Welcome to the Food for Your Soul podcast, where we apply the Word of God to the hearts of men and women to stoke the fires of your delight in Christ. Which is more important, putting your tithe into the offering plate or showing mercy to someone who's in desperate straits? The answer, mercy. Matthew 23, 23, Jesus said, you give a tenth, but you have neglected the more important matters of the law, justice, mercy, and faithfulness. He went on to say that they should do both. Go ahead and give your tithe. I'm not saying that tithe is unimportant, but mercy is more important. Not all acts of righteousness are equally important. Some good deeds are weightier than other good deeds. Mercy is more important than tithing because tithing is symbolic whereas mercy is a direct moral act. When Jesus gave that answer and He talked about weightier matters of the law, He is teaching us that there are gradations of good and evil. It's good to tithe, it's better to show mercy. It's good to show mercy to one person, it's better to show mercy to ten people. It's good to help an old lady cross the street. It's better to save someone's life. It's good to save someone's life. It's even better to lay down your own life to save someone in their place. That's a super good deed, right? To lay down your life for a friend. What's the best deed of all? I mean, we're going through these gradations. What if you got all the way to the top? What would be the best thing a human being could ever do? of all the good deeds? Well, thankfully somebody asked Jesus that question, and so we're going to find out the answer today. And as you know, if you've listened to me at all, this passage is very dear to me. I preached a 13-part series on this verse before. I'm not going to repeat all that now. It's all available online, so don't worry. We're not going to take 13 months on this, as tempting as it is. I want to finish Mark before the second coming. So I'm just going to try, I'm going to do it all in one message here to show you. I'm going to not talk about all the other parts. I'm only going to talk about how it fits into Mark's message uniquely. Jesus has been, just to get the context, Jesus has been dominating the Temple ever since He arrived back in Jerusalem right before His death. He started by driving everyone out of the Temple and trashing their tables, which resulted in this series of encounters, hostile encounters, with the Temple authorities. And they have been asking Jesus questions designed to discredit Jesus, but instead all they do is showcase Jesus' superior wisdom. and authority and discredited themselves. But this last question that we looked at last time, well actually this question that comes up this time is different. It's completely different than all these other questions that he encounters. For one thing, instead of being motivated by a desire to discredit Jesus, this scribe who asks this question is motivated because he's impressed with Jesus' answer. His last answer, they gave Sadducees. Verse 28, Mark 12, 28. One of the teachers of the law, or you probably might say Sadducees, NIV translates that, teachers of the law, not Sadducees, scribes. So he's a scribe, Bible expert, teacher of the law. One of them came to Jesus and heard them debating, noticing that Jesus had given them, the Sadducees, a good answer. He asked him, of all the commandments, which is the most important? So this guy wins the prize of asking the best question ever. This is such a good question. Once Jesus answers it, we're going to know the answer to our original question. What is the best thing, the best good deed that any human being could ever do? Now, the scribes often debated questions like this. This is a very common question for the scribes. They debated what's weightier in the law than other things. They debated that, and rightly so. That's a good topic of conversation. It's important to know which things are more important than other things, even in the Bible. You need to understand not everything in the Bible is of equal importance. And the reason we need to know that is because sometimes people get way off track. Because they take one thing in the Bible and they get so fixated on that that they elevate it too highly in importance and start elevating it above more important things. People like that will destroy relationships or even churches because they disagree with what Bible translation is being used. Bible translation is important. Relationships are more important, right? They get out of balance because they don't understand the relative importance of things. You take something that's good and important, and you elevate that above something that's more important, and you've just taken a good thing and turned it into a bad thing. So what does Jesus say is the most important of all God's laws? It's interesting, like we were talking about at dinner, before answering the question, Jesus finds it necessary to say something about God's nature first. So verse 29, The most important one. He said, what's the most important commandment? Oh, the most important commandment? The most important commandment, answered Jesus, is this. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. That's not a commandment. That's a piece of information about God. And that's a pattern that you see in Scripture. You want to know about duty? Great. First doctrine, then duty. First doctrine, then duty. You've heard the saying, live and learn. A better approach is learn first, then live. Truth first, then action, especially truth about God. So what is this bit of information about God that we need to know, this bit of theology, that we need to understand before we can carry out the greatest possible good deed? It's the fact that God is one. He's unique. He's the only God out there. We need to know that. Once we know that, now we're ready for the command. In the command, verse 30, "...love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength." We need to know that piece of information first, because if there are multiple gods, you can't give your full allegiance to any one god, right? When you're sailing, you need to see God on your side, but then at harvest time, you need to harvest God on your side. So our culture doesn't worship sea God and harvest God and all that, but we are every bit as prone as any other generation to elevate created things and make them ultimate. It might be patriotism, or family, or education, or money, or career, or pleasure. There's just no end to the competitors for God's throne. But if there's only one God, then devotion to that one God must be undivided. Matthew Henry said, He has the sole right to us, and