Speaker 1: Good morning.
Speaker 1: My name is Stephanie Stevens and I have the privilege of reading God's word.
Speaker 1: So if you would like to turn in your Bibles to Mark 1228 through 34 one of the teachers at a law came and heard them debating, noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer.
Speaker 1: He asked him of all the commandments, which is the most important, the most important one answered, Jesus is this here, O Israel, the Lord our God.
Speaker 1: The Lord is one, love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.
Speaker 1: The second is this, love the Lord.
Speaker 1: Love your neighbor as yourself.
Speaker 1: There is no commandment greater than these well said teacher.
Speaker 1: 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 and 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.
Speaker 1: When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, you are not far from the kingdom of God.
Speaker 1: And from then on, no one dared asked him any more questions.
Speaker 2: [inaudible]
Speaker 3: so in light of that news, I've wrestled a bit, even though we're in the middle of a study of Mark's gospel, what is it, Lord, that you'd have me preach?
Speaker 3: You know, these next several Sundays, especially leading up to you meeting and and hearing from our, our candidate for our next lead teaching pastor.
Speaker 3: You know, somebody suggested to me, well, you could do as short series on the care and feeding of your new pastor.
Speaker 3: You know, not a bad idea.
Speaker 3: Thought a little bit about that.
Speaker 3: But where my heart really was going as I was thinking and praying is, you know, I've been here a little over two years.
Speaker 3: It'll be two and a half years probably by the time I'm done.
Speaker 3: What is on my heart after spending that time with all of you to leave you with.
Speaker 3: After all that we have gone through, especially those of you who have been faithful and you've, you've hung on through thick and thin, literally, uh, what is on my heart to leave you with?
Speaker 3: And at the same time I was looking at what's next in Mark chapter 12 and by God's Providence.
Speaker 3: The next section in our study of Mark is the passage that Stephanie just read where Jesus speaks about the two greatest commandments.
Speaker 3: And the more I thought about that and the more I prayed through that, I really came to the conclusion that I can't think of a better passage of scripture to focus on for the next several weeks as we prepare our hearts for candidating Sunday on November 22nd 24th excuse me.
Speaker 3: So I think as as, as we go further with this over the next couple of weeks as we stick with this same passage, the next couple of weeks, I think you're going to see how much it's about central and we're central zone, how much it's about where I think God desires to take central, how he desires to use this new lead teaching pastors.
Speaker 3: Part of that, but how he wants you all to be part of that, how you are a necessary part of that.
Speaker 3: So let me jump in really quick here.
Speaker 3: Let me just quickly set the setting, especially if you're new or you have not been part of our study of Mark up to this point.
Speaker 3: We've been working our way really over the last year through the gospel of Mark.
Speaker 3: We are in chapter 12 Jesus, by this stage in Mark's telling of what happened is in Jerusalem.
Speaker 3: He's just a couple days away from going to the cross where he died for our sins and what is happening in chapter 12 is building towards that.
Speaker 3: We saw a number of weeks ago in verses 13 through 17 that he's been challenged by the religious leaders, the fair season, the Herodians couple of weeks back or right after that, we looked at the next section, 18 to 27 he's challenged by the Sadducees and now today beginning in verse 28 we see a third challenge.
Speaker 3: The outcome is a little bit different, but again, it's a religious official.
Speaker 3: Ascribe a lawyer, a lawyer of religious law who asks him which commandment is the most important of all?
Speaker 3: Now that's a bit of a challenge, but it doesn't come from nowhere.
Speaker 3: This is, this was at that time a a hotly debated question by the Pharisees and the scribes and the other religious leaders, the uh, the Pharisees, the scribes, they took all of the old Testament law and somehow they gleaned out of that they, that there was 613 separate laws, separate precepts.
Speaker 3: And they further subdivided that down saying that 248 of those precepts, those commandments are what you must do.
Speaker 3: And the other 365 were prohibitions.
Speaker 3: Commandments, what you must not do.
Speaker 3: And so they debated with that many commandments, it's impossible to keep them all.
Speaker 3: So which ones should you keep, which were the weighty are the most important commandments?
Speaker 3: And they're thinking really like the thinking.
