Cultivating Love For God

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Shayne Poirier on Mark 12:28-34.

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This sermon is from Grace Fellowship Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. To access other sermons or to learn more about us, please visit our website at graceedmonton .ca.
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Well, as we just heard our brother read, the theme of our text for today is love.
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And to preach on the topic of love can be one of two things. It can either be a very convicting experience or it can be like a postcard or a
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Carlton card that you get at the bookshop or the gift shop at the airport or the mall.
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One comes across as very sappy and the other comes across as very effective. And my hope and prayer today is that we would really today grasp the beauty and the glory of what it means to be
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Christians who love, who love God and who love neighbor.
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What a magnificent and critically important theme it is to spend our day dwelling on.
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D .L. Moody, writing about love, once said, there is no use trying to do, think about this, trying to do
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God's work without love. The doctor can go without it.
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The lawyer, our brother might know, can go without love. But God's work cannot be done without love.
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In a similar fashion, Alexander Strauch, some of the men here that are going through the Institute, you certainly know his name.
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He once said that every man is faced with a decision.
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He must either love or die. Even the disciple whom
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Christ loved, John the Evangelist, the author of the Gospel of John and the first, second and third epistle of John in the book of Revelation.
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He wrote, anyone who does not love does not know
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God because God is love. A few of us in this room would argue with the fact that love is one of the most important themes in all of Scripture.
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After all, the chief directive, as we will see and have already heard, the chief directive and great command that is issued to every regenerate
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Christian after the words repent and believe is the word love.
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To love God and to love neighbor. It is the substance of this single word, love, that is to be the motive for every act of Christian worship and obedience.
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It is to be the chief interest behind every impulse to share the
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Gospel with the lost. It is to be the driving force behind the
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Christian's concern for every single social issue. It is love for God, I was thinking about it this week, love for God and love for neighbor that compels every
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Christian to seek for peace and justice, to stand up for that which is good and true, to serve and to suffer, to rejoice with those who rejoice.
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And as I mentioned when I was thinking earlier this week, it is even love that compels us to hate the very things that are contrary to God and His will.
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Like the evils of abortion, which is murder or slavery or the abuse of children.
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If there ever was, I think you would agree with me, if there ever was one word which perfectly captures and summarizes all of Christian ethics as taught in the
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Bible, it is found in this one word, love. Of all the words that we find in Scripture, there are few that are as important as this one word.
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Now, I spent just a couple of minutes trying to make a case for how important love is.
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And you know that already, I'm preaching to the choir to some extent. What a magnificent theme it is to spend our time today dwelling on this theme.
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But if we're honest with ourselves, this is a theme that is often misplaced in the lives of the everyday
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Christian. It is often the case that we go days or even weeks without this great commandment coming to our minds.
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To love the Lord your God and to love your neighbor as yourself.
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For many Christians today, even for us reformed Baptist types, if I can call us that, it is possible and likely even that some of us could be described with the same words that the
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Lord Jesus Christ said to the Ephesian church in Revelation chapter 2 and verses 2 to 4.
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To paraphrase that for a moment, it could be said of us that we, like the
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Ephesian church, labor diligently. We patiently endure. We love, don't we?
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We love to test those who claim to be Bible teachers and are not. We are eager to know and to believe sound doctrine.
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We have not grown weary in serving God. But Christ has this one thing against many of us, against many of you perhaps, that some of us have abandoned the love that we had at first.
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We read our Bibles. We read our systematic theologies. Our heads have grown big and our hearts have grown cold.
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Some of us can look back and maybe do that right now. If you were to look back one year or five years or ten years ago, some of us can say if we are really honest with ourselves,
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I don't think I love God as much as I used to then. We might be able to say, oh, how
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I remember when my heart used to burn for Him alone and how God was on my mind at every hour of every day and how it was the greatest pleasure in all the world to draw near to Him in prayer and to spend time in His Word.
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But now when I look at it, that same task that once brought me joy now feels like a chore.
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Dear saints of God, what are we to do when that kind of experience describes our lives, when
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God commands us to love and we feel like our hearts have grown cold?
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Well, this afternoon we find ourselves, as we know, in the Gospel of Mark. For this last week,
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I keep orienting us to the day. It's Tuesday still in Christ's last week on this earth.
