Please stand for the reading of God's Word. Our scripture today is from Matthew 22 verses 36 to 40.
Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law, and he said to him, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment, and the second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets. The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. That was good for a text, wasn't it? It's always a pleasure to be with you. I know last winter grace was a mistake. They didn't know what they were getting when they invited me. But the second time around, you know what you're getting. So, thank you very much to those of you that were involved in inviting me. And I'm especially pleased to be here with you today during this your missions conference. If there's one thing that's dear to my heart, it is the extension of the kingdom of God throughout the world. I'm deeply committed to myself and I am overwhelmed usually by the missionaries that I meet at conferences like these. And if you don't know a missionary, well, let me put it this way. If you've had a bad experience with a missionary, meet these. These are good ones. You'll find them to be ordinary people but at the same time deeply committed to Christ and inspiring to you and to me. And you will find yourself encouraged by them. So I encourage you to come especially to the block party tonight where you have a chance to see them and to participate with them in worship and in conversation and in dinner. The title of this series this weekend is, a lot of neighbors to the world. And this comes from the fact that in this passage we just read, Jesus tells us that the second great commandment in all the scripture is to love your neighbor as yourself. And we're going to be talking about that but you'll notice in that passage we just read that that was not the great commandment, the greatest of them all. The first commandment was, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind. So this morning we're going to be focusing on that first and great commandment as a prelude to the second that we'll be focusing on tonight. You know, I love children, especially now as a grandfather, I'm in love with them all over again. And children are wonderful and delightful and great to be around until they reach that stage where they ask why? Because they don't just ask you that appropriate times, they ask it constantly, don't they? Every single thing you say to them at that certain age is why? Why? Why? And finally you get some frustrated, you have to say something like, because I said so. Be quiet, you'll understand later. You're too young to understand. Why is a question that young children ask a lot and inappropriately? But as adults we grow up and we understand that we don't always have to ask why? If something's convenient for you to do, well then you just go ahead and do it. If it's easy to do it, yeah, you can just go ahead and do it. You don't have to ask why do I need to do this? If it's not going to cost you much, if it's not going to require sacrifice from you then, why just usually doesn't even come to our minds? Now we're in a mission's conference. Those of you who are visiting, they don't normally have flags and things walking in here. This is a special time. But at this mission's conference, we're going to be asking why? And the reason for this is because your pastors and your elders have said to me that it's time for the mission of the church here at Park City to be inconvenient, that it will require of you commitment, that it will require of you sacrifice, loyalty beyond what you have imagined before. And because it's going to require something of you, that your pastors have been praying for you, your elders have been praying for you, your missions committee has been praying for you, that God will stir within this congregation to bring about a response to the call, to bring the gospel to the ends of the earth here, that will be remarkably sacrificial, that we must ask the question why? Why should you and I be willing to give up time and energy and money even our children to this thing called the mission of the church? Why would that be so? Now there are all kinds of reasons that the Bible gives us, but one I think that is obvious to us is this greatest commandment of them all. Because Jesus tells us on the basis of these two commandments on them hanging all the law and the prophets, the whole of the Bible can be summed up in those two commandments, love God and love your neighbor as yourself. And so as we ask this question why this kind of inconvenient missions conference? Why this call to do something sacrificial? The answer in the first place is because Jesus tells us that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. What did Jesus mean when he said that? You know, we talk a lot about love for God, loving God, being in love with Jesus, things like that and there are certain branches of the church that when they talk about these things, they have a sort of sentimental schmaltcy approach to it. You know, I love Jesus so much and I just love it more every day and every day with Jesus is sweeter than the day before. You've heard those kinds of things from people and we Presbyterians scour and say, oh, what's superficiality? If only they knew reality then they wouldn't be thinking this way. I've been a Christian a long time and every day isn't sweeter than the day before.