Speaker 3: I think of many people today is God graded on a curve or God graded on a scale.
Speaker 3: Think of that image of lady justice holding the tipping scales.
Speaker 3: And if you could really narrow down what are the weightiest the heaviest, the most important commandments, and you could focus your energy on keeping those commandments.
Speaker 3: You know, you would weight the scale down in your favor so that even, you know, all of the maybe hundreds you didn't keep perfectly would be outweighed and somehow God would give you a passing grade.
Speaker 3: And we may have no knowledge in our term current culture of 613 commandments, but we still, many people operate by that scale analogy.
Speaker 3: If I do enough good things to balance out the things that are bad things that I do or things that I should do that I don't, I'll get a passing grade and I'll be okay with God.
Speaker 3: And that really is the commonality here.
Speaker 3: We're not Jewish, we don't live under many of these commandments that applied in that culture at that time.
Speaker 3: But we still face the same question that they did.
Speaker 3: How can we make sure that we are our right with God?
Speaker 3: How can we make sure that we are in a right relationship with God and every generation sense that generation of, of the old Testament law and in this generation where Jesus is teaching.
Speaker 3: Every generation has really wrestled with answering that question and even in church history, there's been an attempt to answer that question.
Speaker 3: How do we looking at all those laws, all the old Testament law, how do we possibly make sure we get a grip on?
Speaker 3: What should we keep?
Speaker 3: What do we let go?
Speaker 3: How do we know when we've done enough?
Speaker 3: How do we know when we're right with God?
Speaker 3: And here I'm going to take just a little bit of a diversion, although it does address this question.
Speaker 3: I'm going to reach back into our Presbyterian history.
Speaker 3: You may not know this if you are recent to the church, but a the first 80 years from 1896 to 1974 of central church's existence, it was a Presbyterian church and there are some things that we have let go of from that, but there are some good things from that.
Speaker 3: That rich heritage of the Presbyterian church, the Cumberland Presbyterian Presbyterian church that are still part of our roots.
Speaker 3: And one of those though we don't refer to it hardly ever anymore, are the Westminster confessions, the Westminster confession of faith, the Westminster shorter catechism, the Westminster shorter catechism was simply a way of, of of people learning the essentials of Christian faith through a simple question, answer format.
Speaker 3: It was taught even to children.
Speaker 3: And I'm not by any means going to go through all the Westminster shorter catechism today, but I just want to give you four questions in a row that go to where Jesus is going here that really addressed the question that's being answered here.
Speaker 3: How can we make sure with 613 commandments that we are all right with God.
Speaker 3: And the first question, I'm going to jump in at verse 39 it is up on the screen.
Speaker 3: The language is a little dated.
Speaker 3: All right?
Speaker 3: But uh, but I think we can make it relevant.
Speaker 3: Question 39, what is the duty which God requires of man?
Speaker 3: That's just simply an old way of asking.
Speaker 3: Just what I asked.
Speaker 3: How can we know that we are in a right relationship with God?
Speaker 3: The answer, the duty which God requires of man is obedience to his revealed will the answer.
Speaker 3: How do you know you're in a right relationship with God?
Speaker 3: God has revealed what he wants from from us.
Speaker 3: God has revealed in his word what it means to be in a right relationship with him as we obey him.
Speaker 3: We are, uh, we are meeting the duty of God.
Speaker 3: What he requires.
Speaker 3: Question 40 takes it a step further.
Speaker 3: What did God revealed a man for the rule of his obedience?
Speaker 3: Okay, how do we know what in God's law that we are supposed to keep answer the rule which God revealed to man for his obedience was the moral law.
Speaker 3: You are obligated.
Speaker 3: I'm obligated.
Speaker 3: God calls us to live according to his moral law and that'll be defined in the next question, but just let me set apart from that the ceremonial law, there was a lot in the old Testament commandments in those 613 commandments that had to do with keeping the law of the sacrifices and keeping a law of the feasts and keeping a law of of how to behave in the temple, in the tabernacle.
Speaker 3: Jesus fulfilled all those on the cross.
Speaker 3: We no longer are under the ceremonial law.
