Please turn with me on your Bibles to March 12, page 885 on the P Bible, in the P Bible. As you're turning there, I want to tell you first that Warren Meyer, many of you know a charter member of this church, and an elder emeritus, went to be with the Lord yesterday afternoon. And you may be praying for Callie and for the family, but we know that he's in the presence of a living God, and it's true, and we believe in the resurrection of the body in the everlasting life, that this is not the end. We don't believe that we have no hope in the face of death, Warren's death or anyone's. But Jesus says alive, and that same Jesus says we're turning to this passage of speaking in the temple, and he tells us the meaning of a law, so you're about to hear. And I want you to realize that we're stepping on holy ground here, this conversation that he has with the scribe, verse 28, 334, one of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating, noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer. He asked him of all the commandments, which is the most important, the most important one answer Jesus is this, here, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, love the Lord your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this, love your neighbor as yourself, there is no commandment greater than these. Well said teacher, the man replied, you're right in saying that God is one, and there is no other but him, to love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices. When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, you're not far from the kingdom of God, and from then on, no one dared ask him any more questions. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, here for us, who can be against us, that you did not spare your own son but you gave him up as a ransom for us, that we being your enemies, you made into sons and daughters. This is shocking, so unlike anything else in our world, and we need to believe it, we need faith, we are people that are full of weakness and doubt, and our own agendas, Lord we need for you to stop us this morning, and the midst of our worlds and the things that we think are so important. We need to hear Jesus teach us, we need to be changed by what he says to describe. We ask Holy Spirit that you would pour out your power here this morning on us in this sanctuary, but also on Cali and the family and friends of Warren. Thank you for his life, for his faith. Thank you that you had swallowed up death, Lord Jesus. You're so wonderful. It's in your precious name we ask. Amen. Jesus gives the meaning of the law here. He breaks down what the Bible is about and what life is about. To get this, to understand this, to embrace this, according to the New Testament, to understand what Jesus is saying here, to believe him is to be in the kingdom of God and all that means. To miss this, is to miss the kingdom entirely. I am persuaded, a senior pastor of this church, in my own personal life and also in the congregation, that the Holy Spirit is doing something very exciting, God's always at work, and I perceive one of the things he's doing is he is delivering us, delivering me from a joyless Christianity. So many of us have lost the joy of our salvation. So many of us have a dark cloud of duty-bound Christianity and so many of us don't even know it. We don't know how we're so miserable. When we have three study Bibles at home, four study Bibles at home, one of these people that every time a new study Bible comes out, I want it. I must have it. The new ESD study Bible, I have both versions. Love study Bibles. Are you ever, are you like me and you're surrounded by Christianity? Maybe, but there's something missing. Maybe you know a lot about Jesus, but you don't want to ask you in an honest moment. Do you know Jesus? Do you know the joy of the salvation that he brings? Is that real? That's the scribe, the teacher of the law, it's a scribe. He's a scribe. You hear about those in the New Testament. We don't even know this guy's name. You know, he was surrounded by study Bibles. His job was to study the law. He knew the law perfectly. He knew the Bible better than any of us. He was a PhD in the law, the very thing that he's asking Jesus about. He knew everything about the law, about it. He knew everything about God. What God revealed, he knew it. He and his friends would get together. The scribes would get together and they would dispute, they would discuss which commandment was the greatest. That's what they did at Starbucks, 613 commands, and they not only quoted the Bible itself, but they also talked about the Talmud, which was a commentary on the Bible. They knew the commentary on the Bible about the commentary, about the law. What did each teacher think, generation after generation, they discussed on what was most important that God taught, and then one day this scribe was in the temple. This scribe was in the temple, and he heard this man, Jesus, teaching. He was talking to the Sadducees. He knew the Sadducees. And he heard Jesus answer a question about the resurrection. He knew, the member of the resurrection was a big deal. They all disputed the resurrection. What was the resurrection about? Was it true? The Sadducees didn't believe it. And he heard Jesus answer. The scribes were more in line with the Pharisees. He believed in the resurrection, probably. Here's Jesus response. He really liked what he heard. He hears this penniless teacher from Nazareth, who is a carpenter, answer a question, and do a showdown to the Sadducees, and they leave. And so he comes up to him. He comes up to Jesus. This is teacher, great job on that question. Great job, that was. Well