioning. This is the third of a series of these questions. Each of these questions, they thought, would generate conflict for Jesus. They thought when he answered these questions that some people would lose confidence in him. They thought that his ministry would be over. He might be killed as he answered these questions, but Jesus was faithful in telling exactly what he thought he ought to say from the Father. In this instance, a man comes to him and says, what is the greatest commandment of all the ones that are given? Jesus doesn't say what we might expect him to say. What is the most important thing that a person could do? Jesus didn't say, be saved. He didn't say, join a church. He didn't say, be baptized. He didn't say, take communion. He didn't say, pray. What Jesus said was something that's really sort of startling. He said the most important thing you can ever do in your life is to relate to people as God wants you to. Your relationships in life are more important than anything else that you'll ever do. Now in this passage, Jesus is describing what he means by the relationships between himself, God, and us. Knowing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question. Teacher, what is the greatest commandment in the law? Jesus replied, love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it. Love your neighbor as yourself. All the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments. Now the reason Jesus didn't mention being saved, asking Jesus into your heart, or joining a church, or being baptized, or any of these other things, was because the primary focus of all that God wants for us is the relationship that he has with us. This commitment that we have to God that allows him to be the primary ruler of our lives. This is what it means to be a follower of God. All these other things are ways by which you're obedient to God, but you can do all of them and really have not a submissive spirit. I read a story one time about W.C. Fields, a comedian of long ago, I don't know if any of you have ever seen any of his comedic work, but he was not a very religious man, known for his drinking, and his carousing, and his lifestyle. One day a man came in a hotel room where he was, and so I'm sitting there reading the Bible. The man said, I didn't know you were a religious man. He said, I'm not, I'm just looking for loopholes. You can read the Bible for all kinds of different reasons. You can join the church for all kinds of different reasons. You can be baptized for all kinds of different reasons. You see, none of those behaviors are even important to God unless the first one is really there. Loving God with all your heart, and your soul, and your strength. It means placing him in a position of absolute authority over your life. All of the world was made by God. The stars, the planets, the suns, everything that there is was made by him. All of it moves in the orbits that he wants it to. Every single particle of the universe is submissive to the voice and the hand of God. All the animals on this earth do what God wants them to do, except you and I. God gave us the capacity to look him in the face and say, no, I don't want to do what you want me to do. All of us go through it. You start out, young child, obeying your parents, doing what they tell you. You get up to the teenage years, suddenly you discover you don't have to do what everybody tells you. You have desires inside of yourself that you want to fulfill, even if your parents don't want you to do that. You want to drive the way you want to drive, not the way your dad tells you to drive his car. You want to go places you want to go. You want to come in when you want to come in. And suddenly you hear about God and all these rules that he has. You have to choice. Do I want to live by these rules that God gives me to live by, or do I want to do what really feels good to me? Do I want to do the things that I enjoy, or do I want to do the things that God tells me are the right things to do? And in the middle of all those feelings and ideas, everyone in the universe says, I want to do what I want to do. I don't care what God says, I'm going to do it my way. Number one funeral song in America. I did it my way. And we do. We do it our way. We live the way we want. We talk the way we want. We do the things we want to do. We do it our way. It doesn't matter that our lives don't work out quite like the way we want them to. We keep on doing it our way. This is the primary sin of all mankind. I will live the way I want to live, regardless of what God says. To enter the kingdom of heaven, you have to say to God, I'm through doing it my way, and from now on in my life, I want to do it the way you tell me I should do it. You are the authority for my life. I will do the things you tell me to do. I will do them the way you tell me to do it. I will do it when you tell me to do it, because I believe, after my own lifetime of experience, I'm not good at making these choices. It hasn't worked out the way I want it. So I trust you, hear that word, trust you. You are now the boss. Now you know when you go to work for someone, you work at the business they're in. If you were to go to work for Denise, I don't know exactly what Denise does, it has something to do with computers, it has something to do with figures and figuring out money and how that sort of stuff works. If you went to work for her, you would have a job that assigned you to certain tasks. It would be kind of like keeping books or doing physical things. Now if you decided you didn't like to work for her, the pay wasn't good enough, certainly the boss would be good