Speaker 3: Many of those 613 commandments where we're part of the civil law, they were God for the nation of Israel at that time, giving laws of what to do, what justice looked like and and that's past.
Speaker 3: We are no longer living and in old Testament Israel or first century Israel, what is not passed?
Speaker 3: What is still in effect is the moral law and question 42 gets to what that is.
Speaker 3: Where is the moral law summarily comprehended?
Speaker 3: Again, kind of a wordy way of saying, well, how do I know what the moral law is?
Speaker 3: How do I know what God requires to keep me up to keep for the moral law?
Speaker 3: The answer, the moral law is some merrily comprehended in the 10 commandments.
Speaker 3: You want to know a summation of the moral law of what God requires of you and me to be in a right relationship with him.
Speaker 3: You simply go to Exodus 20 or Deuteronomy five and you see the 10 commandments.
Speaker 3: You shall have no other gods before me.
Speaker 3: You shall not make an image, a graven image.
Speaker 3: You shall not take my name in vain.
Speaker 3: You shall keep an honor my Sabbath.
Speaker 3: You show honor your father and mother.
Speaker 3: You should not commit murder.
Speaker 3: You should not commit adultery.
Speaker 3: You shall not steal.
Speaker 3: You shall not bear false witness or lie testimony.
Speaker 3: You shall not covet all of the moral law.
Speaker 3: All of the rest of the commandments flows out of one or more of those.
Speaker 3: So it's kind of like, I don't know if this illustration is going to work for most of you, but when I was in law school, the hardest class I took was tax law.
Speaker 3: Now, tax law, as you can imagine, is incredibly complicated.
Speaker 3: In the 30 some years since I've been in law school, it's gotten even more complicated.
Speaker 3: Tax law started with this body of law that is spun its way out and all kinds of regulations that are constantly being added to no tax attorney.
Speaker 3: Even he, if he or she spends 100% of their time on tax law, can possibly keep up with all of the tax law that has what I grappled with in law school.
Speaker 3: How do I figure this all out?
Speaker 3: Couldn't it just be summed up in a few basic principles?
Speaker 3: And that is what the Westminster shorter catechism tells us God has done in the 10 commandments.
Speaker 3: All of God's law can be understood through the 10 commandments.
Speaker 3: And now Jesus says it gets even simpler than that.
Speaker 3: And question 42 addresses this.
Speaker 3: Well, what is the sum, if you could boil down what is the sum of the 10 commandments?
Speaker 3: Answer the some of the 10 commandments is this.
Speaker 3: To love the Lord your God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our strength.
Speaker 3: And with all our mind and our neighbors as ourselves.
Speaker 3: Hello, that's just what we heard Jesus say.
Speaker 3: An answer to this question, he gave us the greatest commandment and the second greatest commandment, and so all of the 10 commandments and ultimately all of God's moral law can be summed up in what Jesus teaches here in Mark chapter 12 the two I've used this image before.
Speaker 3: If you think of two tablets of the law, Jesus or Moses brought down from Mount Sinai two tablets of stone.
Speaker 3: If you think of that first tablet bearing the first four commandments, you shall have no other gods before me.
Speaker 3: You shall not take the, you shall not make any graven images.
Speaker 3: You shall not misuse the Lord's name.
Speaker 3: You shall keep the Lord's Sabbath.
Speaker 3: All of those flow out of what it means to love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength and the second tablet commandments five through 10 covering honoring parents and, and, and adultery and murder and lying and, and coveting all of those fall out of the second greatest commandment.
Speaker 3: They are all part of what it means.
Speaker 3: They all flow out of what it means to love your neighbor as yourself.
Speaker 3: So if you and I, if we want to know what God requires of us to be an a right relationship with him, Jesus says it really all boils down to this.
Speaker 3: Do you love God?
Speaker 3: Do you love God as your Lord with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength, and are you loving your neighbor as yourself?
Speaker 3: So my plan over the next three weeks, just so you know where I'm going, you can plan your Sundays accordingly.
Speaker 3: Is this Sunday we're going to look at the greatest commandment, the first one, the next two Sundays, we're going to look at the second greatest commandment.