said, that's literally what he's saying. Well beautifully done. Can I ask you a question? Which commandment is the most important? penniless teacher from Nazareth, this scribe, this PhD is asking, this carpenter. And Jesus gives him an answer. That if we listen to this answer, we take it to the center of our being. We see Jesus as he really is. That we will be on the cusp of what it means to really know Jesus. Do you believe it's possible to have a joyful Christianity? Three things today. First, Jesus gives us the meaning of the law. The meaning of the law, here it is. Secondly, our problem, there's a problem with the law, our problem with the law. There's a problem here. We'll see it very soon. And then finally, how does it transform us? How does it change us? Let's listen to what Jesus has to say. He says this and the response to this man's question, the first and the meaning of the law, he says, what is the most important one? Well, Jesus says, hero, Israel, the Lord, our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this, love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these. The meaning of the law, Jesus gives what's known as the Shema, you learn the Hebrew word today. Shema. Every Hebrew knew what the Shema was, was from Deuteronomy 6, verse 5. He most important passage, big statement, most important passage to a Jew in the entire Old Testament. They prayed this Shema every morning and every evening. This was so basic to a scribe. This was first day stuff. He not only knew the Shema, he knew what a dozen commentators thought about the Shema. This is no brain or stuff. This was the most basic thing. He had all the tools in his mind, but he didn't understand what it meant. The second thing he gives, Jesus quotes from Leviticus 19, verse 18, about loving your neighbor as yourself. What is Jesus saying here? We talk about the meaning of the law. In one word, Jesus is saying the law is about love. The substance of the law of God is about loving God and in turn loving those who are created in the image of God. Jesus very clearly tells us this. We miss so clearly, quickly, that we miss that the law itself is about loving God. There's a vertical command to love God. What does that mean? First, it's comprehensive. It's comprehensive. I want you to listen to what Jesus says. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. Do you notice there's a word all there? That's in the original language. That means complete, absolute, like everything. The kind of love that I have for anything is sort of like when you cut the apple with the apple cutter, it's such a cool device. You have to cut each thing, it just cuts in the splits, and you can pick off one piece of the apple. That's the way most of us love anyone or anything, but Jesus is making it a very steep command here. Love the Lord your God with all your heart. It's a command. All your mind, all your soul, all your strength, everything, completely. He says with here, it's actually more accurately, it's out of. The preposition is translated better as out of. Out of all your heart, as being the source, the way you're going to love God is out of all your heart, out of all your soul, out of all your mind, out of all your strength. He says heart, soul, mind, strength. What is that? That's the description of a human being. That's what we are. Your heart to a Jew was central command, that's where everything happened. Your heart, according to the Bible, is the center of you. That's why you do what you do, it's your motives. It's the real you, it's why we do what we do. Your soul is an invisible part of you, it's known as your psyche or your emotions, what makes up the psychology of who you are, how you feel about things. Your mind, of course, your intellect, your thinking, your strength, your energy, that's a person, it's a package of person. We all know what that means, we think of love, we love things with all our person, don't we? When you love, when you first fall in love, come on guys, with your heart, your obsessed, you think about her, you want to be with her, your emotions are going toward her, you make plans to be with her, you spend your energy, you spend your money, you spend your time with her, that object of your love, when we love things, we love things with our entire person, that's what Jesus is describing here, loving God completely with all your humanity. Do you love God like that? Do you see how shocking this is? They prayed it every morning and every evening. Here's the command that God gives us. I am your God, and I want you to love me with your entire being all the time. I am the Lord, I am the only Lord, God's, I am the one and only Lord. You love me with your entire being, it's comprehensive, the second thing, it's it's directed toward our neighbor, love your neighbor as yourself, love your neighbor as yourself, literally your neighbor is anyone who lives close by in the Bible, that's what a neighbor is. I would like to choose my neighbor, the kind of neighbors I have are the ones that I want to grill out with, but the way the Bible describes neighbor is a neighbor is someone who lives by you, someone who is near you, someone who lives in your city, someone who lives in proximity to you, that is who your neighbor is. The problem with that is God is calling us to love those people that we don't like. Oh goodness. I love people I like, people I do not like, I act like, I'm not seeing them, this is confession time for the pastor. Any human, here's the problem, any human being wants to be around those people that are like them, right? That's great, we have friends, but to call someone a neighbor is to cross socioeconomic