therefore ought to have the sole possession of us. Now, do you think most Christians really believe that the greatest thing any human being could ever do is love God? I mean, most Christians know that's the right answer, but do we really believe that it's better than curing cancer? If you could accomplish something in your life, loving God or bringing about world peace, loving God would be greater, greater than winning the lost, greater than... Of all the amazing things human beings have accomplished, the greatest of all is to love God. If you want your life to count, if you want to make a difference, you want your existence to matter, It's all 100% a function of how much you love God. So we need to know what does loving God mean? We need to define it because there's always so much nonsense out there about agape, the word agape, not involving emotion. which is an idea that comes out of philosophy, not the Bible. And I could do a whole sermon on that, I'll refrain. But on the other hand, we know that love is more than emotion, right? There's more to it than just feelings. A mother who's dead tired in the middle of the night, baby's crying, she's not jumping out of bed because she just feels a desire to do that. She's acting, you know, it's not just like this emotional impulse. Oh, I want to handle a dirty diaper in the middle of the night. It's commitment, right? So what's the definition of love and where does commitment and emotion and all that fit in? Here's the simplest definition I can give for love. Love is a tender regard for the other person that seeks that person's highest good and activates appropriate emotions toward that person. Okay? All right. Well, let me go through it slowly. So love is a tender regard for that person that activates appropriate emotions toward that person and seeks that person's highest good. Now, there's three key parts to this definition. First, love is a tender regard. It's a tender regard. That has to do with how much you value the other person. Love involves valuing the other person. It's a valuing or a tender regard that does two things. It has two results. Number one, it activates appropriate emotions toward the person. It activates appropriate emotions toward the person. And number two, it seeks that person's happiness. and highest good. So what do you do when you're trying to love someone you don't feel attracted to that person in a given moment? Well, love will still seek their highest good, right? seek their happiness, and the stronger the love, the more it will activate the appropriate emotions for whatever circumstance. And depending on the circumstances, the appropriate emotions are different. If the person you love is suffering, which emotions get activated? Compassion and pity. Or maybe anger toward the one hurting them. It activates appropriate emotions. If the person you love is happy, what does that do? It activates happiness in you. If the person you love rejects you, what does that do? It activates feelings of sorrow and sadness and heartbreak. If the person you love chooses others instead of you, it might activate feelings of jealousy or rejection. And when those feelings get activated, They assist the other part of love, which is seeking their highest good, right? And seeking their happiness. When you're trying to seek their happiness and highest good, the emotions help. So when you hear the baby crying, that activates emotions in the mom of feelings of compassion for that baby, and that helps her get up and do what's in the baby's best interests. You see that? If the feelings aren't being activated like they should, then you know something's wrong with your love. Just like when your car won't start, you know something's wrong with your car. So what about loving God? What emotions does love activate toward God? Pity? No, because God's never in trouble. Anger? No, because God never does anything wrong. Feelings of rejection? No, because God doesn't reject the people who love Him. The emotion that love for God activates is delight. Delight. When you love someone and you're confronted with that person's good qualities, you like it. You enjoy it. It makes you happy. And when you're not experiencing those good qualities, what do you have? Desire. I want to experience. I want to. I want to draw near. I want to experience them again. So loving God means you desire nearness with Him, and when you finally experience it, you like it. That's love for God. All right, that's a basic overview, and there's more to it. This is a simplification. There's other emotions that are activated towards God. Love will activate feelings like hope and confidence and trust and gratitude and all the rest. But you get the idea. The Lord picked a word when he wanted to describe the greatest commandment, the greatest duty, he picked a word that has way more to do with relationship than it does with duty, right? He picked the word love. Love. The greatest commandment is a relational commandment. You notice it doesn't say, love the Lord your God. What it doesn't say is, love the Lord with all your heart. It doesn't say that. He didn't say, love the Lord with all your heart. It's not love the Lord, it's love the Lord your God. And if you were here last time, which almost none of you were, But if you listen online, if you listen, that message was one of the, now I did two, and I uploaded them in the wrong order, and so not very many people downloaded that one online, so I hope you got a chance, but if you didn't get the message on the God of Abraham, your God, God of, what that means, that message has impacted me as much as any other one we've done in Mark so far, I'd urge you to, to give that a listen if you haven't, but it's a very relational idea for God to be your God, your God. And that's what Jesus says here, love the Lord your God. There's just a world of meaning packed into that. It's a love relationship, it's not a pledge of allegiance. It's a love relationship, and that's why it requires your whole being. Verse 30, love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength. Now let's take a quick look at each of those four. What is your heart? What does it mean to love God with your heart? The heart is the headquarters of your being. It's the command center of your life. It's where decisions are made, plans are hatched, and directions are set. The heart is where we decide for or against God. Your soul is part of you. Your mind is part of you. Your body is part of you. Your heart is you. That's you. Your heart is the part of you that makes you you and not someone else. You can get a transplant and have some organ transplanted from someone else's