Sermon for the 23rd Sunday after Pentecost   10/23/05                  Preached at ULC

Text:  Matthew 22 (What is the greatest commandment?)            Title:  Love and Obey

Main Message:  Love and obedience go together.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength.  And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

If you’re a Christian and you don’t know these words by memory, you need to get to know them.  Deuteronomy 6 says to take these words and bind them on your hand and forehead, write them on the doors and gates of your house, or today it might say to stick them up on your fridge and your bedroom mirror, put them someplace you’ll see them until you get to know them by heart.

These words are what Jesus himself, the Son of God and the living word of truth, taught us to be the most vital commands that God ever gave us.  If there is anything at all God wants from us, this is it.  To love him.  To love our neighbors. 

So we need to know these words and we need to have some understanding of what they mean.  That’s what we’re going to talk about today.

Jesus quotes these commandments from the Old Testament as an answer to a question.  He was being tested by a legal professor on the law of God.  You can almost picture this guy in his tweed Pharisee’s jacket with the leather elbow patches, puffing on his pipe, strolling ponderously up to Jesus with a thick legal tome in hand and saying, “So, Mr. Jesus, which commandment would you say is the greatest?  What does God want from us most?”

Jesus isn’t afraid of the Pharisees.  He’s faced them before, and he knows what they’re up to.  His usual tactic is to answer a question with another question, or a parable or a story.  Not here.  I’m not sure why.  Maybe this question is too important for word games.  Maybe he doesn’t want to have any confusion that there are things God wants from us, and this command is at the heart of them all.  Maybe.

At any rate, he answers the Pharisee’s question directly.  The greatest command of God is that you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.  The only wrinkle is that he tacks on an addition by saying, “And the second command is like it – you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  Apparently the two commands are so connected that you can’t even say one without saying the other.  More about that in a minute.

For now, I want you to think about how the whole topic of love comes up in a discussion of commands and obedience.  Love and obedience aren’t words our culture likes to connect together.  Commands and obedience are words that seem cold, hard, businesslike, even warlike.  The soldiers I work with understand about giving and following orders.  They would not expect to have a senior officer come up to them and say, “Soldier!”  “Yes, sir?”  “I order you to love me with all your heart.”  “Don’t ask, don’t tell, sir.”

We don’t think of love in that setting.  We think of it over here in a different side of life, a side of life that’s a little softer, with feelings and emotions and caring.  We talk about love at weddings, not among warriors.

But even at weddings, it wasn’t that long ago, brides at the altar would promise their husbands to love and obey.  I suggested that phrase to my bride, just as a joke.  Fortunately it was long enough before the wedding that my bruises didn’t show up in the pictures.  We don’t use the word “obey” anymore in the vows, and I’m not advocating we return unless men and women promise to obey equally, but when it comes to loving God we’re not equal with him, and we have to find some way to reconnect love and obedience because that’s the only way the Bible talks about love when it comes to loving God.

Deuteronomy 6 says, “Now this is the commandment, the statutes and the rules that the Lord your God commanded me to teach you.  Hear, O Israel, and be careful to do them.  You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.  And these words I command you today shall be on your heart.”

In the Bible, love means obedience.  Maybe you think that things changed when Jesus came, but love meant the same thing to him that it meant in Deuteronomy.  What’s God’s command?  What’s God’s order number one?  To love.  And in case you missed it, Jesus said again in John 14:15, “If you love me, you will obey what I command.”  Any part of your life where you don’t follow God’s law is a part of you life where your love for God is lacking.  To put it most bluntly, when you don’t obey God, you don’t love God.  When you do love God, you obey what he commands.

Now when you put love and obedience together, you start to realize that loving God becomes a decision as much as an emotion, and far more an act of the will than a twist of fate.  Some people say they fall in love and they fall out of love as if they had no choice in the matter.  Phooey.  Real love is both an emotion and a decision.  It is both outside your control and completely in your control.  I won’t say it’s an unbiased decision because all of our choices are influenced by something.  God loves you and he wants to influence your choice, but he won’t force it.  Love for God means choosing to love God because that’s what Jesus set us free to do.

Love for God also means choosing to love your neighbor.  Remember, the professor of law only asked Jesus for the one greatest commandment of all.  Jesus gave him a second, free of charge.  You shall love your neighbor as yourself.  I said these two commands were tied together so tightly that you can’t even mention one without the other.  It seems the best way to love God is to love his kids.

You guys understand this better than you might think.  A couple of weeks ago, a woman who normally worships at 7:30 had to go to a later service and afterwards, she came up to me and said, “I don’t normally get to see your kids because they always come to church later, but I saw them with your wife today and they are just beautiful.”  If there is a better way to put a smile on a proud daddy’s face, I can’t imagine what it is.  If you want to get in good with me, be good to my kids.  It’s not that hard to understand that God feels the same way.

There were hundreds of other commandments that Jesus could have chosen to add.  But the one he chose to explain the first was the one that requires us to love God’s children because it’s the best way of loving God himself.

In fact, Jesus went so far as to say in Matthew 25 that when you feed the hungry, you feed him.  When you house the homeless, you house him.  For some reason, God identifies with us so closely that our pain and our joy becomes his.  When we are loved, he is loved.  We are his body; he is our soul.

I think sometimes we have a hard time believing that God identifies with us that much.  It’s hard to believe that not only are we commanded to love God, but that he loves us so much that he feels what we feel.  Some of us can’t believe that God would want to be so intimate with someone so, so…what?

Messed up?  Shamed?  Stubborn?  Broken?  Hypocritical?  What’s your adjective?

So many people imagine a God who sits and waits on top of a mountain for us to find a path to the top.  A God who commands us to love him and steps back to the sidelines to be an impartial judge of how well we do.

Isn’t it possible that picture is wrong?  Maybe the reason we’re supposed to love God with all our heart and soul and mind is because that’s the way God already loves each one of us.  Maybe he doesn’t command you to love him because he’s insecure and jealous but because he’s already declared his eternal love for you.  Maybe he’s not standing on the sidelines but he’s already loving each one of us in the way he wants us to love each other.

The truth is that none of us follow this commandment right.  Not enough to satisfy an impartial judge, anyway.  Who here can say they love God with all their heart and soul and strength all the time?  Who counts the minutes every day until they can pray again?  Who devours God’s Word with more delight than your favorite dessert in the world?  Who loves every one of their neighbors as much as they love themselves?  Who could pass this test?

Jesus did.  And the amazing truth is that even in your sin, Jesus loves you with everything he has.  Even in your brokenness, he comes alongside and offers you a shoulder to lean on.  Just as you are, he has chosen to always love you.  He has promised to always love you, and God will be obedient, yes God will be obedient, to God’s own promise.

Love the Lord your God and love your neighbor.  It is a command and it calls us to obey, and it is also a promise and it calls us to believe.  Amen.