and racial and political lines because they're close by. The Bible love is primarily an action that you care for them in action rather than just a feeling, that's the way Jesus is describing love here, that's the way the Bible talks about love. It doesn't mean you just feel loving feelings for someone and therefore you'll do that, it means you actually care for your neighbor the way you care about yourself and we don't have to teach anyone to care for themselves. Even those of us who hate ourselves love ourselves. As I said in the first sermon, that is another sermon in itself. We love ourselves, but the Bible's calling us to love others just like we would love ourselves, our neighbor. So you can't separate love for God and love for neighbor. Know what we'd love to sometimes, wouldn't we? Just this me and Jesus connection, I wish I could come to church. If I were in the pew, here's what I would struggle. I want to come to church and have sort of this invisible shell around me. I'll wave at you, be very nice to you, but let's not get all talky. Please, please, let's not share our feelings. You can act like you to share your feelings, but let's honestly, I would like to have a worship service, me and Jesus, and then I'm going to get in my car and I'm going to lose these. I don't want you to bother me, but what the Bible is saying here and what Jesus is doing is he's combining love for God and love for neighbor as inseparable. In other words, you cannot claim to have love for God and not love your neighbor. See, love for God without love for neighbor is just abstract mysticism. It doesn't exist according to the Bible. Love for God is always expressed in love for neighbor, regardless of who it is. So you know that you love God by the way that you love your neighbor. You see how steep this is? Final thing we see about the meaning of the law is that the law reveals the way it's supposed to be. God is love. God is love, 1 John 4. God is love. Isaiah 49, he describes himself, let's now God describes himself to his rebellious people, terrible people. He said, can a woman forget her nursing young? Should she have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even if a mother forgets, I cannot forget you. God is love and love never had a day where it was its first day. You realize that love was never invented. There was never a first day for love, like there was a first day for the wheel or for the iPod or for a sliced bread. There's never a first day for love because God always existed. And since God always existed, love always existed. Father's Son, Holy Spirit, always in a perfect loving communion forever and ever, the Trinity. Love comes from God, He invented love. The reason there is love is because there is a God. And so when that God shows for himself a people known as Israel and He redeems them out of Egypt, the first thing he tells them is, guess what? I want you to love me because in the garden what happened in the fall is we broke that loving relationship with God and we were built against God and in a lot loving God, we stopped loving each other. And God comes to them in the cool of the day like a spurned lover, do you know that? Someone who had been cheated on, he's not this cold mechanical God. He comes and he says, where are you? His heart is broken. It's ripped out because his creation is turned on him. And so when he redeems the people, the first thing he tells them is, I want you to love me. I want you to love me with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. I want you to love me and I want that love to overflow. This is about love. I made you because of love. You ever wonder why you're here? You ever wonder why you're breathing? You ever have those questions? Some of you think, well, that's kind of a deep thought. I need to not have that anymore. Maybe your friends would make fun of you guys on the golf course if you said something like this. Why am I here? But you think about it sometimes. What is life about? Why are we breathing? Is it so that I can go to college and make money and have a family and send my kids to college and retire? Is that, that's good? But is that it? That's not, that's not very much.
Do you see the reason we were created? The God and the God of the universe has told us, I created you because I loved you and I've sent my love upon you and I want you to love me with that very body, with that very mind, with that very soul that I gave you. I am love and I created you with love and I want you to love each other that way. That's the reason you're breathing. We have a problem though. Second point, here's some real trouble here. I don't want you to really hear this and take this to heart. I pray this spirit would bind this upon your heart. Here's the problem. We can't keep the law. Some of you psychologically go, okay great, I can't keep the law, but it's worse than you think. Romans 3, verse 10, some of you are so angry right now, that's good. Romans 3, verse 10, there is no one righteous, not even one. Verse 19, now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law that's us so that every mouth may be stopped. I don't care how pretty your mouth is today. Every mouth may be stopped, literally like this because the law says you haven't kept it. You haven't loved. You haven't loved. You are created. Your creator made you to love and you haven't loved. That's the point. The law is sweet and beautiful to Jesus. See we think of the law as like this nasty thing, this horrible thing, let's get away from the law. This is the way Jesus saw the law. The law saw it as a revelation of God's holy heart. We don't love God in our neighbor. We break it all the time