body into you, and you're still just as much you as ever. You could lose an arm, still be just you. You could change your mind about something, and you're still just as much you before and after you changed your mind. I could lose everything. I could lose my family. I could lose everything I hold dear. I would still be me. But if I love God with my heart, that means love for God goes so deep that if you took that away, my very identity would just disintegrate. So what Jesus is saying is when you get past all the layers down to the essential core of your being, what makes you, you, love God with that, your very identity Soul, the Hebrew word for soul means appetite. Your soul is a part of your inner man that craves things. It's the seat of all your desires, all your longings, and it's the part of you that feels anguish when those desires aren't met. So when you feel anguish, you feel it in your soul. Mark 14, 34, we're gonna see this in a couple more chapters. Jesus said, my soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. So that part of you that desires things and feels empty when you don't get the things you desire, love God with that part of you. Love God with that desiring part of you. Train all your desires. Your desires for food, your desires for rest, and recreation, and companionship, and respect, and money, and success, and importance, and everything else. Train yourself to make all those desires a desire to have an experience with God. So when you get those things, you receive them from God's hand and you use them to teach you something about what God is like. Lift up your soul to God, as the psalmists say. Lift up your desiring, all your desiring and craving and longing to God. So that's heart and soul. That's how I would define heart and soul. Maybe you would define them a little differently, but no matter what the nuances of all the definitions, one thing all scholars would agree on is that the point of this phrase, all your heart and all your soul, is absolutely every bit of you. Absolutely every bit of you. Heart and soul. That's what it means. Your whole inner man. Just to put in another plug for the idea that emotions are important, wouldn't that have to include emotions? Your whole inner man? Because wherever you locate emotions in the heart or the soul, or you say, no, that's not the... They're in there somewhere, right? There's somewhere inside you is emotions, and if you're supposed to love God with your entire inner man, then it's got to be that part of you also that feels things. Could we imagine that God would say, you must love me with absolutely every part of your being, except for your emotions. They don't have to be involved. They're exempt. I mean, maybe God would say that, right? Because emotions are such an inconsequential part of your inner man, right? I mean, feelings don't play any significant role in your life, do they? Right? None of us have ever made any decisions based on how we felt. None of our words or actions have ever been affected by how we felt, right? Wrong. Hardly anything affects our lives more than our feelings, right? Your feelings are a huge part of who you are. Why would that part of you be exempt from loving God? I would argue that not only are feelings and emotions included, feelings and emotions are in many ways the goal of the Christian life. In so many areas, they're the goal. Would you rather have information about joy or feel joy? Would you rather have a great definition of passion or feel passionate? I mean, we need definitions, we need information, but only as a means to an end. That's something that we, the cerebral types, need to hear over and over, because sometimes we can get to the point where we're just content to just be able to define everything in the Bible, right? And explain everything. People like that can wax eloquent about hope and delight and love for hours and hours, and then you ask them, have you ever felt any of that? And then they stare at you like a cow at a new gate. But that's the goal. Have you ever wondered why the greatest commandment isn't, glorify God? I guess that's what I would have expected Jesus to say. What's the greatest commandment? Glorify God! What's the most important reality in the universe? Isn't it the glory of God? Yes, it is. What's God most concerned about in the universe? His own glory, no question about it. So why isn't the greatest commandment, glorify God? It's not the greatest commandment because because nothing glorifies God more than when we love Him. There's no greater way to glorify God. There's no greater way to glorify anyone. We've talked about this many times. Which would honor my wife more? If I say, I'm going to spend time with you out of sheer duty and commitment, or I'm gonna spend time with you because I want to. I love being with you. Obviously, that's gonna honor her more, right? That second one honors her more because if being with her makes me happy, that happiness is the echo of her excellence. If being with her makes me happy, then my happiness is the echo of her excellence, and that's why it honors her. If I'm happy about it, how delightful she is is reflected in how much I enjoy being with her, and it's the same with God. Sacrifice, worship, serving, obedience, praise, those are all things that bring God greater glory if they're done out of desire than if they're just functions of mere duty. So if the most important reality is God's glory, then the most important command has to be to love God. Okay, so all your heart, all your soul, that's everything. That covers everything. But then Jesus adds the word mind. Now the word heart already includes thinking, right? The seat of your thoughts in Hebrew thinking is the heart. As a man thinks in his heart, right? So thinking's already covered. That's already covered. And yet Jesus throws in the word mind here. Evidently, he wants to lay special emphasis on the importance of our thoughts when it comes to loving God. So you love God with everything in you, but especially, especially your thinking. Especially your thinking. 