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The Lord Jesus Christ is still in Jerusalem and He is still, as we saw, as we have seen now for the last several weeks, still being confronted with the rhetorical attacks of the religious leaders.
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And at the very climax of this scene, we see three questions put to Christ in this chapter 12.
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Our Lord is going to deal with this vital issue of love. And in this brief encounter, what
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I think we're going to discover as we learn and study is that Christ not only issues the command to love.
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I think that every one of us here has heard that, that we are to love the Lord our God. Even if we haven't intentionally memorized it,
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I think we could all recite it, that we are to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength and love our neighbor as ourselves.
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But Christ not only gives us the command to love, but His description of that love shows us how we are to love and how we are, if we find we're growing tired and cold, how are we to cultivate that kind of love in our
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Christian lives? Every single one of us in this room, whether you are a baby
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Christian or a veteran of the faith, you know who you are, maybe.
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Maybe your kids will point you out. You don't have to love, sorry, you have never loved God as you ought to.
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All of us, every single one of us in this room are defective in our love in many ways.
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And Christ not only challenges us in this respect, but by His grace He's going to show us the way.
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And I intentionally set aside for today's purposes just these seven verses, verses 24, 28, excuse me, through verses 34, so that we can really hone in on this topic of love.
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I was talking to Sam earlier today and I said, after having looked at it, we could have actually preached about six sermons on this particular topic.
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We could look at what it means to love God with heart, and then with soul, and then with mind, and then, and so on and so forth.
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But for today's purposes, what I'm going to do is this. We're going to do a quick exposition of the early verses of the text, and then we're going to look at six, and I promise, brief, six brief points of how we are to love
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God and to cultivate God in our lives, cultivate the love of God in our lives.
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And so let's begin at the beginning in chapter 12 and verse 28. And I want to read at first verses 28 through 29.
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So one of the scribes came up and heard them, that is Christ and the
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Sadducees, disputing with one another. And seeing that he answered them well, asked him, which commandment is the most important of all?
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Jesus answered, the most important is, Hear, O Israel, the
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Lord our God, the Lord is one. We're going to pause there mid -sentence for a second.
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Here we find, as I've already said, that Christ is still in the heart of Jerusalem, and he is engaged in that same activity that we've now found him in for the last number of weeks.
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As a matter of fact, if you can remember back two weeks ago, it was on this Tuesday still, in or near the temple court, that Christ was debating with a number of the religious leaders who came to ensnare him in his words.
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In Mark chapter 12 and verse 13, if we turn there briefly, we found that unlikely coalition of the
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Pharisees and the Herodians who came to trip Christ up with questions about paying taxes to Caesar.
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And not only did Christ navigate those questions, or that question, brilliantly, but he left them stunned.
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They marveled at his response, the text says. And then in verse 38, we read that the
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Sadducees then took their turn and asked Christ about the resurrection. And he not only demonstrated, and we considered what this would be like for Christ to say this to us, that they didn't know their
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Bibles, even though they were the teachers of Israel. They did not know
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God, and they did not know his word. And not only that, but he showed them how foolish their perspective was.
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And so, as all of this was happening, we now learn a scribe in the crowd, one of the religious lawyers of Christ's day, one of the experts of the law of Moses, who is watching all of this.
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And we're told that he came to Christ seeing that he had answered them well.
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This reminds me of those times when you get to see a debate that's completely lopsided between the two parties, where one party wipes the floor with the other.
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And it's obvious here from Christ's response that he was in fact right.
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His views and not the others were indeed accurate and true. And so this scribe, this lawyer of the law of Moses comes to Christ and he puts this question to him.
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Which commandment is the most important of all? Now commentators are going to debate whether this man was sincere or whether he was not sincere.
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I believe from everything that we can see here that he was sincere. It was
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H .A. Ironside who said the scribe seems to be an honest man of a different character than the cruel hecklers.
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And so here the scribe comes. And it's hardly surprising that he would pose this particular question to Christ.
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In fact, it was common practice for Jews in Christ's day to go to particular rabbis and to ask them just this question.
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I don't know, brother, if you think lawyers, if they're going to ask a question about something in the context of a teacher, it's maybe what's lawful or what's permissible under the law.
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And so this lawyer comes with that same type of question. The Jews, after all, if we were to look at the
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Old Testament, were bound by... Does anyone know how many commandments in the Old Testament?
