Deuteronomy 6:4-5 | Communion in Love

Listen to this week’s sermon, Communion in Love preached by Rev. Benjamin Kandt from Deuteronomy 6:4-5.

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Welcome And Prayer

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 0:06

Hello everyone. This is Pastor Benjamin. You're listening to Sermon Audio from New City, Orlando. At New City, we long to see our Father answer the Lord's Prayer. For more resources, visit our website at Newcity Orlando.com.

Mendel Julien 0:22

Join with me in the prayer of illumination. Heavenly Father, may your word be a lamp to our feet and a light to our path through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Reading The Great Commandment

Mendel Julien 0:36

Today we're going to be reading in Deuteronomy 6, verse 4 and 5. Hear, O Israel. The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. This is the reading of God's word.

Why We Argue About The Greatest

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 0:59

Jordan or LeBron? Messi or Ronaldo? Hendricks or Van Halen? You know, Jason talked a little bit ago about how we we value Christian unity here, and I think I just messed that up. So but what is it about us that uh we want to know, we want to debate who is first and who is great. What is that in us? And it's not just a modern proclivity, it's actually an ancient experience as well. In fact, in the around the first century AD, there was a lively debate about what God expects of humanity. Now, I mean, everybody, if you believe that there's a God, you would assume that that God probably has some expectations for us as human creatures. But the Jewish people had uh a pretty big book, what we call our Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, and in there there were 613 laws, commands. And so this debate, this conversation was between teachers of this book about which is the one rule to rule them all, if you will. And in the course of that conversation, there's one uh story that I think kind of heightens this debate. You see, there was a rabbi named Shemai, and Rabbi Shemmai was approached by a Gentile who is a non-Jew, and the Gentile came to him and said, Listen, I will convert to your Jewish faith if you can summarize the Torah, that is the commands, the teachings of Scripture. If you can summarize the Torah while I stand on one foot. And Shemmai responded by hitting him with a stick, apparently. I mean, this is what the history says. Uh, he was not having it. I think his heart didn't like the reductionism, this attempt to minimize all that God requires to something so simple. Now, there was a maybe a kinder rabbi named Rabbi Hallel, and this same Gentile went to Rabbi Hallel, he's brave, courageous, apparently Gentile. He goes to Hillel, he says the same thing. I will convert to your Jewish faith if you can teach me the Torah while I stand on one foot. To which Hallel replies, whoever, what whatever you find hateful, do not do that to someone else. That is the entirety of the Torah. Everything else is commentary. That's what he said. Now you can notice Hillel defined the great, the first and great commandment horizontally, how we relate to one another. That's important. But then about a generation, into the ring steps the heavy hitter, Rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth. And

Jesus Defines What Comes First

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 3:38

in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus is asked this question Teacher or Rabbi, which is the first and great command in the law? To which Jesus replies, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart, with all of your soul, with all of your mind, and with all of your strength, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself. And he adds some comments to it too. He says in Matthew's gospel, This is the first and great commandment. Upon it depends all of the law and the prophets. Now we think it's lost on us what happened in that moment. Jesus changed human history forever with that phrase. He finally defined for us what is first and what is great in the heart of God for humanity. It's to love God with all of yourself and to love your neighbor as yourself. This is a brilliant moment in human history. Jesus tells us what is the goat, the greatest of all texts, in the Bible. It's Deuteronomy 6, it's Leviticus 19. He brings those together and he says, This is the entirety, the summary of what God calls humans to live into. And so today we we actually begin a series through the book of Deuteronomy, starting today, going all the way through until Advent. But we're going to spend these three weeks lingering on Deuteronomy chapter six because of the importance of this chapter in all the Bible. So if you have a Bible or a device, go ahead and get Deuteronomy chapter six in front of you. We're going to only look at verses four and five today. The following weeks we'll take up more of the text together. But

What Love Means In Scripture

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 5:24

before we get there, um there's something I have to do before we start, which is I have to define a question that's been been asked for a long time, but at least since 1993, when the great Trinidadian singer Hathaway asked the question, What is love? Baby, don't hurt me. What is love? Romantic poets and philosophers have been meditating on this question for a long time. What is love? Well, I want to submit to you a definition that I don't have time to defend, but you can bear with me. The definition of love, I think, from scripture is love is self-giving in allegiance, action, and affection for the good of the beloved. Love is self-giving in allegiance, action, and affection for the good of the beloved. And so when we take up the text and we look at this call to loving God, this is what the call is to do. So look with me at the text. We're gonna go verse by verse through this passage. Look at verse 4.