1 Corinthians 14.15, I will pray with my spirit, but I will also pray with my mind. I will sing with my spirit, but I will also sing with my mind. God doesn't want thoughtless, mindless worship. Bruce Lee was famous for saying, don't think, feel. God says, no, how about you think and feel? Both. I want you to love me with all of you, heart, soul, and mind, your thoughts. This part's so important because we're always thinking. We're always thinking. Most of the time, you're not feeling strong emotions. But every moment of every day, you're thinking about something. Your mind is always moving in some direction, and God's command is that it always be moving in the direction of loving Him. We need to think thoughts that are likely to result in increased love for God. That's why God gave you a brain. This is why God gave you a brain. And what do you do when you really love someone a lot? You enjoy that person in your imagination, right? You think about them. You recall things they did that you really liked, and you replay them over and over. You use your brain power to think up ways to make them happy, put a smile on their face. You think of ways you might have hurt them and think of ways how you can make it right. The more you love someone, the greater the percentage of your thoughts they take up. And God commands us to love him with all our minds. And then finally, the fourth word, strength. Love God with all your strength. This word refers to ability or capability. Love God with all your doing, all your actions. Love begins on the inside, but it never ends there. Unexpressed love is not love. You use your mind to think up ways to love God, and then you use your strength to do them. to carry them out. Your soul, for example, your soul desires nearness with God, but you need your strength to actually get up and put one foot in front of the other and go to a place where you can be alone with God for an extended time, right? Your soul wants that. Your body has to get it done. Your soul might hunger for God's Word, but only your strength can pick up a Bible and do the work of reading. You hunger and thirst for spiritual sustenance from God, and then you use your strength to perform the most strenuous action that you perform all day, lifting that remote and clicking the TV off and pulling up a sermon or some worship music or something to listen to. Everything that our hearts and souls and minds do to love God finds its expression through our strength. are doing. And God requires we love Him with all our strength. Everything we ever do should either express love for God or seek greater love for God. Love for God must dominate your feelings, drive your decisions, direct your thinking, and define your actions. Do you see now why Jesus said things like, if a man looks at a woman in order to lust after her, he's committed adultery in his heart, or if you're angry with someone, you're guilty of murder. He said things like that, and to us that seems like, oh, that's so much, that's so extreme, it just sounds like hyperbole. That sounds extreme to us because we focus so much on actions, but actions are only the end of a process, right? If the greatest commandment is to love God with everything inside of me, how can I ever pat myself on the back for committing a sin on the inside but then refraining from acting it out on the outside? How is that any big victory? It's a little victory. But if God's command to love Him with everything inside of me, the essential core of my being and my feelings and my desires and my attitudes and my thoughts and all that, that's the greatest command, is to be pursuing God above all with all that. But instead of doing that, I go the opposite way, the way of lust or anger or selfishness or pride, self-love, whatever. so that the whole inner man is running in the opposite direction of the greatest commandment God ever gave. And then at the last second, I stop short of actually carrying out the physical action. How is that a huge victory? I get all proud of myself and I say, well, at least I didn't say that. At least I didn't do that. At least is right. Least, it really is least, because what I did was 95% evil, if not 100. This is why Jesus hated hypocrisy so much. Righteousness that's only on the outside, but not on the inside. Whenever you do some good deed, ask yourself, how deep does this good deed go? You can imagine God looking at you doing some good deed and saying, that's beautiful. But then He looks a little deeper beyond your outside and He sees your motives for doing it. Does He still say, that's beautiful too? Then He looks a little deeper at your attitudes about it and your desires and your emotions, what emotions are being activated. How deep does God have to look before it stops being so beautiful? However deep it goes, think about how you can push it deeper. Push that goodness deeper because it's not too much for God to say, if you're gonna love me, I want it to go all the way to the core. So this principle helps us a lot with externalism and hypocrisy. It also helps us with the problem of judgmentalism, right? You look at someone who's committed some terrible external sins with their body, and you think, oh, I'm not like that. I'm not like that. I've never committed a felony. I've never committed adultery. I've never done, you know, all these horrible things that people have done to me, I've never done that to anybody. Well, maybe you haven't. Maybe you haven't, and that's good, but have you loved God with all your mind? With all your heart? Is the command center of your life driven by love for God? If not, then how are we getting off pointing the finger at other people? How can we be judgmental towards others when we realize the most important issue that determines whether you're good or evil is what's happening at the core of your being. How can we point any fingers? Because you can see the core of your being, you can't see the core of anyone else's being. So the person that I should be struck with, it seems like the most astonishingly sinful person I know has to be me because I'm the only one that can see what's going wrong with the core of my being when it comes to loving God. I can't see that in anyone else. So when you find yourself thinking you're better than other people, you know for sure that you're measuring with the wrong yardstick, and probably what you've done is reversed the first commandment and the second commandment. So let's look at the second commandment. The scribe only asked for commandment number one. Jesus throws in number two as a bonus, because if he just gives number one, if he just gives what the guy asked for, it would be misleading. So verse 31, the second Jesus says is this, love your neighbors yourself. There is no commandment greater than these. Jesus doesn't want anybody to make the mistake of thinking that you can love God in the privacy of your own room. Just retreat from people and just sit there and love God. No, He elevates love for neighbor up to where it's connected with love for God so that we understand you can't love God without loving people. You think, man, I just love God. I can't stand people, but man, God is awesome. If you think that, then 1 John 4, 20 says, if anyone says, I