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A general guess? 600, brother. That's from a lawyer. 613, or student at law, 613
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Old Covenant laws. And the law itself was exhaustively detailed in that Old Testament.
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If we were to go and parse each of those commandments, what we could find is that you could divide those 613 commands into two groups.
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You'd have the 248 positive commands. Commands that you must diligently and judiciously obey.
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And then 365 prohibitions. Things that you shall not do.
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The way I think about it, it's one you shall not for every day of the year. So between the 365 and the 248, 613
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Old Covenant laws. For those of us who have read the books of Exodus or Leviticus, we know that these laws covered everything from issues like murder and theft to shaving and clothing fabrics.
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It was exhaustive in its detail. And for the Jews, it was to be a law to be studied and loved.
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It was a law to be carefully observed and obeyed. And in the end, if the
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Jews were to really get to the root of the issue, it was a law given to the nation of Israel in order that it might bring them to the end of themselves where they would find
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God ready and willing to save them. But the
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Jews never fully understood the full intent of the law. And they were trying to keep every command or prohibition.
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And so it was common for them to try to narrow down this law further into two additional groups, what they would call the heavy commands.
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Commands that demanded a strict and a swift punishment upon lawbreakers.
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But when you have a group of heavy commands, it also necessitated an opposite group, which were the light commands.
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And these were commands that were to be treated with extreme leniency. And because, in the end, they knew that it was impossible to obey all 613 commands, history tells us they were always trying to whittle it down to just one command that captured all the others.
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For instance, if we were to look into church history, about 20 years before Christ, there was a rabbi, we've heard his name a few times in the
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Gospel of Mark, Rabbi Hillel, who issued what I have coined in my own mind as the golden prohibition.
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You have to love the legalistic mindset of these Jews at that time. It wasn't the golden rule, but the golden prohibition.
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And he said, what you do not want done to you, don't do to your neighbor.
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Another rabbi who came after Christ, he said, his greatest command was, in all your ways, acknowledge
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God. Now, certainly, neither of these are wrong, but what we see is that Christ has a different answer for this scribe.
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And rather than being creative or novel, he goes back to the revealed will of God in God's word.
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That makes me, if I can just deviate from my manuscript for a minute, it makes me really glad, actually, that when the
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Lord is asked challenging questions, that he goes back to God's word.
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I often see so many of these celebrity preachers who are very, very creative, and I think to myself,
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I could never do that, I'm not that creative. But it turns out here that even Christ, as a man, with a divine nature and a human nature, goes back to the word of God.
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And where he starts, rather than being creative or novel, is he goes back to what the
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Jews would call the Shema, which literally means to hear. It was a portion of the law that every pious
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Jew, if you were a pious Jew, would recite every morning and every night as part of your daily prayers and ritual or ceremony of devotion.
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And it came directly from Deuteronomy 6, verses 4 and 5. Christ quotes it almost exactly.
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He says, Here, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, and you shall love the
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Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.
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So here, what Christ does in the face of heavy commands and light commands and great commands is he issues two great commandments, two heavy commandments that summarize all of the law of God concerning man's vertical relationship with God and all of the law concerning man's horizontal relationship with his neighbors.
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The Jews wanted a command, Christ did better, he gave them two. The great commandments.
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Now, it begs the question, we're familiar with this, but how, brothers and sisters, can we love and obey
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God in this way, in this life? How can we cultivate a greater love for God?
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I think Christ makes it here abundantly clear. As we study this text, what
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I'm going to do is we're going to hone in on verses 29, 30, and 31 for the remainder of our time.
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And we're going to look at six ways in which we are to love God and to love neighbor.
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And perhaps like Christ, at least in this instance, it's not that creative. It comes right out of the text.
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So in verse 30, Christ begins with these words. He says, and you shall love the
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Lord your God with all your heart. Not surprisingly, the first manner in which we are to love
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God, brothers and sisters, is to love, notice the language here, to love
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God from a whole heart. To love from the whole heart.
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What I find interesting is in each of the manners of love that we see in verse 30,
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Christ prefaces each act of love or each faculty for love with the
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Greek word ex, which means from or out of.
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And this is not, you know I love words, this is not a highlight of mere semantics, but this is an important detail.