The Lord Is One Alone

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 6:22

It says this, Hero Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. I'm gonna pause there for a moment. Because something is happening in this text, and people debate what does it mean that the Lord is one? And there's really only two options, and I actually think both are not only equally true, but I think both are on the heart of God and in the mind of Moses when he inspires this passage. The first way in which the Lord is one is that the Lord is alone. The Lord is unrivaled, you could say. And you know that this is true because the first of the Ten Commandments is, you shall have no other gods before me. What does it mean for our God to be one? It's that our God is alone and unrivaled in our affections and in our allegiance and in our action. But there's a second possible meaning here, which is the Lord is one in that the Lord is not only unrivaled but undivided. God is not duplicitous in any way, shape, or form. All of God does, all that God does. The reason why that's good news is you just watch the Odyssey, for instance. You've got the Greek gods are constantly baiting and switching human beings. You have them feigning that this is what they're after when really behind the scenes they're after that over there. The God, the true and living God revealed to us in Scripture, is nothing like those gods. This God is undivided. Hero Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. There is a unity to the person of God. There is a unity to the heart, the soul, and the strength

The Lord Is One Undivided

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 8:05

of God. That is so important for us if we're going to have any kind of a unity in our devotion to that God. Let me say that differently. Because the Lord is one, that's why you're called to be one in your love for that Lord. All this language of all your heart, all your soul, all your strength comes from the fact that there is a oneness in God, a unity in God, a wholeness, an integrity in God, and it evokes, it calls forth a wholeness and an integrity in you. Let me just make that plain real quick before we jump into these four capacities to love. Some of you are exhausted today because you are a divided person. There are parts of you that have been given in loyalty, in love to something over here and something over here simultaneously. And so you feel attention internally because you are a divided person. This text in Deuteronomy 6, it's called the Shema. The Shema is after healing your whole person. Healing your whole person as you recenter, realign your very being in the love of God and God alone.

Loving God With The Heart

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 9:24

So, with that, I want to talk about first the four capacities of love that we see in our text here. The four capacities of love, the first one is the heart. The heart is our loyalty. That's what I'm kind of shorthanding that. But but in scripture, the heart is the CEO of the self. You see, a CEO has some decisions they have to make for their business, for their company. And one of the ways they make those decisions is they have ordered priorities, right? Priority number one is going to shape decisions more than anything else. That's what happens. If your love, if your loyalty is from the heart for God, your love of God will be the highest priority in your existence. Decisions, actions, choices will flow from this ultimate and highest loyalty. Now, another way to say this is you have uh a solar system within you of sorts. And in our solar system, the sun is the center of the solar system, and it is 99.86% of the mass of our entire solar system is found in the sun. All the other planets, all the other moons, all the other asteroids are whatever the remainder of 99.86 is. I'm not good at math. What do I mean by that? Until the Lord, the true and living God, is the center of your solar system, your life will be exorbitant. Nothing will orbit around the center in the way that it is meant to. Things will not be held in harmony like you were designed for until your loyalties, your heart, is given to the true and living God first and foremost. And so another way to say this is what God wants of you is the opposite of what Henry Ford wanted from his workers on his assembly line. He is quoted in saying, Why do I keep getting whole persons when all I want is some hands? What does he mean by that? Henry Ford was frustrated that he had to care for the whole person of his worker when really all he wanted was somebody who could pull a lever on an assembly line. What Yahweh wants is the exact opposite from you. If he has your hands but not your heart, it's worthless to him. If he has your lips but not your heart, later prophets say, these people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. And it is, it just it drives God crazy if I could say that. Because he wants you and he wants all of you, starting with the center of you, which is your heart. This is your place of loyalty. Now, you may not experience this uh as acutely as I'm about to describe it, but you and I are in a war. But the war is fought on the battlefield for the allegiance of the human heart. Every day and in every way, there is a battle between good and evil, vying for your highest allegiance. And that tension between good and evil, that that pole, it actually runs through each and every one of us. But it runs directly through the human heart. Alexander Soljanitsyn, who spent time in a Soviet Union gulag, said it like this. The line separating good and evil passes not through states nor classes nor political parties, but right through every human heart. And through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years, and even within hearts that are overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains an unupprooted small corner of evil. End quote. Starting with the allegiance of the human heart. This is where good and evil are at war with one another. Now the Bible has a really robust psychology of the heart. Listen to this briefly. This is a few of the ways the heart can present itself in Scripture. The heart can be broken, grieved, discouraged, obstinate, proud, wicked, tremble, double, subtle, perverse, sorrowful, troubled, foolish, darkened, envious, jealous, impenitent, evil, unfaithful, deceitful, hard, scheming, diabolical, covetous, and many more things. I'll read you that list because as the Proverbs say in Proverbs 4, guard your heart with all vigilance, for from it flows the springs of life. Heart's really important. And it's why we begin