Speaker 3: And then the final Sunday before candidating weekend, November 17th is going to be a special communion service because I see all of this building and leading and preparing us for that.
Speaker 3: So the the greatest commandment back to Mark chapter 12 where did Jesus get this greatest commandments?
Speaker 3: How could he say that this was the greatest commandment?
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 3: He didn't just pull that out of the air.
Speaker 3: He reached back into what is probably the most well known scripture, the well known verse passage in all of the old Testament for Jews.
Speaker 3: Deuteronomy six four and five hear O Israel.
Speaker 3: The Lord is one God and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength.
Speaker 3: This scripture, there's probably for Jews there was no more well known scripture.
Speaker 3: This is the scripture that was essentially the cornerstone of their faith.
Speaker 3: They recited this good religious Jews once in the morning, once at night, every day.
Speaker 3: When I was a, I had the privilege of visiting Israel two summers ago.
Speaker 3: One of the things that I saw both on houses of, of Jews living there and in the shops is, is these these little boxes sometimes made of wood, sometimes made of clay called mezuzahs and that they would be, they would be attached to the doorframe, the front of the front door of a Jewish families house.
Speaker 3: And as I, as I asked about, well what is a mezuzah all about, I was told, well, there is a scroll of paper in that, that that little box, Oh, what's on that scroll of paper.
Speaker 3: Deuteronomy six four and five.
Speaker 3: You show there is only one God and you shall love this God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength by by putting that up there saying, this is what this house is all about.
Speaker 3: This is what this family is all about.
Speaker 3: This is the cornerstone of our faith.
Speaker 3: And it begins in Deuteronomy six four which Jesus recites in verse 29 here when he says, this is most important, Jesus said, listen Israel or hear O Israel, the Lord our God.
Speaker 3: The Lord is one the basis of even the first commandment as well as the second greatest commandment.
Speaker 3: This truth there is only one true God.
Speaker 3: Now, that may seem obvious to some of you, especially if you've grown up in church.
Speaker 3: It was not at all obvious in that day.
Speaker 3: They lived in a culture where there were all other cultures of other nations surrounding them that they all had their, they had a whole host of small G gods, and so the first assertion was this Yahweh, the Lord is the only one, true God.
Speaker 3: And even today that that same polytheism that existed in that time exists in in some actual ways.
Speaker 3: There are certainly lots of people in our culture who religiously worship other gods, but in practical ways, we in our culture make gods out of money.
Speaker 3: We make gods out of sex, we make gods out of you, name it, and so there is a polytheism that even infects our culture where it needs to be.
Speaker 3: Repeatedly said, we need to come back to this foundation that there is only one true God.
Speaker 3: The apostle Paul says it this way in first Corinthians eight some people actually worship many gods and many Lords as people you know.
Speaker 3: That's probably who you were certainly who I was but for us followers of Jesus, there is only one God, the father by whom all things were created and for whom we live and there is only one Lord Jesus Christ.
Speaker 3: Through whom all things were created and through whom we live.
Speaker 3: You realize you just sang that.
Speaker 3: I didn't even catch this until we just sang it.
Speaker 3: You just sang the affirmation when you sang, if you meant it from your heart, you are the God above it all.
Speaker 3: There is no higher name.
Speaker 3: There is no higher throne.
Speaker 3: You are affirming.
Speaker 3: Deuteronomy six four you are affirming what Jesus says here and verse 29 the Lord is one.
Speaker 3: There is only one true God and so we love God as he calls us here because he is the one true God.
Speaker 3: He is our creator.
Speaker 3: We acknowledge he is our sustainer.
Speaker 3: We are live only because of him.
Speaker 3: He is our faithful father.
Speaker 3: He is our Lord.
Speaker 3: He is our King.
Speaker 3: He is ultimately our judge.
Speaker 3: But how are we to love God?
Speaker 3: Jesus quotes the second part of what's called the Shamar.
Speaker 3: Deuteronomy six four and five answering how we're to love God in verse 30 love the Lord your God with all of your heart and with all of your soul and with all of your mind in all of your strength.
Speaker 3: And I think the first truth that we need to note here is the nature of the love that we're to love God with Jesus is very deliberate in his choice of words.