consciously and unconsciously. Here's what I mean. Jesus is teaching this scribe, this expert in the law to us, to you personally. You have never kept what is most important to God. So what do we do? Here's what we do. First thing we do is we rationalize it. That's the first response to this. The first thing we get mad at God as if we had a right because He created us. The second thing we do is, well, I've really wanted to be better. Is that, how, is that good? How about this one? I've tried this one. I've really done my best. I've done my best, God, can we be friends? If God demands absolute perfection is love because He's a perfectly holy God. I've done the best I could. He says, it's not good enough. Or we compare ourselves to other people or we boil ourselves in leisure and in the American dreams somehow. We've done this to wake up one day, crossing our fingers, hoping that it's all going to work out. It's going to be okay. But folks, we are objectively guilty, not just subjectively. The second thing we do is we turn the law into a system. Human beings turn a relationship that God created us for into religion. That's what Jesus is teaching this man and the man responds, well, that's a good answer. Jesus, well said. That is better than all burnt offerings and sacrifices. Why? Because the scribes and the Pharisees and the Sadducees had made this religion, the Shema, they have made it into a ritual of sacrifices and things to do and things to not do. Ways to wash your hands so you can somehow appease this God but what this God wants is your heart. See what God primarily wants from you and the law. God wants your absolute allegiance. God wants your soul, isn't he the God of the universe? See, religion is about us. Religion is about what we can get from God by what we do, right? Religion is about us looking good to each other, us comparing ourselves to each other, us following a sent list. You want to 12 points, how to be a better person. But Christianity is about a relationship with the Holy Fire breathing God of all eternity.
This is bad news. What are we going to do? That's what Jesus is teaching this man. I think he is. I know he is. The first thing you have to see, you have to believe that you have been loved by God first, loved by God first. You hear that's the message of the gospel. What does that mean? The first thing to be loved by God means to be crushed by the law, be crushed by the law, sub rationalizing and how I have done this and how I have done this. Have I been a good enough parent? Have I been good enough worker? Have I been good enough at this? You tell yourself, have I kept the golden rule? I've tried hard. I've been a hard worker. I've done all that I could. It means that you absolutely give up on that whole attempt and realize that God's standard is too high, that the law is too perfect and you actually raise the white surrender flag. See the freest people in the world are those people who raised the surrender flag. You remember the surrender flag, Bugs Bunny? Remember the white flag he puts up remember? Dude, that's really something people do. The universal flag for surrender was white, why? Because even in the first century, when people would go to war, they had these mighty, vivid, bright war banners. War banners mean bring it on, but if the war is being lost, all you have is one white shirt. See the first thing about coming to Jesus and understanding his love is to realize that you're dealing with the judge and king of all the universe and how freeing it is to give up on the game of righteousness and to say surrender to him, I cannot be at war with you anymore. The reason you don't feel close to God is because you are unreconsiled in your minds to do God's holy law. Let it crush you this morning, see us Lewis, gotta get us Lewis quote in there, right? This is a really good one, because some of you are thinking to this or that, you know, this is too heavy for me or something. What's nobody says? This is so encouraging, a recovery of the old sense of sin is essential to Christianity. Christ takes it for granted that men are bad. So we really feel this assumption of his to be true, though we're part of the world he came to save, we're not actually part of the audience to whom his words are addressed. When we merely say that we're bad, the wrath of God seems like a barbarous doctrine, but when we actually perceive and taste that we are bad, it appears inevitable. What does that mean? It means this is the best news in the world, this is love, not that we love God, but that he loved us, and he sent his son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. If you are being crushed by the law of God this morning, don't be near the kingdom, be in it. What does that mean? It means realize that Jesus Christ kept the perfect law, love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself, Jesus Christ never broke it, not one time. He kept the perfect law of God and the penalty of that law, which was death, breaking the law equals death, Jesus Christ actually took that penalty for you on your behalf, cheer up folks. This is the greatest rescue plan ever. In Jesus Christ, the God of all eternity, who loves you, showed his love for you by sending his own son. He came here and died in your place. You can't keep the law, but Jesus kept it for you. I can't get over that, can you get over that? Please don't be one of those people say, I already understood that, I've got that, that's the gospel. Oh my goodness, leave. You don't ever get that. You just marvel at that. You marvel that the God of all the universe would love you so much he would send his own son. He would come here and die in