Loving God With The Soul

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 14:11

here. Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, but also all of your soul. All of your soul. That's the second capacity here. And the way I would describe your soul is it is your life. Psalm 103.1 says it like this Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name. Hebrew parallelism means that soul is equated with all that is within me. So that's the best definition of a soul. And that's important because we live in an interesting cultural moment. We as Christians live between some kind of Platonic views of body and soul and some secular views of there's maybe no such thing as a soul. And so let me just say this: you are not a soul with a body. That's not true of you. That's what Plato would say. But you're also not a body that might have a soul. That's what your fitness influencer would say. You are an embodied soul and an insoled body. Both matter, and they're you can't really disentangle them. Another way to say that is your soul and your body are the perspectives on the whole person from different vantage points. The soul from the inside out, the body from the outside in. Why does all this matter? Well, it matters because the soul is besides, let me say it this way: your soul is the most vast and profound creature in all of God's cosmos. You look at the stars and you wonder at the universe, and and that is not nearly as deep as the human soul. I believe that. There is a profundity and a depth to you as a human being. And what the scriptures say in Deuteronomy 6 is love the Lord your God with all of that soul. Leave nothing on the shelf. Don't leave a basement door unopened and locked, where God has no access to in your soul. Don't let that happen. Instead, love him with all of your soul. There's a writer named Henry Scougel, and he says it like this, and I wonder how you would fill in the blank here. He says this the worth and excellency of a soul is to be measured by. Fill in the blank. How would you measure the worth and excellency of a soul? By its achievements, maybe? By what other people say about that soul? This is how Henry Scougal finishes it. The worth and excellency of a soul is to be measured by the object of its love. A soul that is flourishing and fully alive is going to be one that has the object of its love as the true and living God. And we all know people who have de-humanized themselves, who become a shell of themselves because they have loved something lesser than, something without the worth and excellency that the object of that soul's love deserves. And so we are called to love the Lord our God with all of our soul.