Speaker 3: The Holy spirit has been very deliberate in his preservation of the words that we have.
Speaker 3: This is not the Greek word for love flail, which means a love of, of, of feeling, a love of affection, a love of sentimentality.
Speaker 3: In other words, while certainly loving God with our emotions and our feelings and our affection is part of loving God.
Speaker 3: That's not ultimately what Jesus base is the love we're to have for God on.
Speaker 3: We don't measure our love by whether we're moved by music in a service we don't measure our love by whether we're emotionally impacted by an alter call.
Speaker 3: Jesus instead uses the word here AGA power.
Speaker 3: It's the word that I got.
Speaker 3: A love is rooted in and a God, a love really in the context that Jesus uses it.
Speaker 3: Here is is the love that is willful.
Speaker 3: The love that is determined, the love that is a decision that you and I make as followers of Jesus day in and day out, the love that is even sacrificial at times and living out that decision.
Speaker 3: Jesus calls us here too.
Speaker 3: I love that perseveres for God even when our feelings are in one of those roller coasters and we happened to be based on maybe what's happening in our life at the bottom of of that roller coaster track, Jesus calls us to a love for God here that makes even the hard decisions of active obedience, that loving God and following Jesus often means the decisions that our culture would press back on and and and even persecute us for.
Speaker 3: That's the kind of love that Jesus speaks here.
Speaker 3: This I've got a love for God is to come.
Speaker 3: Jesus says from every facet of our human personality and then he names for our hearts and our soul and our mind and our strength and while there's considerable overlap in these, the these each do address a S a separate part of our personality that God wants all of our personality, all of these facets and worshiping him.
Speaker 3: Let's look at those.
Speaker 3: First of all, we're to love God with all our heart.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 3: Now heart here is the Greek word Kardia where we get our word cardiac or cardiologists from, but he's not talking about that Oregon that that pumps blood in our body.
Speaker 3: He's talking about the non material part of us that that really is, I guess we could call our our command center.
Speaker 3: It's our our inner most self that people can't see just by looking at us on the outside where we make our moral and spiritual choices.
Speaker 3: I can look at you and you can be dressed or you can look at me and see nothing external that we're there.
Speaker 3: That would give me any reason to question where you stand with God, but inside in that inner most self, in that command center in the heart, that is where you and I choose either for God or against God.
Speaker 3: It's in our heart that we either reject God or we surrender to him.
Speaker 3: That's why Paul says in Romans 10 10 it's with the heart that a person believes resulting in righteousness, resulting in them being made righteous by Christ.
Speaker 3: It's in that command center.
Speaker 3: It's that moral and spiritual choice that they make for God or against God, for Christ or against Christ.
Speaker 3: Now here's the thing.
Speaker 3: Even when I hear the call to love God with all of my heart, with that command center, with making that choice, you know what?
Speaker 3: I have a huge problem and so to you, I can't make that choice on my own because we're all born in sin.
Speaker 3: We're all born infected with Adam and Eve's rejection of God, their rebellion of God.
Speaker 3: And what this has done is it's made our hearts sick and throughout scripture we see this.
Speaker 3: Let me just point out one place.
Speaker 3: Jeremiah 17 nine the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick who can understand it?
Speaker 3: That's my heart.
Speaker 3: That's your heart apart from Christ.
Speaker 3: Work in our lives.
Speaker 3: It is deceitful and there are many ways our hardest, probably deceitful, but you know probably the most significant is our hearts.
Speaker 3: Our self deceived our hearts to see us, that we're good enough or that we're good people or we're not as bad as as those other people that we know.
Speaker 3: Our hearts deceive us, that that, that we, what we feel in our hearts is, is a true, genuine love for God and our hearts are desperately sick.
Speaker 3: Our hearts are impaired, even though we understand the concept that we're to love God, even though we may even feel some things like that apart from Christ on our own, we're unable to love God.
Speaker 3: We cannot love God unless we have a heart transplant.
Speaker 3: That's what we really need.
Speaker 3: A spiritual heart transplant.
Speaker 3: We need God to do what we can't.