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Because what this means is that we're not merely to love God with our hearts. That is true.
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We are to love God with all of our hearts. But even more so, we are to love God from our hearts, from our souls, from our minds, from our very strength.
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And this love in the original language is an active, it's in the active verb form.
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It means that we're not merely to feel love for God with our faculties in a passive sense, but we are to express love actively to God from each of these faculties.
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And so we are to love God first, as a verb, from the whole of our hearts.
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And this inspired scripture is very specific about the kind of love that we are to offer
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God, the kind of love that God demands. We remember, if you were here when we studied 1
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Corinthians, when we were in 1 Corinthians chapter 13, the love chapter, that we talked a great deal about love.
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In the Greek language, there were four words that were used to describe four different kinds of love.
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Kids, does anyone remember? Or adults? Don't name the one that starts with A. We're saving that one for the end.
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So you've got to think of a different one. Can you come to mind? Maybe someone's going to get help. We'll wait until Darrell gets some help.
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What do you think, Darrell? How's your Greek? We'll let him off the hook.
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Of the four different types of love in the Greek language, the first one that we would find, one of the first ones, is the word storge.
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And storge, the way that I remember this in my own mind, because I'm amateur in my
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Greek, is it's similar to a stork. And what does a stork bring? At least in the cartoons, it brings a baby.
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And so storge is familial love. It describes love between family members, the kind of love that when your cousins and your aunts and your uncles come together, you don't have a lot in common necessarily, but you're family and you love each other.
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And so you have storge love. One of the other types of love that you would encounter in the
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Greek language is eros love. And that eros love informs our
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English word erotic. And that would speak of a romantic kind of love, an erotic kind of love, the kind of love that you might see experienced between a man or a woman.
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In scripture, it never actually appears as a positive form of love. But at least for the
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Greeks, there was the eros love. And then one could find phileo love.
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Now, if you have ever been or heard of the city of Philadelphia, we know that it's called the city of brotherly love.
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And that comes from philo or phileo and delphoi, which means love and brother.
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And phileo love is a tender affection kind of love. Think an old friend.
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Think a good friend. Think Alex greeting you at the back door on a Sunday or Steve not letting you leave without a hug.
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It's a tender affection. It's the love you have for a good friend. Now, when the inspired author
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Mark used this word love on behalf of Christ, he did not use storge or eros or phileo.
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But he used the fourth kind of love. And you know what that kind of love is already, I think.
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And that is agape love. Now, what is agape love? We hear so much about it.
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The kind of love that God commands for every single one of us toward him as agape love is this.
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It is a deep and a constant affection. It is a persevering love.
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It is the kind of love that you read about in 1 Corinthians chapter 13 verses 4 and 7.
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It is a patient love. It is a kind love. It does not envy or boast. It is not arrogant or rude.
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It does not insist on its own way. It is not irritable or resentful. It doesn't rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.
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It is the kind of love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
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It is a love that never fails. And what God is calling for in the life of this scribe and in the life of every one of his people is the highest form of sacrificial love that the
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Triune God has even demonstrated in the Gospels. It is a John 3 .16
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kind of love. For God so loved the world, agape. He so agape -ed the world that he gave his only son so that whoever believes in him should not perish.
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And so here we have Christ giving to the scribe the first aspect or the first manner of love that is to define every man or woman of God.
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It is love from a whole heart. And that word heart comes from the word kardia, which was in that day and should be interpreted as us or by us, excuse me, today as the seat of the affections, the seat of the emotions, the seat of even the intellect or the will.
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What God commands of every Christian first and foremost is that we love him from the very core of our being.
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That is our affections, our intellect, and our desires firmly fixed on him.
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To love God from the seat of our affections is to love first in our heart.
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He is to be the first and the greatest thought in the morning. He is to be our last and our most comforting thought in the night.
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To love God with all of heart, with the whole of heart, from the whole of heart, is to have, if I can use this expression, a heart, a flame for God.
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And I think that this is probably the kind of love that comes most naturally to new believers.
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If you can think back to your early days as a Christian, I think I've told you my story before.
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I wanted to get in law enforcement, but I still had a humble job at that time as a mall security guard.
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And when the Lord saved me, I found that in my front pocket, there was just enough room to tuck in my
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Gideon New Testament. And I would sit on the balcony overlooking the mall, so at least
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I was kind of doing my job overseeing the mall.