Loving God With The Mind

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 17:13

And the third capacity is we love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, and mind. Some of you, astute Bible readers, you're like, mind isn't in the text, dude. It's not, you're right. But interestingly, all three times Jesus quotes this passage, he uses the word mind. Heart, soul, mind, and strength. Why does he do that? Well, I think because Jesus is, he loves his Greek neighbors. Jesus is a Jewish rabbi in a Greek context, and Greeks really like to analyze things and pull them apart. Hebraic thinking is a little bit more holistic. Greek thinking is a little bit more, we we like analyze things. I'm saying we because we're Western heirs of the Greek tradition. Uh, if that was too nerdy for you, just track back with me again. I'm gonna go from here. When Jesus says, love the Lord your God with all of your mind, he's making explicit something that was implicit in the Hebrew imagination. Because in the Hebrew Bible, you think with your heart, you imagine with your heart, you have dreams with your heart. And so Jesus is saying your entire intellectual life is unto the love of God. All of your thoughts, all of your cognitions, all of the images that fill your mind, all of the opinions you have, even that chatter that kind of rambles on, that little inner critic that won't shut up in the back of your head, the entirety of your mind is unto the love of God. This is why Paul says to take every thought captive, to serve Christ. Because even your mind, your mental life is unto the love of God. There is no domain in human psychology that is exempt from the entire total devoted commitment to the love of God.

Loving God With Your Strength

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 19:08

But now when we get to the fourth capacity, we move from the inside of a person to the outside of a person, if you if you will. The fourth capacity here is we love the Lord our God with all of our strength. And I'm using the word labor to summarize that. And what strength is, this this word in Hebrew is ma'od. And it's actually a weird word to use here because it means muchness. And if I just said, hey, love the Lord with all of your muchness or your variness. I don't know if you if that would really make sense. And really what the Hebrew text is getting at is it's saying, love the Lord your God with all of your effects on the world, all of your influence, all of the ways in which you have agency to shape and influence and form the people in the world around you. That's what it means to love the Lord with all of your strength. I'm saying your labor, your work. But this would also include your possessions, your transactions, your investments, your house and home, your family, like everything that you have stewardship over is to be dedicated to the whole strength, love of God. You can see how this would easily flow into culture making. Now he doesn't say just Christians that love God with all of those things. He says everybody is gonna love something with their heart, soul, mind, and strength, and that's gonna influence culture. And so the invitation of Deuteronomy 6 is not that you have just these like disparate components. It's actually a way of totalizing the whole person. You could think of this like almost like Russian nesting dolls, like your heart is within your soul, is it within your strength? Or differently, you could think of this as what's been called the fifth voice in a barbershop quartet. You got four people in a quartet by definition, and people will say there's almost this fifth voice that emerges from those four in perfect harmony. That's Deuteronomy 6. Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and something emerges from that, out of the totality of who you are. Where things, everything in your life is meant to be aligned and in harmony with one another. And this almost this fifth thing emerges where the uh the whole person is in love with God. That's the point of Deuteronomy 6.