Speaker 3: We need him to transplant, to exchange our sick heart for a heart, a new heart that is able to love God.
Speaker 3: And that's exactly what God said he would do.
Speaker 3: God promised it in the old Testament is Eko 36 I will give you a new heart.
Speaker 3: I will put a new spirit within you.
Speaker 3: I will remove your heart of stone that hard, that is hard, that heart that is incapable of loving God.
Speaker 3: And I will give you a heart of flesh, a soft heart, a heart that able to allow the Holy spirit to change our hearts.
Speaker 3: So we can love God.
Speaker 3: That is what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.
Speaker 3: If you've embraced him as savior.
Speaker 3: And Lord Paul says in Ephesians three that you embrace Christ as savior and Lord Christ dwells or lives in your heart by his Holy spirit.
Speaker 3: And as he does this, he roots and grounds you in love.
Speaker 3: He enables you to love God and ultimately as we'll see the next couple of weeks to love other people.
Speaker 3: So even before I go on to the second aspect of our personality, I need to ask this morning for you to answer in your own mind, in your own heart.
Speaker 3: Have you surrendered your heart to Jesus Christ?
Speaker 3: Have you allowed him into that command center where you make your moral and spiritual choices and and made him your savior, made him your Lord, made him your King and if you have, are you daily yielding your heart to him?
Speaker 3: I surrendered my life to Christ years ago.
Speaker 3: Daily.
Speaker 3: I have to yield my heart to him again.
Speaker 3: This is the only way that you and I can love God with all of our heart.
Speaker 3: Well, we're also called to love God with all of our soul and that term soul is used in throughout the Bible in a variety of ways.
Speaker 3: So we really have to look at the context of how Jesus is using it here.
Speaker 3: And the particular word that Jesus uses that is translated in the English as soul is suitcase.
Speaker 3: It's the word that we get our English word, psyche from the word.
Speaker 3: That's where we get psychology from, that that whole realm of emotions and feelings and so in the context of this verse, solar suitcase refers to that inner part of you that that is really the source of your emotional life.
Speaker 3: What is Jesus calling us to here?
Speaker 3: Think of your soul is Jesus speaks of it as as all your emotions, all of your feelings, all your affections, what you desire, what you are truly passionate about, and in calling you and me to love God with all of our soul, God is saying that while there are many things in your life that you desire, that you have affection for, and maybe spouse, family members, certain activities that that all may be good things above it all above all of your desires and affections and passions all ultimately, he must be the Supreme source of joy in our lives.
Speaker 3: You may get joy out of relationships.
Speaker 3: You may get joy out of experiences.
Speaker 3: All of those have to be lower than what God is to be in our life.
Speaker 3: He is to be the Supreme source of joy in our lives.
Speaker 3: But again, we have a huge problem.
Speaker 3: You and me, the problem is really described I think, by the PO, by Paul in second Timothy chapter three when he writes about how people will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.
Speaker 3: Here's the bad news.
Speaker 3: We are those people, okay?
Speaker 3: Apart from Christ, the things we love, our turn inward, we love ourselves.
Speaker 3: We love money or what we think money will buy.
Speaker 3: We love pleasure rather than loving God.
Speaker 3: We elevate even the good things that God has created for us to love above our love for God or we sweep him out of the picture entirely.
Speaker 3: And so because we are born in sin, our emotions, our loves, our desires, our passions, they have been turned inward and the good things that God has created, we love too much and the things that God has said, these are harmful for you and warned us against because they will hurt us.
Speaker 3: We decided, we love as well.
Speaker 3: Our emotions have been disfigured.
Speaker 3: Our affections have been disfigured.
Speaker 3: What we need is for God to transform our desires, our affections, our passions, and that's just what he's done for us in Jesus Christ.
Speaker 3: Paul writes can collagen's three that when you embrace Jesus as savior and Lord he raises you, he resurrects you spiritually with Christ, just as he has physically and spiritually resurrected Jesus Christ.
Speaker 3: And in doing so, that resurrection begins to transform you.
Speaker 3: He writes so that we begin to seek or to desire the things that are above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.
Speaker 3: He reorients our desires.