enough, you'd rather work for Hazi. And you went to work for Hazi, you'd leave your computer at home, you'd have a whole different set of tools, not a pencil or a pen or a computer or a calculator. You would have wrenches and you'd have hammers and you'd have saws and you'd have all the tools that a mechanic works with. Depending on who your boss is, it will determine what you do, the things you do, the activities you're in. So when you decide, I don't want anymore to rule my life, and you say to God, you take charge of my life and rule me, suddenly you've changed bosses. A radical transformation in your life now comes. No longer are you doing what I want to do, but you're doing what he wants you to do. You think about things in a different way. If you go to work with Denise, you dress up like you're going to a place, an office. If you go to work for Hazi, you better have some clothes you can wash the grease out of. He changes everything, depending on who you work for. So whenever you say to God, I'm going to love you with all my heart, my soul, and my strength, you're saying, you are now in charge of my life. Now if you make that kind of commitment, he may say to you, join a church, be baptized, take the Lord's Supper. He may tell you all those things, but they're the result of him telling you and you're doing them out of obedience to him. That's why we always say here when we take offerings for our mission causes, we don't try to raise money. We try to say to you, ask God what you should give because he is the boss. And if every one of us did exactly what he told us to do, then everything here in the church would work perfectly. If every one of us did everything God told us to do, then everything in our lives would work exactly as they ought to. So when Jesus begins, he begins with this one idea. You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. And then when you do that, he will rule all of your life. Everything else will take care of itself. If you're listening to God, doing what he tells you, then all the other things in your life will work exactly as they ought to. Now I don't mean that you're going to be wealthy and happy all the time. Jesus wasn't happy all the time. He wasn't wealthy. But boy, when the end of his life came, he had accomplished everything in his life that he ought to have accomplished. And when it was over, he could say to the Father, it's finished. I've done everything that I was supposed to do. And it worked well, because all of us, because of his life, now know what it means to have forgiveness of sin, to walk in fellowship with God, and to experience the presence of God in our lives. You see, every one of us has to make a decision about whether or not we're going to rule our life, ourselves, or whether we're going to surrender, and that's a key word, surrender, submit to the authority of God. That's what it means to be a follower of Christ. You can say, I've taken Jesus into my heart, but you may have taken him in there as a good buddy, not as your boss. You don't beginner the kingdom of heaven until he is your Lord, and your boss, and your king. You may have asked God for a lot of things in your life, in a way that sort of lets him know that you're ordering him to tell you what you want him to do for you. I hear a lot of people talk to me about prayer, and how much they pray. And usually their prayers are, here's what I want you to do, God. Here's what I need from you. Here's when I need it, and here's the way I need it. Now get on the job. Who's the boss in that deal? It's the prayer. What God wants us to understand is, this walk with him only really works if he is the Lord. You don't have the right to decide these things for yourself when you've given yourself to him. If you go to work for Hosea, you don't have a right to go out there every day and say, what will I enjoy doing? When the boss comes and says, get under that car and change the oil, you do it. That's what it means to love God with all of our heart, our soul, and our strength. For the word love doesn't stand for some kind of emotional experience. God and I have this fuzzy relationship. No, the word love in the Bible is a decision you make that says to God, I will do whatever you tell me to do. You are the authority for me. Love is the self-denying, sacrificial service to others. Self-denying, you say no to your own desires and interests. That's what Jesus said. No one can come after me unless you deny yourself. You have to say, first of all, I will say no to my plans, my wishes, my way of thinking. You must take up your cross, which means whatever assignment God gives me, and it'll be a job. Whatever assignment he gives me, I will say, okay, God, I'm going to do that. And you do it no matter how hard it is. Why? Because you trust the boss. He's in charge. And follow me. What Jesus meant by that is you're not going to know how to deny yourself or what kind of things I want you to do till you watch carefully how I live and how I do things, and then you'll know how you're supposed to do it. So you see, what Jesus asked was exactly what he did. He let the Father control his life. He said, I only do what the Father tells me. I only say what the Father tells me. And so he says to us, I want you to promise in your life, you will do what I tell you to do. You will live the way I tell you to live. Then Jesus said, and the second commandment is like it. You're to love your neighbor as yourself. This is a quote from the Old Testament of the book of Leviticus. And there, it was seen in the context of the people of Israel as to how they treat each other, their own family, their own home