The Four Stages Of Love

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 21:40

So, how do we become whole person lovers of the Lord? Well, that's the second thing I want to look at, which is there are four stages of love, four capacities of love, four stages of love. And I get these from uh a monk named Bernard of Clairvaux, he lived in like 1000s. A D. And he started a monastery in Clairvaux, France. And he was a hero of people like Martin Luther and John Calvin. Luther said he was the best monk that ever lived. I don't really know who I would have like up against him, who the goat monk is, but apparently it's Bernard of Clairvaux. And so Bernard of Clairvaux, uh, he wrote a book called On Loving God. You could read it this afternoon. It's great. And in there he says this love is the fountain of life. And the soul which does not drink from it cannot be called alive. So the question is, how do we live fully alive in the love of God? How do we do that? Well, he's got these four stages. Stage one is to love self for self's sake. Now, this is kind of how you're born. You could call this selfish love. It is. But it's not entirely wrong, provided you don't stay there. A lot of people stay there. They're really hard to be in a relationship with. Because to love self for self-safe is everything is self-referential. Everything is referenced back to my own interests, my own wants, my own desires. And we kind of live here for a little while until we have enough of ourselves. Anybody ever have enough of themselves? I know I have. And as we feel pain, we begin to look outside of ourselves because God in his severe mercy is puncturing our sense of self-sufficiency. And so what happens is we look outside ourselves to God and we begin to love God for self's sake. You could call this dependent love. This isn't wrong, but it is immature. There's a childishness to this kind of love. My children will often say to my wife or I, Mommy, I love you, Daddy, I love you. And it usually is on the back end of getting a candy. What's happening in that moment? They love me for their own sake. They love the gifts that I give to them. And a lot of us stall out here in our Christian maturity. We love God for what God gives us. If my life's going well, I'm like a wholehearted worshiper of God. Love Him. But here's the diagnostic. What happens when life doesn't go the way you want it to? What do you do when God isn't giving you what you want from God? Do you experience that deep disappointment that God is not coming through for you in the way you want Him to or expect Him to? Do you have a bitterness, a resentment, an offense in your heart towards God that's beginning to show up that actually is revealing that you relate to God more like a genie or a vending machine? This is what's dangerous about getting stalled out on stage two Christianity is you love God for what God can give you rather than loving God for God's sake. That's stage three. And the way that we love God for God's sake, Thomas Aquinas says it like this the heart and the soul and the mind and the strength, it says, love is born of an earnest consideration of the object love. In other words, you begin to love God for God's sake as you begin to know God and experience God as God is. The psalmist says it like this great is the Lord and greatly to be praised. Why are you praising the Lord right then? Because He's great, not because He's given you anything great. Or praise the Lord, O my soul. And it'll it will also say, Because the Lord is good. Why do we praise the Lord? Because of his goodness, not because He's given me good. Do you see this way in which loving God for God's sake actually weans us off of our circumstances as a measure of our love for God? One of the things that naturally flows in stage three love for God is obedience. John, the beloved disciple in 1 John chapter 5 says it like this, for this is the love of God. What does it mean to love God? He says this, for this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And then he goes on and he says, and his commandments are not burdensome? Does anybody else read that and go, oh, really? John? Must have been nice. Getting a vision of revelation of Jesus, maybe that's why they're not burdensome to you. They're kind of hard for me. That's because we're not in stage three love. We don't love God for God's sake. We love him for our sake. And so when his commandments cross our will, we say, I don't think so. Or maybe we say, maybe this time, but not next time. Listen, just to be honest, I think many of us don't get beyond stage two love. I don't think many of us get to stage three. I feel like I've touched stage three sometimes. And it's great. I find myself praying things like, Lord, take whatever you want from me, just give me yourself, it'll be enough. And it's there's a there's a taste of heaven in your soul in those moments, but then I slip back into a selfish love for God. And Bernard of Clairvaux said, actually, few people get from stage three to stage four. Now, some of you are like, What's stage four? What could be more than loving God for God's sake? You know, in a strange turn of events, Bernard of Clairvaux said stage four love is to love self for God's sake. And he he stretches to this point that only poetry can take us. Rational discourse doesn't make as much sense here anymore. And so you need the poetic language of things like your love for God is so great that you love self for God's sake because you are like a piece of iron in a fire that begins to glow so brightly that you can't discern where the iron stops and the fire begins. That's what it means to love self for God's sake. Or said differently, you become like a piece of stained glass through which the love of God, the light of God, shines so brightly, and as it passes through you, your unique personality and disposition and all the ways God made you, the love of God shines through you and begins to shape the color and the patterns that are refracted through you that could only go through you. That's the love of self for God's sake. Tim Keller calls it the freedom of self-forgetfulness. Isn't the self suffocating? Just constant self-concern, constant self-obsession, it's suffocating. Imagine the freedom of self-forgetfulness. Leanne Payne calls it the virtue of self-acceptance. Where we love self because we realize we are so lost in wonder, love, and praise of God that we begin to love what God loves, starting with our very selves. We delight in what He delights in, which is you. And we just are okay with our faults and our foibles, kind of. You've been around people like this, I promise you. They're so jovial and just light. And they don't walk around with a dour look on their face all the time because everything's hard, and they just have this sense of like, I'm loved in the love of God. What else do I need? Now, Bernard of Clairbeau says most people don't reach this time, this side of heaven, but everybody gets there that side of heaven. That's hopeful to me, truly. I'm reaching for the love of self for God's sake, but I might not get there until I drop dead, to be honest. So, how do we begin to walk through these stages of love? What motivates us through these stages of love? Bernard of Clairvaux uses this beautiful language, he calls it our double debt. We owe a double debt of God to God. The first debt is we owe him our very selves, our entire existence, because he created us. He's our author, our maker, and the maker has rights over what he's made. So God owns you already. Full stop. But if you belong to Jesus, you owe him a double debt of love. Because not only is he your creator, he's your redeemer. He's purchased you out of sin and death and the devil for himself in love. Now you owe him a double debt of yourself. But the way that we begin to receive this love of God for us and respond is with the very important word that I purposely skipped over.