love God, yet hates his brother, he's a liar. You can't love God without loving the people he loves. We must also love people, which means we have to have a tenderhearted regard for them that drives us to serve their best interest and seek their happiness, seek their joy in the Lord, And that regard should activate appropriate emotions toward those people, towards our neighbor. And Jesus keeps it practical. He doesn't say, love the whole wide world as yourself. He just says, your neighbor. And you say, who's my neighbor? Well, Jesus answered that with a good Samaritan story. He said, basically, your neighbor, you could define your neighbor as someone whose needs you can see and whose needs you can meet. That's your neighbor. So Jesus elevates love for neighbor by joining it together with love for God. I mean, love for God is the most important way up here, and he takes love for neighbor and just puts it right up there and elevates that. But there's also a sense in which Jesus is demoting love for neighbor, pulling it down because he wants it to be very clear. There is a very clear number one and number two They're not co-commands. He doesn't say the greatest command is these two. He says, there's number one, and here's number two. God is number one, people number two. You love your neighbor as yourself, you love God way more than yourself, because God's greater than humanity. Love for God is primary, and we need to know that because the world always wants to push loving people up to the number one spot, don't they? They think loving people is the most important thing because they think humanity is more important than God. Just listen to them talk about victimless crimes. This doesn't hurt anybody. How could it be wrong? If all it does is dishonor God, if all it does is dethrone the Almighty, it doesn't hurt a human being, then how could it really be that evil? What does that say? It says human beings are more important than God. They say, well, this doesn't hurt any people, so it can't be a sin. If it is, I mean, if all it does is dishonor God, doesn't hurt any people, if it is a sin, it's a peccadillo at the most. Taking God's name in vain? Come on, so what? Punching someone in the nose? Stealing their stuff? Lying to them? Killing them? Now we're talking about serious stuff, because those things hurt human beings. That kind of thinking is not a little mistake. It's full-blown idolatry because it places human beings in the place of God. Reversing commandment number one and number two is not a small, it's like, well, you're just off by one. No, it's idolatry. This thinking has wormed its way into the church. There's a whole branch of Christianity known as liberation theology that elevates what they call social justice to the number one spot. So that's really the only thing that matters. That's really all there is to Christianity. Helping the poor, helping the oppressed, that's all that matters. And that was the attitude that the disciples are going to have here in a couple chapters, in chapter 14 of Mark, when the woman pours expensive perfume on Jesus' feet, and what do they say? Why this waste? They thought it was a waste to just dump it on the ground when it could have been used to feed the hungry, to give to the poor, to help desperate people. Why waste it by honoring the Son of God with it instead of doing something real good, like helping the poor? And Jesus says, wrong. What she did was beautiful. What she did was beautiful. Adoration of Jesus is greater than feeding the hungry. We need to keep number one, number one. Put anything else in that place, even something as noble and good as loving your neighbor, helping the poor, you do that, you're violating the first commandment. Listen to David's prayer of repentance after getting a married woman pregnant and then ordering the murder of her husband to cover it up. He said in Psalm 51.4, You hear that? It's like, you only? What? Didn't you sin against the guy you murdered? Or, you know, Bathsheba? Or the baby that got killed in the process? Or the whole nation of Israel? I mean, it's hard to find someone you didn't sin against. David understands all that, but he also understood that the only reason those other things were sins is because they were failures to love God. So in the big picture, it really was just one giant sin against God with a lot of tentacles. That's what David was saying. But the tendency is to forget this. And that tendency to forget it is a problem even for us. It's not just liberation theologians and the world. It's us, isn't it? I mean, what gets us more upset in politics? Abortion or someone taking God's name in vain? Giving sex change hormones to little children or failing to give God thanks for creating the world? How often do we act like harming human beings is more serious than blaspheming God? The first command is the first command because it's the command that we break when we break any other command. It's first because breaking it is the only reason why breaking the other ones is bad. Did you know that abortion is not wrong because of the sanctity of life? It's wrong because of the sanctity of God. There's nothing inherently immoral about a human life ending. It happens every day. The only time it's immoral is if it happens as a result of somebody disobeying God. The only reason any kind of child abuse is wrong is because it displeases God. The reason murder is wrong is because human beings are in the image of God. That's why killing a human is so different than killing an animal, because humans bear God's image. And according to James 3.9, that's also why it's wrong to speak slander against your neighbor or harsh words, because they have God's likeness. If you love God, you will love people, the people that God loves. If you love God first, you will love people. When you put the first commandment first, everything else finds the right place. Everything else falls into place. Love for God puts you in a disposition to fulfill all the rest of the Christian duties. But when love for God falls out of the number one place, everything else falls apart. So we love God, and because we love Him, we love those He loves, namely our neighbor. If you love your neighbor for any other reason, then it's falling short. Love for God is the only motive high enough to enable us to love our neighbors, especially when they are not deserving of our love. And the standard of how much you need to love them is the way you love yourself. And I'm not going to get into the whole thing about, oh, this is really a command to love yourself. Leave it to our narcissistic culture to turn this into a command to love yourself. Not