your place. You can't keep the law, Jesus kept the law. Through the law, Paul says, I died to the law that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ. Do you hear what he says there? I have been crucified with Christ. I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life that I now live, I live by faith in the Son of God who gave himself for me. What does that mean? He says me, put your name in the blank. I'll care what you've done, who you are. I'll hopeless, you drag yourself in here today. When Paul says me, he means it's personal. It's personal, it's for you. That means you can stop playing games. How do I let it means this, that we're free to obey instead of obeying to be free? Some of you are trying so much to get your life together and follow the rules. We do it, we try to dot the eyes and cross the tees. We're trying to do it right, but folks, it's a new law. You will never get God's approval. You'll never feel like God loves you by trying to do right ever. You see, the law is no longer the past to God. The law was meant to show us who Jesus was. Jesus is the past to God. Embrace him. He is your friend. He's real. Now, he's been freed from condemnation. Romans 8, there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Let me say it again. There is therefore now no condemnation, zero condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. So stop condemning yourself. We do that because we're self-righteous. That means now that no matter what you do, you do the very best that you can and you bring it to God knowing that it's never going to be good enough to earn his favor. But you do it now out of gratitude. You are a free person now go and serve him. You know what that means? It means that the best sermon that I'll ever preach, and I hope you're there. The best sermon that I'll ever preach has to be washed in the blood of Jesus for it to be acceptable. You know why? Because Richie Sessions is preaching that sermon and Richie Sessions will always be a sinner. So that best work is still a filthy rag, but given to Jesus, Jesus makes it clean, makes it wide as snow, and God accepts it because Jesus did it. Do you realize how radically free that is? See, some of us are afraid to do anything, serve God or love our neighbor, love God or love anyone. You know why? Because we're such perfectionists. We think to ourselves, I'm not going to do it right. And God's saying, really, of course you're not going to do it right, but do it, do it because he loves you because his righteousness is complete. I went bowling last week with my brother and our wives and our children, and I had been bowling in probably 20 years. I'm a terrible boulder, that surprises you. But since I've been bowling, they invented these things known as bumpers. They pull up, you pull up these bumpers and these pieces of plastic lined the lane all the way to the gutter, spoiled children. I don't know the feeling and the shame of throwing a gutter ball. I'm not. So I decided, my children, they played with the bumpers, but me and my brother, we did it without it, the old school way, the right way, and we threw it, and I'll be honest with you out there with several gutter balls. There was a guy that was next to me. He was with his son, and he was throwing the ball, too, but he had the bumper up. And so he was throwing some, and sometimes he would hit one, and sometimes he would strike, and he would rejoice with the strike, like, dude, you have a bumper. How can you take any credit for that? He's like, he just hit one of it, too, and so, here's the point. The most wonderful thing happened when Jesus and Nazareth came into this world. The one speaking to this scribe, the scribe doesn't get it. The scribe is near, but he's not in, because the scribe still thinks he can do it. He still thinks he can get there and not throw a gutter ball. When Jesus Christ came into this world, he kept the commandments perfectly. He entered into the Holy of Holies. He stood righteous where Adam fell. Jesus wasn't. Jesus was glorious. Jesus stood. Jesus won. Jesus beat death itself. Jesus makes all our absolutely filthy rags perfectly righteous. You know what that means? That in your Christian life, the bumper's up. In Christ, you can't throw a gutter ball eternally. See, Satan tells you and gets you to worry about your performance and how you're doing and how good you're getting and how much better you are. And you get worried. We start thinking that our relationship is still based on how we're doing. It'll never be that way. You know what it means? Be like my daughter. My four-year-old daughter, she walked up to the lane, never balling before, boom! And the ball just started going and going. And in every other case, back in the day, that ball would have been in the gutter. It was stopped in the gutter, but it made it and she could throw a spare. This is what I'm saying. You have been free to love. You have been free to love God. You have been free to use your gifts. The death of perfectionism, let it mark this church. Let us go. And if we hit one pin, we hit one pin. If we hit two, sometimes we hit a strike and we can give each other a high five. But folks, we are never going to stand before God based on our performance. Jesus is awesome. Lord Jesus, Satan has stolen the joy from so many people in this church. Satan has blinded the eyes of the self-righteous in this church. Lord we need you to come and take off the scales. We need to see how glorious you are. Lord we are self-righteous. We want our own righteousness. We want to trust in our own things. Lord let us not be near the kingdom. Let us be in the kingdom. We ask in Jesus' name. Amen.