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I'm not saying it's perfect. It was immature love, no doubt. But I would sit there with my New Testament in the watches of the night and read the scriptures for hours.
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And it was my great desire, my total joy, to be there with my
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God and with his word, drawing near to him. Now, if you have truly experienced conversion, there is some aspect of that same experience that is true in your life.
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Is there not? There needs to be. There must be. When we used to tell our students at McEwen University that a newborn babe is just like a newborn child.
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I marveled when my children were born that within 20 minutes, they were nursing.
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They were hungry and they knew what to do. There was a desire and there was a mechanism to fulfill that desire.
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And such is the way that we are to love God with our whole hearts. And let me ask you, brothers and sisters, that early, that novel feeling as a new
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Christian might have worn off. But has that given way to a mature love from the heart?
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A heart aflame for God. A heart now that is mature in its stature with God, but that is steady and that is zealous and that is enthusiastic in love for God.
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Now, some might ask, where did I get that expression, a heart aflame for God?
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Our brother Sam and I were talking, I think it was this week or last week, about a story that Charles Spurgeon, or that comes from the ministry of Charles Spurgeon, when there was a young man who came to him and said,
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I want to preach, but no one is coming to hear me preach.
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Or how do I gather a crowd who will hear me preach? And Spurgeon said to that young minister, he said,
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Dash yourself with gasoline, set yourself on fire, and invite people to come watch you burn.
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To be filled with love for God, to the very core of your being.
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I'm quoting from a lot of Puritans today because I've been living in the Puritans this week, and they have a lot to say about love.
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But Thomas Watson says, This love is the only thing in which we can retaliate with God.
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If God be angry with us, we must not be angry with him. If he chide us, we must not chide him again.
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But if God loves us, oh we must love him again.
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We must not give him word for word, but we must give him love for love.
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And the way to cultivate this kind of love is to reflect on the love that God has shown to us in his gospel.
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To meditate on all that God is, and that all that God has done for us in Christ.
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In Psalm 63 it says, Oh God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you.
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My soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.
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What are we to do when we feel like our hearts are as cold as the glaciers of Antarctica?
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And our souls are dry and dusty, like this psalmist feels. He says this, he says,
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So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and your glory.
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Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you.
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So I will bless you as long as I live. In your name I will lift up my hands, my soul will be satisfied as with fat and rich food.
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And my mouth will praise you with joyful lips when I remember you upon my bed.
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And meditate on you in the watches of the night. Brothers and sisters, we are to have a heart, a flame for God.
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And that is to be the norm, not the exception. How many people do we look at and say, they are fit for eldership, or they are fit for this, or they are fit for that because they love
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God. That is to be the experience, the normative experience of every Christian. To be filled with love and yearning in the pursuit of God and his glory.
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And if we are not experiencing that, it is because we are not meditating on God.
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We are not reciprocating, or to use Thomas Watson's terms, retaliating with God.
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By meditating on God and meditating on that gospel. Now I said these were going to be brief points, so I am going to move along.
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The next thing that we see here is that we are to love God, not only with our whole heart, but we are to love from the whole soul.
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Now again, Mark uses an interesting word there. He uses the word psyche, which literally means the life.
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We are to love God with all of our life, with all of our inner self.
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And there is a lot of overlap in each of these words. I think the Lord used that intentionally, but the place of the will.
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To love God with all of our souls is to love God with all of our lives.
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It is to love God with every decision of our life. It is to love
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God with every aspect of our eternal souls. It is to love God both in our willingness to do that which pleases
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Him, and in our refraining from doing that which dishonors Him.
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It is to take all of our souls, in all of our lives, and say, Blessed be the name of the
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Lord. Now I thought about it this week. We are surrounded by a
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Christian culture that loves to say that they love God. And we are surrounded by a
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Christian culture that loves to sing about how much they love
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God. But let me tell you how we know one who truly loves
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God from the whole of their souls. It is not by what they say.
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It is not by what they sing. But it is by how they live.
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Where is the one who loves God? Not merely with their words, but with their life, with their psyche, with their obedience unconditionally offered to God.
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In John chapter 14 and verse 15, Christ himself said, If you love me, you will keep my commandments.