Right? That's what makes Presbyterians Presbyterians. And so you and I tend to hear that commandment love the Lord your God and we twist it and reduce it down to something that it doesn't say. This is what we do it. We do this. We say love the Lord your God means obey the Lord your God. Ah, no, that's a good thing for us to think about. Duty, that's what motivates us. A sort of raw, stark, I gotta do what I gotta do because he said I gotta do it. But I want to tell you something. Jesus does not say here that the greatest commandment in the Bible is to obey the Lord your God. He says the greatest commandment in the Bible is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind. And there's quite a difference there. You know the difference. You're driving down the street out here and mining your own business paying attention to the things you supposed to be paying attention to and you look in your rear view mirror and you see those blue lights flashing in your rear view mirror. If your heart just full of love. Usually not the first thing that comes to your mind of course as well if I just don't respond then maybe you'll go around me and find somebody else, right? But they don't, of course. And finally they do their little siren and they point to you to go to the curb and you go to the curb and you obey everything the officer tells you to do. At least I do. I hope you do. You do it. Get out of the car. Okay, I'm out. Put your hands on the roof. Okay, I'm on the roof. Everything you say. I'll do it, officer. But you're not doing that because you love that man or that woman. You're doing it because they're cursing you into it. They're forcing you into it and you feel as if if I don't do this somehow I'm going to get in deeper trouble that I'm already in. That's duty. That's raw duty. That is not what Jesus is talking about here. Missions is not motivated properly by this sense of the police officer forcing you to do something you just rather not do instead it's motivated by love for God. Now, when Jesus referred to this passage, he was referring to Deuteronomy chapter six and verse five. It's the verse that follows right after that very famous verse. Hero Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God. It's one of those famous verses in the Bible. In fact, Jesus was not the first one to say it was the most important verse in the Bible. But he was referring to Deuteronomy where in Deuteronomy this word love was used in a very special way. Now in the Bible, the word love is used just about like we use it. I love pizza. I love Sally. I love to run and play. Those kinds of things are in the Bible, but that's not what's going on here. What's going on in Deuteronomy six as Jesus quotes this verse is that God is entering into covenant with his people Israel. And as he enters into covenant with his people Israel, he talks like kings talked in the ancient world of the Bible. Because believe it or not politicians politicians in the ancient world asked their people commanded their people to love them. Can you imagine George Bush coming on television and saying America, I want you to love me. I can't imagine that, but that's what politicians did in the ancient world. And along with that, they explained why their people should love them by telling them what they were and how they acted toward their people. They said things like these, they said, as your king, I am your shepherd because I feed you. As your king, I am your father because I protect you and I'm kind to you. As your king, I'm the builder of great cities. As the king, I am your warrior. I'm fighting for you. And because of this, I want you to love me. Love for the great king was something that was a very high value in the ancient world of the Bible. Now I want to tell you something about this politicians. They were liars. They were liars. They didn't take care of their people. They took care of themselves. It was just plain old propaganda. But now I have some good news. When God says these words, when the Bible says that our God is our shepherd, when the Bible says God is our father, when the Bible says God is our great city builder, when the Bible says that God is our warrior who fights for us, it is no lie. We are in the hands of our great God, our great king. And he is called upon us to serve him with love and affection. Heart felt loyal love. Now that's hard for Americans to get because when we hear the word king, we think immediately, tyrant, bully somebody who's out for themselves, somebody that doesn't deserve to be a ruler. We think of politicians as people to whom we gift power. And you know what we do in politics, we do in religion too. When we think of our king, Jesus, when we think of God the father as our great king, we think of them much like we think of earthly politicians. Well, you know, he's my king, so I better give him something. So we give him a little bit of this and we give him a little bit of that. We'll say, well, okay, this part of my life belongs to him, but the rest of it, it's mine. And we feel as if sometimes we're doing God a favor by paying attention to him, but hear the words of Moses as they're quoted by Jesus. Love the Lord your God. Heart felt loyal love. Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, with all of your soul, with all of your mind, with all of your strength. He is such a great king who is to be admired, who is to be spellbound. He was to be unbelievably powerful in our lives that we give him every single inch of our lives. Every single part of your life belongs to you. Do you not know that you were bought with the price your life no longer belongs to you? That is the beginning of the mission of the church. Most of you in here have missions in your life. You have tasks and goals in your life, but the tasks and goals of your life do not belong to you. They belong to him. He is your great king. Why can God require so much of us? Why can he call us to give so much of our lives to the point that something like a mission's conference would actually be uncomfortable? That we'd have to search for ways to sacrifice and to give of ourselves to the mission of the church. Well, at least two reasons. The first reason is this. It's because of what he has already done for us, what he's done for us in the past. The Bible tells us we love because he first loved us. I hope you know that's true. That the world in which we live is a terrible place. It's under the tyranny of sin and under the tyranny of death. And that human beings are incapable of fixing it. Have you noticed that? Have you noticed that this world can't be fixed by us? Well, our God in the past did something quite remarkable. He began to move against the tyranny of sin against the tyranny of death in real living history. He did it first in the nation of Israel. And the climax of all of that was that he sent his son Jesus into the world to die on the cross for our sins and then to be resurrected on the third day to begin a new world. To begin a new life, a new age of victory and hope