Speaker 3: Doesn't mean that you stopped loving your spouse, your family, the other good things in your life.
Speaker 3: It means that it's put in proper order, that the proper priority is we love God more than anything else.
Speaker 3: And so again, even before going on, I need to ask, have you been raised with Christ?
Speaker 3: If you experienced that spiritual resurrection, that begins when you embrace Christ as savior, when you embraced him as Lord and King of your life, and if you have, are you letting him change your desires?
Speaker 3: That's a day by day process.
Speaker 3: We call it sanctification, where he reorients your desires.
Speaker 3: He he reprioritizes your desires.
Speaker 3: That is the only way that you and I can love God with all of our soul.
Speaker 3: Well, we're also called to love God with all of our mind.
Speaker 3: And here Jesus is speaking about not, not, not the brain, the Oregon in our head, he's speaking about all our thought patterns, all our ideas, all our opinions.
Speaker 3: Mind is Jesus uses it here.
Speaker 3: It's not about intelligence.
Speaker 3: It's not.
Speaker 3: You take an IQ and, and, and you know that IQ test tells us how much you love God or not.
Speaker 3: It's really about what the Bible calls wisdom, how you perceive the world, how you sift truth from error, how you ultimately make decisions based upon your opinions and your thought patterns and your ideas.
Speaker 3: And so to love God with all of our minds means that we submit our thought patterns, we submit our ideas, we submit our opinions to God's word.
Speaker 3: It means that using the phrase from Proverbs three we do not lean on our own human understanding.
Speaker 3: It means that we lean instead on what the word of God has revealed to be right and true in his word.
Speaker 3: But again, you and I have a huge problem.
Speaker 3: All human beings have this problem apart from Christ.
Speaker 3: Sin has the Bible says darkened our minds.
Speaker 3: That's what Paul describes in Romans one 21 he says that when we reject God, as we all naturally do, here's the result.
Speaker 3: Their thinking becomes nonsense and their senseless minds are darkened.
Speaker 3: Now we see this in society all around us and maybe if you like me can look back at your pre Christian life.
Speaker 3: You can look back at the way you thought back then and what your opinions and thought patterns were and you can see how dark and they were like I can see in my life the reality is apart from Christ, when when people reject God, when they even deny his existence, you know that that whole concept of truth, it becomes subjective.
Speaker 3: It becomes essentially meaningless.
Speaker 3: I mean, think today of what our culture, our unbelieving culture is presently doing with what God's word says is true about gender, about biological sex.
Speaker 3: And you see this darkening of the mind.
Speaker 3: You see this thinking, becoming nonsense apart from Christ.
Speaker 3: And so what we need is for God to shine the light of his truth into our dark and minds.
Speaker 3: And in doing so, to transform our foolish thinking into biblical wisdom.
Speaker 3: And that again is what he does through Christ.
Speaker 3: Many places I could point to, but Romans 12 comes to mind.
Speaker 3: Romans 12 two here is what he does.
Speaker 3: He transforms us in Christ by the renewing of our minds so that we may discern, we may what is good and pleasing and the perfect will of God.
Speaker 3: That's the work that God does in Christ and transforming ultimately our minds.
Speaker 3: Again, I must ask, do you look to God?
Speaker 3: And what he's revealed in his word is the ultimate definition of reality, the ultimate source of your truth.
Speaker 3: If not, that's where it needs to begin.
Speaker 3: You have to turn to him through Christ, not to what our culture says is true and right, and if you have, are you letting Jesus Christ and in the work of his Holy spirit transform you by the renewing of your minds?
Speaker 3: Again, a day by day process a process as we're involved, as we're connected with him in prayer and in his word and with other believers, this friends is the only way that we can come to love God with all of our minds.
Speaker 3: Well, finally we're called to love God with all of our strength and again, the context is important to know what Jesus is talking about here in the context of this verse.
Speaker 3: I believe that Jesus uses the term strength to mean all your human abilities, all your human talents, all your, your human energies, all your powers and including even your, what you possess physically, you're your human possessions.
Speaker 3: Even even your wealth where we spend our energies, how we use our abilities, what we do with our possessions and our wealth, it really all reflects how much we love God or how little we love God with all of our strength.