Hearing God Love You First

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 30:30

Look with me again at verse 4. Verse 4 says this Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. This is called the Shema, which is the Hebrew word for hear. In other words, all of your love for God must start by hearing of God's love for you first. Faith comes by hearing. And nothing matters, Paul says. Nothing matters in all of the world except for this one thing: faith working itself out through love. And so God maintains the initiative. God is always the first lover. And so all of our response of love is simply receiving first from him that God is a lover of you, first and foremost. If you don't believe me, John the beloved disciple is his name. In 1 John chapter 4 says this in this is love, new city. Not that we have loved God. Your love for God really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. That's what John's saying. Let's just relativize it for a moment. In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins. What does that even mean? It means before we can respond with all that we are and all that we do in love of God, we have to receive all that God is and all that God has done for us. Love is responsive, not initiative. That's why the Shema begins with, Hero, Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Look first at who your God is. Then and only then can you love God with all that you are? Now, what is this first love of God?

Jesus Shows Love On The Cross

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 32:22

We we see the love of God made manifest most clearly in the person of Jesus Christ. You see, Jesus came and died, and a question that you can ask yourself is Did Jesus die for you or for God? The answer is yes. Because Jesus obeyed the Shema, he loved God with all of himself, and he loved his neighbor as himself. Jesus was being obedient to his father out of love when he went to the cross. And Jesus went to the cross to love you, to make manifest the love of God for sinners like you and me, for people who don't love very well like you and me. A poet says it like this love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be. God creates the loveliness in you that he wants from you. No other way. And so we see Jesus. We see his heart of love for God and for you. They take a spear and stab it into his side, and outflows blood and water, and medical professionals show that that is actually the result of a ruptured heart. Jesus' heart on the cross was ruptured with love for you and me. But it's not just his heart, it's his soul. In John 13, he's about to go to the cross, and the weightiness of it is settling in, and he says to his disciples, Now is my soul troubled. Jesus' mind was so saturated with scripture that as he's on the cross in the brokest region of his brain that's responsible for language is going offline because of the trauma that he's enduring, he can still recite Psalm 22. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Psalm 31, into your hands I commit my spirit. His mind was devoted, all of it, to the love of God and to you. And finally, was it Jesus' strength that enabled him to endure? No. What kept Jesus on that cross was not his, was not those nails, it was his love, his devotion to the Father and His devotion to those whom the Father loves, which is his children, the sons and daughters in this room and around the globe. You see, Jesus loves his God with his whole self and his neighbor as himself. And so as we receive that love by faith, we begin to respond in love. And I quoted this last week from Henry Nowen, which is you might be given 50, 60, 70, 80 years of life, and the the only thing that this life really, the primary thing that you get to do in this life, the thing that makes this life successful, is for you to simply use this life to say, I love you too. You see, other goats could be surpassed, their records broken, that's true. This will remain the greatest of all texts one billion years from now. Success, wholeness flourishing here and now, and there and then for an eternity is to be loved by God and to love God with your whole self.

Final Prayer And Sending

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 35:31

Let's pray. Father, we pause before you now and we acknowledge. Yes, Lord, we agree with your love for us in Jesus Christ. It's not our love for you, it's your love for us manifested in your Son, Jesus Christ. Lord Jesus, we love you. We love you with our hearts, our souls, our minds, our strength. Thank you, God. Thank you for who you are and all that you've done for us. Spirit of God, you are the love of God poured out into our hearts. Love from God and love for God. Would you stir up that love in this room even now? We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.