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1 John 5 verses 3 and 4. I understand our brothers' struggles with 1
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John and others. I read 1 John this week and thought I could just read this whole book in place of the sermon.
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But 1 John 5 verses 3 and 4 says, For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments.
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And his commandments are not burdensome. For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world.
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And this is the victory that has overcome the world, our faith.
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There are many people today who claim to be Christians and who claim to love
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God. And yet their life screams, their soul screams in opposition to that profession.
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Thomas Watson, to quote another Puritan, he said,
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He that loves God. And we understand, brethren, there are limits to this.
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But he said, he that loves God will have nothing to do with sin unless to give battle to it.
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Sin strikes not only at God's honor but at his being. Does a man love his prince who harbors him who is a traitor to the crown?
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Is he a friend of God who loves that which hates God? The love of God and the life of sin cannot dwell together.
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He said, a child which loves his father cannot but weep for offending him.
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Did not my Lord suffer enough on the cross, but must I make him suffer more?
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Shall I give him more gall and vinegar to drink on that cross? Brothers and sisters, we are to love the
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Lord our God with all of our hearts and with all of our lives. And the best way that we love
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God with our lives is by living obedient lives unto him. And that in and of itself is going to cultivate greater love and greater joy.
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Greater love through the joy of obedience. I'm sure many of us have experienced that before.
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Sometimes the best thing to do to love and to obey God is to love and obey
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God. And the joy that comes from that. I remember as an early
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Christian, this was about 2009 at the height of Facebook. And I remember every week
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I would go and delete more friends off Facebook to rid myself of the addiction that was early 2000s
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Facebook. And every time I would remove 10 more friends and I would be filled with joy and emboldened.
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And I kept saying to people and they thought I was crazy, I did come back to Facebook. I'm not sure if that matters now or not, but I remember saying,
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I just want to focus on loving the people in front of me rather than trying to impress the people who see my best pictures, the highlights of my life.
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The next thing we see, to love God from a whole heart, from a whole soul, and next from a whole mind.
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Dinoia. It means to love God with all of our intellect.
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And oh how that is needed today in Christ's church. We have a lot of people who are prepared to love
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God with all of their feelings. But not enough people, where is the man, where is the woman who wants to be an intellectual, if I can use that term, for Christ's sake.
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I think I've shared this quote before, but Mark Noll says, the scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is no evangelical mind.
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Despite dynamic success at the popular level, modern
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American evangelicals have failed notably in sustaining serious intellectual life.
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He says they have nourished millions of believers in the simple verities of the gospel, but it is largely abandoned in the universities and the arts and other realms of high culture.
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The historical situation is curious. Modern evangelicals are the spiritual descendants of leaders and movements distinguished by probing fruitful attention to the mind.
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And yet the scandal is that mainstream Christianity is largely all whim and no wisdom.
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All mush and no mind. R .C. Sproul said, burning hearts, you want a heart filled with love for God.
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He said, burning hearts are not nourished by empty heads, but by minds that are filled with the living and abiding word of God.
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We live in one of the most anti -intellectual periods in the history of Western civilization.
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We have passion, but we are surrounded by an anti -intellectual spirit of the world.
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Around the same time that R .C. Sproul quoted or penned that famous quote, there was a
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Gallup poll that conducted or that summarized their findings in one of their surveys.
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And this Gallup poll said this, it says, we are having a revival of feelings, but not of the knowledge of God.
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The church today is more guided by feelings than by convictions. We value enthusiasm more than informed commitment.
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The way of the world is this. The world will always follow, as Ephesians 2, 3 says, follow the course of the world with both the mind and the will.
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Minds that are darkened, blinded by the devil. But the church, brothers and sisters, is to be a place not only where we use our wills and our emotions and our passions, but certainly our minds.
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God not only created our emotions, but he created our intellect.
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And we are to use every faculty that God has given us for his glory. Claudius Buchanan.
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There's a story about Claudius Buchanan, who was an English missionary to India.
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A missiologist, actually. He was a brilliant theologian. There's probably like a few people in this room that we just wonder, how do they fit that much in their brains?
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And despite the fact that he could have applied his mind to a thousand different things, he could have been the
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Elon Musk of his generation. Despite the fact that he could have made a fortune as a lawyer or as a businessman or some other trade, he devoted the life of his mind to the advancement of the gospel and the translation of the
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Bible from the Syriac into the Malayalam language for the benefit of a small
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Christian community in India. That, brother, made me think of your daughter. Applying his life so that people who do not have the scriptures have the word of God in their own language.