a command to love yourself. It's an assumption you already love yourself. No matter how down on yourself you might be, how much self-loathing you might feel, still, you want things to work out well for you, and you should want things to work out well for your neighbor. That's the point. Love your neighbor as yourself. And once again, if the number one command slips from its place, this becomes impossible. This is a really interesting thought. Think about this for a second. If I'm not loving God first, if I'm living for something else, if I'm living for money, I can't really love my neighbor as myself because that would mean I'd have to give him my money, all my money, right? If I am living for a vacation and pleasure and everything, then I work all year and I save up to go on a vacation and then I have to, if I love my neighbor as myself, I have to send him on a vacation and I can never go on a vacation. Whatever I'm living for, I can't love my neighbor as myself if I'm doing that. If my way of loving myself is to feast on the presence of God, to seek God, seek joy in God above all, I can do that. I can help you do that without losing anything of value, of real value. It might cost me money, it might cost me time. I'm not saying I don't give. I'm saying I can pour out, I can seek your ability to enjoy God with all my energy, and it doesn't cost me my ability to seek enjoyment in God. You see that? To really love my neighbor as myself, I have to love God first. All right. In the next passage, we're going to look at the scribe's remarkable response and then Jesus' reaction to that. And I'm going to put that up online early next week, maybe Tuesday or something like that, so you can just see that online. For now, let me just wrap up our thoughts by considering what each of Jesus' answers have in common. Let's get back to this context of what's going on in the temple here. Have you noticed a theme in these confrontations with the scribes and the chief priests and the rest? Their first question was about politics, right? What about taxes and Caesar? What was the bottom line of Jesus' answer to that question? Give to God what is God's. Give God that which bears His image. The coin bears Caesar's image. You bear God's image. Give God yourself. So give to God what is God's. Next question that came out of left field. I mean, way out in left field. What about marriage in the afterlife when you've had seven husbands? Typical question you'd get, right? What's the bottom line of Jesus' answer? God is the God of the living. The God of that we talked about last time. Understand what God of means, and that will solve all your intellectual objections to resurrection. Third question. What about the law, Jesus? Which rules supersede other rules in the Bible? Answer, love God. When someone asked Rabbi Hillel, the famous rabbi, the same question, what's the most important command, he gave a version of the golden rule, the silver rule, they call it. Don't treat people in ways you don't want to be treated. Basically, he says, love people. And you say, no, no, that's number two. That's number two. For number one, love God. You see a pattern? Question about taxes? Give to God. Question about marriage? Understand what God of means. Question about law? Love God. Three questions about three completely different topics, and all three answers were the same topic, God. Now remember where this is happening. This is all happening amongst the debris of Jesus ransacking the temple. And do you remember why he did that? He did it because he said this place is supposed to be, what? A house of prayer. It's supposed to be a place conducive to drawing near to God. and what you've made it is a catastrophic violation of that purpose." And so Jesus just busts up the place, dressed down the men in charge, preached about how the temple is supposed to be a place of prayer, and then when they peppered Him with questions, His answers were, relationship with God, relationship with God, relationship with God. No matter what question they asked Him. In the days before Jesus' death, He wanted to reorient our thinking back upward toward God. And as obvious as that might sound, and I know this sounds as obvious as it could be, think about God, it's a message we need, we constantly need to be reminded of this because every generation tends to get lost in the weeds of the Bible and forget about this one obscure character that is in there by the name of God, right? There are millions of Christian books out there, thousands being printed every month, new ones. Why is it so hard to find one about God? You would think if our whole existence is about loving God, that almost every Christian book you'd pick up would be mainly about that. You'd think there'd be book after book, sermon after sermon, blog after blog about God's nature, this is what He's like. These are the nuances of his character. And you'd think they'd go beyond the handful of things that we learned about God in Sunday school when we were kids. And you'd think nine out of 10 Christian book, how-to books would be about how to love God more. It's not how it is. Preparing this message, I went to some of my favorite preacher's websites and could not find a single sermon on loving God. Some of them have their sermons listed in topical categories, and they've all got a topic, loving others, not loving God. How can this be if that's the most important? I mean, Jesus could not have been more clear. And yet how we struggle to keep it, number one. Even for us, even for us, practical atheism is a constant temptation every single day to live as if there are no God. And so just before he died, Jesus had a big Q&A session in the temple, and his answer to every single question was, God, God. Something about how we're to think about God. Holy, holy, seraphs cry and call to all who hear. Cover feet and face before the one whom all must fear. His glory fills the earth and flashes brighter than the sun. to him belongs the highest praise, his equal? No, not one. More worthy he to be the one whom every creature seeks, than any treasure earth may boast, the heavens, land, or sea. But if deserving of our praise, and honor, and our fear, our faithful prayers, repentant sobs, and every mournful tear, then what of that the greatest of gifts that we can bestow? Our hearts, the love that steers our lives and pulls the soul in tow. If worthy of obedience and duty and of praise, how much more must we with joy our longings to Him raise? His claim on us extends beyond just that which people see. All is His, our hearts and souls, not just our hands and feet. Let's pray. Father, teach us what it means to