and the defeat of sin, the defeat of death, the defeat of evil in this world. That is something that God did out there in objective history. And we should be astounded. And as she calls our hearts to swell with love and loyal devotion to him for not leaving us in the condition in which we had put ourselves. But it's more than that. He did not just do this out there in ancient history two thousand years ago. He has moved into your life and into my life. If you are a follower of Christ today, think back to the way it was before you knew him. Because the tyranny of sin and death was not something that was just out there, it was in you. It was destroying your life. And you were helpless, absolutely helpless to do anything about it. And you came to Jesus and you asked him to relieve you of all this guilt to free you from the tyranny of death and sin. And he did it because you trusted in him and only because you trusted in him. And he changed your life, didn't he? He put you on a path of hope and of destiny. He gave you a family that resolves issues rather than destroys each other. He gave you a church like this one that supports you. He gave you friends. He gave you a reason for living. This is what Jesus has done for you. And for this reason, your life belongs to him. He is your king and he tells you to give all of your heart to him. I'm an independent guy and I've been blessed with health almost all of my life with really good health. Last year, about this time, I was in Jackson, Mississippi to see the birth of our second granddaughter. I woke up early in the morning and my daughter was going to give birth to her baby and found out that I was going to have my own babies, kidney stones, seven of them, big ones. Now I had never really in all of my life ever come to that point where I was just wishing I could die. That's what you do when you have that problem. You just wish you could die. And so my son-in-law wheels me into the emergency room. He gets a cell phone call from my daughter saying, come back and get me. I'm coming too. So I'm lying there. Absolutely helpless. Absolutely helpless. And I look at the doctor and I say, doctor, if you don't do something, I'm going to die. I cannot fix this. That feeling of helplessness comes upon us occasionally, doesn't it? Maybe with wayward children, maybe with your own health problems, maybe with struggles and work where things are- you're just absolutely helpless. Do you realize that is the condition in which you were before you came to Christ? Utterly helpless. You could not take care of yourself. A doctor came up to me, an older doctor, not here in your church a few months ago, and he told me this. He said, I'm quitting early. I'm retiring early. And I said, why? Why are you going to do that? Being a doctor is so important, so precious, so necessary. He said because things have changed. He said, when I first began practicing medicine, whenever I would do something for someone, he was a surgeon, so I often had very serious cases, he said, when I would go into the room after surgery, they would just be full of thanks and full of appreciation. They would write me letters later and tell me about their children, about things that were going on in their lives. He said it was very gratifying because people in the old days used to think that what I did for them was something that they really didn't deserve and something they really should be thankful for. Full of gratitude, he said, but now, when I perform surgery, I'm lucky to get a see-a-later from the patient. You see, we believe these days that we have rights, that we are entitled to certain things, and we even begin to believe that what we have as Christians is an entitlement. It's not an entitlement, it is a gift from God to a helpless person, and for this reason, you should be so full of gratitude that it does not even cross your mind that you would resist or withhold that gratitude from your great-king. And so, on a day like today, if God moves in your heart to consider things like going overseas on a short-term mission trip, or going for the rest of your life on a mission trip, or giving up the pleasures of your retirement to serve him in some kind of ministry, or sending your children, letting your high schoolers go to China this year, those kinds of things, if God moves in your heart to do these things, respond positively out of a heart of gratitude, out of a heart of joy and pleasure knowing how much he has given to you. That is a heart full of love. Now, Jesus commands us to love the Lord our God with all our hearts, soul, and mind, and strength, but He doesn't just do it because of what God has already done for us. He also does it because of what God is going to do for us. You know, there's one thing about every human kingdom in this world, and we often forget about it when we think about our own kingdom here in the United States. But there's something that's true of every human kingdom. Can you tell me what it is? It ends. It hasn't ending. It fails. It doesn't last forever. Well, we know from the Bible that the kingdom of God is not like that. It is a kingdom that will not fail. And for this reason, we don't just have a great past to look back to, and be full of gratitude because of the past, we have a hopeful future that should motivate us to give all in service to our great king. My father right now is seriously failing in his health. And over the last few months, we've had some very precious conversations about things in the past, times, and conversations that we've had, and young people, one day you'll be able to talk to your parents about things in the past, and it'll be a happy thing. It may not be so happy now, but it will be one day. And so we laugh and joke about the kinds of things that I would say to him, and he would say to me, and I remember that every single time, I think every single time, I had some kind of athletic event. My father would always say to me, as I was leaving, rich, be a good sport. I just hated that. I mean, I hated it because I knew what it meant. Rich, you're a loser. My dad believed I was going to lose, and I did usually because you know what happens. You have a basketball tournament or a soccer tournament, which