group, their own people. So you have other people who are in the nation of Israel, and you're to treat them as you would treat yourself. Now, he's not talking here about loving yourself in terms of self-respect or a good self-image of yourself. He's talking about this same idea of love, a sacrificial, self-denying commitment to something. We have that for ourselves. For example, if you get really hungry, what are you going to do? You're going to go find you something to eat, right? If you're really tired, I mean, just worn out, tired, you're going to find a place where you can rest. You may sit down and it works, or you may need to take a nap, but you're going to do it because your inner sides of you says you're tired, take care of it. We do whatever is necessary to satisfy our own needs. That's what he means by loving ourselves. We have to do something really hard to get enough money to buy food to eat with, we're going to do the job. We will do whatever it takes to take care of ourselves. So because you have a commitment to care for yourself, and we don't ever think about it, am I committed to feed myself? No, we just do it because it's in our inner nature, but we're committed to care for ourselves. Now he says, what I want you to do is see others and have the same commitment to them you have for yourselves. So if you see someone who's lost, doesn't know where they're at or how to find their way, you think, what if I were in that situation, what would I want someone to do for me? And you go over and say, can I help you? If you see somebody who's sick and they fall down, you go over to them and say, can I help you? What you're doing is saying, I am doing for this person what I would want them to do for me. Now when Jesus, when God gave this commandment in Leviticus, he was talking about the people of Israel. They were all family, children of Abraham, all family. And so they cared for themselves and all the way through the Old Testament, that's the way they saw it. But when Jesus started talking about this in the New Testament, he did something rather dramatic and startling. In the book of Luke, when he told this story, as soon as he finished, a man said, well now, who is my neighbor? If I'm going to love my neighbor, self-denying, sacrificial service to other people, who do I have to include in the circle of neighbor? In the Old Testament, it was the circle of family. Now Jesus expands it to the circle of neighbor. Jesus told a story, a man who was a Samaritan, walking down the road, found a Jewish man who'd been beaten and left for dead. There was a couple of religious guys, a Levite that came by, he was real busy, went on the other side of the road, went to Jerusalem, he didn't have time for this Jewish fellow who was his family. There was a priest going to the temple, he went on by and walked on the other side of the road so he wouldn't get in trouble and left the guy there and his problems. And then came this guy who was a Samaritan. Now Samaritans would have been seen by the people in Jesus' day in a very negative way. A Jewish person could not go in the house of a Samaritan and eat, it would make him unclean. He could never intermarry with a Samaritan. They were just outcast people. It's like a lot of people see, Mike, maybe an illegal alien in our country. And it's like you'd see, you know, a Kansas guy who'd run into some people that beat him up and left him on the side of the road and the illegal alien comes by and this guy's a tea party man, you know, send them all back. And the illegal alien comes over, seeing the tea party decal on his car, and he goes over to where he is and says, can I help you? He gets him up, takes him to a motel, gives the guy some money and says, this guy's really in trouble, would you take care of him? Gives enough money to cover the bill and leaves without asking for anything. Now Jesus said, who do you think the neighbor was in this situation? Well, the story's so clear, we know. It's this guy who is not a good friend of the fellow beat up, in fact, they were enemies, politically, racially, militarily, they were enemies. But the hated one in the country overlooked all the animosity between them, saw the man in trouble and did whatever he could to help him. What Jesus tells in this story is, anyone you see around you, regardless of who they are who are in trouble, are the person who is your neighbor to help. So when you come under control of God, he says to you, I want you to look around and you're going to see people all around you who need help, they're in trouble. Don't just look for the people like you and help them, or people in your church and help them, or people who are friends of yours and help them, but anyone in the world you look for them, wherever they are, you help them if they're in trouble. Why? Because God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever trusted him might have eternal life. So now that the boss who loves people like that is in your head and in charge of your life, he is going to ask you to do the things he would do if he was walking on the face of the earth in a human body. And because he loves everyone, especially those who are in need, he asks each of us to see those people and break down those barriers and extend ourselves to those people we would not normally extend ourselves to because our boss is in the business of loving the world. Now that I am working for him, I am also in the business of loving the world. You see how key that first commandment is? It's critical to the second. You can't fake the second if you don't have the first because you're going to love the people that you like