love You. Let it go deep. We hear this and we're convicted. We realize that we don't do this perfectly, and yet, There's a real sense in which we have given all of ourselves to you. And this is our resolve to love you this way. And we know that pleases you. But Lord, help it go deeper and deeper and deeper. We ask it in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. Question? I have to share, when I was a very young woman, I just now understood Yeah, that's interesting. So you give someone a gift. You're trying to show them love. You give them a gift. It feels like loss. You've got resentment and everything. Then you realize, oh, I've given them the thing I was worshiping. And if you have God number one, then you don't have, yeah. I don't feel anything at that woman anymore. Well, praise God. I've been with her for 40-some years. Just took a little time. And husband. Yeah, praise God. Okay, so if you don't feel the emotions, they're not there, how do you get them? Do you just go through the motions or whatever? Yeah, I've done whole long sermons on that, but just to keep it short, I'll just say this. If you don't feel like doing the right thing, and the Bible says to do the right thing, then you're already sinning by not feeling the right way. You don't want to sin again by also disobeying. So you go ahead and do the right thing regardless of how you feel. But it's a mistake to think... Sometimes people go so far as to say, well, if you just keep doing the right thing, eventually the feelings will come. And I don't think the Bible ever promises that. And that hasn't been my experience either. Especially if the attitude isn't there. If you try to learn to love something with the wrong attitude, it doesn't happen. All you do is learn to hate it even more when you do it more. Suppose there's a couple that come together and the guy hates hiking, the woman loves hiking, and so she's like, you need to learn how to love hiking so that we can go hiking together. And so he says, OK. And so they go hiking every Saturday. Is he automatically going to learn to love hiking? Not automatically, no, because if he's got the wrong attitude, then every step of that hike will confirm how stupid hiking is, right? He's going to be walking and saying, we've got cars, we've got motorcycles, we've got bikes, we've got helicopters. What are we doing walking? I mean, are we ancient people or what? And so he'll get mosquito bites, and he'll feel the hot sun, and his muscles will ache, and he'll learn to hate hiking. But there is a way to learn to love hiking. There's some reason those people that love hiking like it. There's some reason. And if you can find that reason, you can learn to like it too. And that involves doing it, but it involves doing it with a certain attitude, right? You have to be looking for, what is it that she likes about this? What is it that's good about this? And you have to have a receptive heart. Learning to generate emotions of fondness for something involves experiencing what's good about that thing. So you have to experience it. You have to actually do it. But it's more than going through the motions. It's doing it with an eye to finding what's good about it. And so that's my short answer. And that might also spread to... Yeah. Yeah, I think about all the people that really hurt me in the whole Agape ordeal and turned against me, caused me so much pain, and I was so tempted with anger for them. The only way I got past that was I had to just like put all that aside and peek back to where I knew them before all that happened, and what did I love about them then? And it's like all that stuff is still actually there. and it's still true of them. I've actually gained a real fondness for some people that I really struggled to have fondness for for a long time by doing that, by just thinking about the gifts that God gave them and how that contributes to the church and what's wonderful about that. You know, in Bible college. You're right. You've got a husband who doesn't really love his wife, showing enjoyment of her, and her demands on him can become impossible. It's like, you want me to spend time with you? You want me to bring you flowers? You want me to do this? You want me to do this? You want me to do this? You want me to do this? I can't do all that. It's just way too much. And it just feels like your demands are absolutely unreasonable. And then he has a shift. He starts enjoying her, and she can feel that he likes being with her. And suddenly, he just does what he wants, and she's satisfied. And it's not like he's checking off 250 boxes of all her requirements. He's just gonna tend to do the things, and where he fails, she'll overlook because she can feel that love. Yeah. Yeah. Right. If you disobey the second one, then you're failing in the first one. But if you disobey the first one, you're failing at everything. So there really is a first act. Even though there's that statement, the second one is like it, it's not the same thing as saying the second one is equal to it. Because otherwise, you couldn't call it second. They would both be first. Well, okay. I address that in the next message, which I already actually recorded and it'll be up, but I'll put them in order this time. So the question is, all of our righteousness is like filthy rags. Actually, I don't agree with that. I don't think all our righteous deeds are like filthy rags. What that passage in Isaiah says is, all your righteousness has become filthy rags, which means you've gone from righteousness to evil. I don't think he's saying the good things they were doing were filthy in his sight. He's saying they were doing filthy things. The best things they were doing were still filthy. The Scripture is very clear that God is pleased with our imperfect acts of righteousness. He is. Because of Christ, He smiles. The Scripture says, make it your goal to please Him. We make it our goal to please Him. And so He is pleased with our imperfect. And so just real quick, I explain this in detail in the next message, but real quick, there are various elements of obedience. It starts with resolve, right? I decide I'm going to obey. And then I take action to obey. And that puts me on the road of obedience. And God counts that as obedience, if you're on that road. And then when you stray off, you repent, you get back on the road. God counts that as obedience, even though I'm not all the way to the end of the road with perfect obedience. And so I don't think it's filthy rags in His sight. It's pleasing in His sight. The reason I say it's the greatest thing you could ever do, because he says it's the greatest command, because