Speaker 3: But again, our sinful condition has impaired us.
Speaker 3: Many places in scripture stand out to make this point.
Speaker 3: But my mind took me back to Jeremiah 17 he speaks about how apart from Christ, apart from God's work in our life, we make flesh our strength.
Speaker 3: I take confidence in my human abilities and what I've learned to do in my educational and occupational achievements.
Speaker 3: I take confidence in my, my attractiveness.
Speaker 3: I take confidence in my physical strength.
Speaker 3: I take confidence in, in what I've accumulated financially or in my material possessions.
Speaker 3: And we trust in mankind.
Speaker 3: We let culture dictate what it means to, to, to live right and, and what makes us strong.
Speaker 3: And in doing so, Jeremiah writes, our sin turns our hearts away from the Lord.
Speaker 3: There's no way we can love God in that kind of posture.
Speaker 3: We need again, God to turn us around.
Speaker 3: We need him to change us so that instead we trust in the Lord that our confidence is not in our own human strength or abilities or wealth or possessions, but our confidence is in the Lord.
Speaker 3: And that is what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.
Speaker 3: Jesus not only redeems us from our sinful condition, he reorients our life.
Speaker 3: He reorients our life's purpose so that we more and more begin to use all our energies, all our strengths, all our abilities, all our powers, all our possessions to further his kingdoms, purpose, to bring more people into his kingdom, and therefore the only way that we can love God with all our strength is by serving the Lord Jesus, turning to him, surrendering to him, serving him with all that we are and all that we have my desire for central church.
Speaker 3: Even as I think about this first part of what Jesus says here, this greatest commandment, my desire is that individually as individual believers and together collectively as a, as the body of Christ, that you would increasingly live out, that you would live out together what it means to love the Lord your God with all of your heart and all of your soul and all of your mind and all of your strength that you would increase in the li love, the Lord your God, more than you would love the glory days of central church, the perceived past history of central church, that you would increasingly love the Lord your God more than the traditions of the church, that you would increasingly love the Lord your God more than your preferences about worship style or your favorite program or your favorite class, that you would increasingly love the Lord your God even more than your pastures.
Speaker 3: You know, I, I have to prepare the new pastor coming in that there is a tendency that has its good parts and it's dangerous parts in the history of, of central that they love the central loves its pastor.
Speaker 3: Particularly the one who brings the word and at times in the history of central, I'm here to tell you as one who gets to leave in case you don't like what I'm saying here, at times you have loved your pastor too much.
Speaker 3: At times you have raised your pastor too high to the place that belongs to Christ.
Speaker 3: And so my desire is that you would increasingly love the Lord your God with all of your heart and all of your soul and all of your mind even more than this man who is just a man that God is bringing in and as you do so as you do so, it will make it even more possible for what we're going to go into next week.
Speaker 3: The two weeks to love your neighbor as yourself, to love your neighbors who are sitting among you, to love your neighbors who were in the first service, to love your neighbors who are across the parking lot, who are going to attempt to minister today too in our fall festival, to love your neighbors throughout our community and around the world.
Speaker 3: Jesus calls us to love the Lord our God with all of our heart and all of our soul and all of our mind and all of our strength.
Speaker 3: Let's pray.
Speaker 2: Jesus, thank you
Speaker 3: for bringing your word to life.
Speaker 3: Thank you for focus kissing us on what is really important and you even more for doing an ice.
Speaker 3: What was impossible for us to do.
Speaker 3: We can't love God like this on her own.
Speaker 3: No matter how hard we try, Lord Jesus, apart from you and your work in our life, we're bankrupt to love God this way.
Speaker 3: Thank you Lord, that in you coming into our lives and in your Holy spirit, taking up residence in our hearts that we are able to increasingly love God with all of our heart, with with our moral and spiritual decisions, with all of our soul, our emotions, our affections are our passions, our desires with all of our mind, our thought patterns, our opinions, and with all of our strength, our abilities, our energies, even our possessions.
Speaker 3: Lord, increasingly make us people who love the Lord God with all of our hearts and make us people who love our neighbors as ourselves.
Speaker 3: For your glory and your name, amen.