or enjoy, and you're going to leave the rest of them alone. So when you work for this guy who loves everyone in the world, your vision is changed. Well, if that wasn't bad enough, Jesus, when he was teaching his disciples in the very beginning of his ministry, it's found in chapter 5 of the book of Matthew, really placed a bombshell in front of them. He said, you have heard it said, love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I tell you, love your enemies. Have self-denying sacrificial service to your enemies that are trying to hurt you and kill you. Pray for those who persecute you that you may be the sons of your Father in heaven. In other words, if God is in charge of your life and you're doing what he tells you to do like a faithful son, you're going to do this kind of thing because God's doing it all the time. Example, he causes his son to rise on the evil and on the good. When it rains, it doesn't rain just on Alan's fields. It rains on the guy that cusses next to him and the guy that's immoral and the guy that hates God. That's how he does. So when he's in charge of your life, he's going to cause you to look at everyone in the world the way he sees them. Not in terms of who you like, but in terms of those who need help. He sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get for that? Not even, don't even tax collectors do that? Don't the worst sinners you know do that? Don't the mafia people take care of their own family? If you only pray for your own family and take care of them, you're no better off than a mafia person in terms of your love. And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, the word means complete, as God is complete, therefore as your heavenly Father is perfect and complete. You do the things your heavenly Father tells you to do. And when your worst enemy, who's made your life a living hell, keeps after you, you think, how does God see this person? Does he see them as a person who needs help? Does he see them as a person who needs to be rescued from the grips of Satan's power? Or does he see them as a mean person who's been mean to me and needs to be punished? See, that's how we feel. Someone's mean to me, he's really nasty and did bad things to me, I think, well I hope they get what's coming to them. He wants us to stop and think of people in a new way. I love that guy that's so mean to you. I want to see him change and come into my kingdom. I want to see his whole life become different. So what I want you to do is ignore how you feel and say, what can I do to show this person that God loves them? And so he said, turn the other cheek. Don't retaliate, take it. Don't fight back, take it. And that other person will say, why are you doing this? And you can say, because God doesn't want me to hurt you, he cares a lot about you. That's your witness. He won't believe you very much if you've knocked him flat of his back and tell him how much God loves him. But you see, you have to take it. And then you can tell it What Jesus is asking is something that is beyond the capacity of a human being to do when people have hurt you and they've Damaged you and they've run you and they've made your life miserable Your human nature will never ever say I want to do nice or that something nice for that person but when God changes your thinking and And he says to you that person's only doing these things because they don't understand how to live forgive them for that and I want you in return to do something wonderful for them It doesn't make any difference if it's your husband or your wife or your children or your parents or your neighbor or your boss It didn't matter who it is I don't want you to hurt them. I Want you instead to do what I would do and that is to do something Nice and good for them When Jesus was asked what is the greatest commandment he said is to let me control your life and Have the relationship between us where I'm in charge and you're listening and you're obeying me And The very second is like it I want you to do everything you can with the people around you to show them how much I love them This is what it means to be saved It's what it means to have Jesus in your heart controlling your life It's what it means to say God. I give myself to you It's what it means to be a follower of Jesus It's what it means to be baptized and say my old way of life is over and gone and now I'm raised to let Christ tell me how to live and I live that way Even though it's hard and even though I don't like it and even though I don't want to do it. I do it because Jesus Christ is my Lord. He's the boss. He's in charge and I've given him my life And the real test as to whether or not you belong to God is how your relationships with other people are If Satan's in charge of your relationships with people you get even with everybody that hurt you If Satan's in control of your human nature you pay people back You punish them You may not hit them, but you may not talk to them. You may avoid them You may do all kinds of things to make sure you make them pay For what they've done to you But when our Lord is in charge of your life everything changes Now you want to see them come to know God and his love and Now you want to show them God's love no matter how much it hurts or costs you Just like Jesus did on the cross I Will love this person Continually no matter what they do to me as long as I live Why? Because you've told me I should and you are the boss What Jesus said was the most important thing in all the world is for you to control for me to control your life and For you to live in a way that my love is evident and clear to the people around you