there's nothing you could do that would be better than obeying the most important command. What could anybody ever do that's better than obeying the most important command? The only reason anything is good that we ever do is because God commanded it, and we did it. So if He didn't command it, then it's certainly not better than what He did command. So that's why I would equate those. Yeah, so if it says the Lord our God is one, so how can the Trinity be real because the Trinity is three? The answer is Trinity is real because the Trinity is one. And so the Trinity is not a violation of monotheism. We as Christians are as strong on the concept of monotheism as anyone because we believe there's only one God. The fact that He's revealed in three persons isn't a violation of monotheism any more than in the Old Testament the fact that you have the Father and the Holy Spirit both in the Old Testament and yet only one God is not a violation of Jewish monotheism. The fact that there's a plurality in the Godhead even in the Old Testament shows that there's such a thing as complex oneness. And then the last one, so are you saying that there are levels of sin and if so, how does the Bible Are there levels of sin and how does the Bible measure them? I would say yes. First of all, if there are levels of righteousness, there have to be levels of sin because falling short of the different levels of righteousness would be levels of sin. So it seems like if the greatest thing you could ever do is love God, then the worst thing you could ever do is fail to love God. There's also indications that there are gradations of sin because there are gradations of punishment. So Jesus said that some people will receive worse punishment than other people, indicating that their sins that they committed were worse than what the others did. different sinners are treated differently by God for that reason. So yeah, I think there are sins that are worse than other sins. How they're measured? Way different than we tend to measure them. We tend to measure the scandalous sins as the worst ones, and the common sins as not a big deal. And that's not how Jesus measured them at all. And when you see Scripture listing the really bad ones, you see the common ones and the scandalous ones mixed together in those lists. You know, gossip alongside murder and stuff like that. So the way that it's measured is, I would say, to the degree that a person has been given light and spiritual privilege However much of that they're rejecting measures how severe their sin is. So that's why for Moses to strike the rock instead of speaking to it was a massive, massive sin that kept him out of the Promised Land. Other people did things that seemed way worse, but they didn't have the spiritual privileges that Moses had, and so they weren't judged as harshly. So when you see warnings about the severest judgment, it's usually because it's people who have had the most opportunity to receive grace from God and rejected it, and they're the ones that sinned the worst. anybody that's a teacher that leads others down the wrong path. Yeah, leading others down the wrong path is also very severe. And that's something you can see. The thing that I mentioned isn't something you can see. You can't tell how much light they've been given, so you can't really judge that. But that's something you can see. So if you're leading others astray, that's severe. That doesn't follow. To say that some commands are weightier than other commands, it doesn't follow to say that that has anything to do with how you're saved. It only shows how much punishment you deserve or how much reward God will give you. But as far as how to be saved, it doesn't play into it. Jesus doesn't ever say you get saved by avoiding the worst sins. or you're lost because of how bad your sins are. Salvation is always a function of faith. And so no matter what kind of sins you're committing, you're totally lost without faith. And no matter what kind of, where you're at with the spiritual growth process, you're totally saved if you do have faith. So to say that there are some things, it's kind of like saying, My children can do some things that are a little bit bad or some things that are really bad, but that doesn't have any impact on whether or not they're my children. None whatsoever. It does have an impact on how I'm going to deal with them, but not whether they're my children. Yeah, thankfully he doesn't say, love God with this much strength, right here, and that's the measure. He doesn't say that because a lot of us would fall short. We don't even have that much. Thankfully, he just says, all your strength. You don't have to love God with all his strength or her strength, just your strength. And if he's only giving you this much strength, that's all you have to love God with. Okay, that's good. Does that go for housework as well? Nope, still have to keep the whole house clean, no matter how much strength you have. When you hear this and your response is to think, I'm probably not even saved because I don't do this. Think about whether your definition of the standard is such that you're not saved and nobody's saved. Because if you're thinking, okay, I have to do this perfectly, I don't do this perfectly, therefore I'm lost, then everybody's lost, right? And Andrew's right, 1 John says, no, there's some people who love God. There are some people who love God, right? And so perfectly doing this can't be the standard. Now, I did, I talked about it more in the other message, so I won't keep going on it, but I talked about R.C. Sproul, who, when he preached on this, said, I've never loved God with all my mind in one day in my life, one hour in my life. And I disagree with Sproul. I think he loved God with all his heart his entire Christian life. And I think he's probably being surprised with reward right now for doing something that he thought he didn't do. But I don't know. I'll talk to him about it when I get there. But yeah, I think because we're in Christ, God counts us, as soon as you get on the road of obedience, he counts that as obedience because of Christ. I just want to back you through. Well, we're evil, but we're being renewed. We're being renewed. And so we have a role in participating. Thank you for listening. We pray these principles from the Word of God are helping you find the peace of God as you draw near to the God of peace. Please remember to pray for this ministry. And remember that we're a crowdfunded ministry, so every gift helps. Just go to treasuringgod.com. Until next time, rejoice in the Lord always and set your mind on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.