team gets the good sportsmanship award? Well, if you were to look at evangelical Christianity in America today, and to look at the kind of hope they have for the future, you'd have to believe that most Christians today go around telling other people that becoming a Christian means you're a loser, but don't worry about it, smile and be happy because you're going to get the good sportsmanship award in the end. You see, they tell us in movies and on television and in books constantly that what's happening to our world is that it's getting worse, and worse, and worse, and worse, and that Christianity is failing, and failing, and failing, and failing, and they're fewer, and fewer of us, and that at the end is all going to be a wash and we just may as well quit now, and hope that it'll get us out of here just as fast as we possibly can. I have some good news for you that should motivate you for the mission of the church. The kingdom of Jesus Christ is not losing. It is expanding, and it is growing, and it is spreading all over the face of this globe. I know that when you look at television, it feels as if it's the other religions that are winning the world, but that's not the truth. It's not the reality. The reality is that when Jesus rose from the dead and ascended on high, he said to his disciples, all authority and power in heaven and on earth have been given to me, now get on with the show. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you. Remember how our religion began. It began with one man, and twelve disciples, and one of those twelve disciples was the devil, and out of those twelve people came a religion that has now spread to the corners of the earth. Jesus has not failed, and Jesus will not fail. The Bible tells us that the kingdom of God will continue to grow, and grow, and grow until the end when our king Jesus comes back, and redeems the entire creation, and makes all things new. You remember it from Handel's Messiah in Isaiah chapter 9? What do we call him? Wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting Father, Prince of Peace, and of the increase of his government and of his peace, there shall be no end. You are not on the losing team, you are the champions of the world. I don't blame you for a moment, if you're bored with missions, if you think Christianity is losing, I would be bored with it too. I wouldn't give a penny to it, I wouldn't give a second to it, if I thought we were going to lose the earth. But the fact is we are not going to lose the earth, our king Jesus has all authority, and all power, and he established his church, and the gates of hell will not be able to withstand it. You are the victors, we rule over the earth even now, and we will rule even more in the future. You ask me why then is Islam so strong, I can tell you why Islam is so strong, it is because we have failed to bring the gospel to the heart of Islam. If you want to see the heart of Islam ripped out, if you want to see the potency of Islam diminished, then what we must begin to do is to take the power of the gospel to them. By the power of the gospel, we will destroy the heart of Islam, and we will see Jesus as the king over all the earth. Do not put your trust in men, put your trust in the gospel to take care of the evil kingdoms of the world. Now you look at your own country, our country, my country, and the reality is Christianity has flattened out. We talk about church growth, but most of our church growth in this country is sheep stealing. It is taking people from this church, look how big the church is growing, now you got them from a half dozen other churches. But that is not the case in other parts of the world. Brothers and sisters, the Jesus is raining over other parts of the world in ways we cannot even imagine. In places like India, in places like North Africa, and in places like China, more and more and more people are believing in Christ so many we cannot even count them. So many we cannot even train pastors for them, they are coming to Christ by the tens of thousands on the daily basis, and they are building the kingdom of God in their countries. We will one day see, we will one day see, the center of the kingdom of God moving in places like China and India, and they will take the gospel to the ends of the earth, much like our forebears did before. That is good news, you are not on a losing team, you are on the winning team, you are the champions of the world. And for this reason, you should look to your great team and be filled with joy, and admiration, and devotion, and heart felt loyal love, willing to give everything in your life to him because of what he is going to do with his kingdom and with you in the future. Young people, I cannot imagine a cause that is more worthy, a cause that is more compelling, a cause that is more optimistic than the cause of the Christian mission. Retires, I cannot think of a better way to spend your retirement than in service to the mission of the church. Middle ages, look at your children, inspire them to be mission conscious, to know that Jesus is not failing in this world, and pray that if Jesus calls them, you will have the strength to let them go. And church, give to the mission of Jesus Christ because you love him so dearly because of what he has done in the past and what he will do in the future for all of us. See, it is true that when you begin to think of missions as something inconvenient and something that is hard and something that is going to cause to you and something is going to be sacrificial, you need to know why. Why should I do that? Now you know, it is because he is your great king who has commanded you to give everything you have to him, loyal love. He is your great king who has done so much for you in the past and he is your great king who will do so much for you in the future. Let us pray together. Our Lord Jesus, how we adore you, how we adore you for your mercies and for your kindness to us. We pray now that your Holy Spirit will open our hearts to hear you speak to us, to lead us as to how each and every one of us should be involved in this mission of taking the gospel to the ends of the earth. How we bless you, how we adore you, our great king. Amen.