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And one day during this effort, he shared with a friend this painstaking process that he went through where he would take every word and every line and every page and exactingly read and interpret and understand and translate it into this foreign language.
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And then once this was complete, he would again take every page and every line and go through each line and every page five times before he was satisfied to move on to the next page.
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Here's a man that could do almost anything with this colossal mind that God had given him, but he spent his time alone in a room, hunched over the
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Bible, translating word by word, and not even for his own benefit, but for the benefit of a people on the other side of the world from him.
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And so one day he told his friend, or showed his friend, what it was that he was doing.
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And he told his friend that he had expected beforehand that this would have been a very tiresome process to sit there hunched over the
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Bible, page after page, line after line, word after word. But he said this, instead, every fresh reading of each page of scripture seemed to unveil new beauties and new glories about God and about Christ.
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And as he detailed the process of his translation work, we're told that he stopped in the middle of a sentence and burst into tears.
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And his friend said, what could this mean that he's breaking down and crying in my presence?
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What could have upset him so much? And as soon as Claudius recovered himself, he said to his friend, he said,
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I could not express the emotion that I felt as I recollected the delight that it pleased
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God to afford me the ability to read his word.
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Brothers and sisters, God has given us a mind, a glorious mind, a mind that can do unknown things, unseen things.
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How many supercomputers does it take to mimic one mind and that imperfectly?
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And God has given us the ability not only to think and to reason, but to read and to study and to know him through his word.
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We're to love God from the whole of our minds. And we're to love
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God from all of our strength, from all strength. Here, Mark uses the word iscus.
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It means our might, our power, our strength. R .C.
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Sproul says the call to love is not so much a call to a certain state of feeling, but it is a quality of action.
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There are so many people who speak of how much they love God. But God is waiting for men who will show them or who will show how much they love
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God, not just with their tongues, but with the exertion of every muscle and every faculty that God has given them.
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1 John 3 .18 says this, little children, let us not love in word or talk, but in deed and in truth.
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How we are to use the bodies that God has given us to love and to adore him.
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I had a thought this week that God has only given each of us one instrument by which we are to love him.
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Sam walks around with a little pencil case full of instruments. He has many instruments to do many different tasks.
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But God has given us only one instrument. That is this physical body that he has put our souls into.
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And we are to use our knees and our elbows and our fingers and our hands and every part of the body that God has given us, every fiber and every muscle to love and to adore him.
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And this, brothers and sisters, is going to be for us the greatest joy in all the world.
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The apostle Paul, when he wrote to the Philippian church, he spoke about what it meant to pour himself out in love for Christ.
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In Philippians 2 .17 it says, Even if I am to be poured out as a drink offering upon the sacrificial offering of your faith,
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I am glad and rejoice with you all. Dear saints, as it pertains to loving
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God with these faculties, to love God with all of your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength is not only the highest calling of the
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Christian life, but it is the greatest possible pursuit of the
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Christian life. There is nothing in this universe that will satisfy your greatest longings, the greatest longings of your soul, like loving
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God and exhausting every part of yourself in his service.
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How happy will you be at the end of your days if the lamp of your life has been burned out for God.
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We have only two options in this life. It is to burn out for God or to rust out for self.
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And there might be people in this room, there might be children in this room, who think to themselves, can living for God and loving
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God with all of yourself, can that really be the best way to live, the most enjoyable way to live, the most fulfilling way to live.
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And what I would say to you is this, find any Christian who has known the joys of loving
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God and you will hear the same story over and over again. The contentment is not found on social media.
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I think we all know that. Contentment and true fulfillment is not found at the lake or at the beach or in the mountains.
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It's not found with a big bank balance. True contentment, true joy and true gratification, the reality or the realization of every dream and desire, all of these are found in this, trusting
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Christ, treasuring Him and living for God with every fiber of your being.
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It is found in the joy of unreserved obedience to God and His Holy Word, holding nothing back, forsaking self for the sake of God.
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It is discovered not in the collecting of material goods, but in giving your very life away that God would have all of you and all of the glory.
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And the sad reality, in fact, is that the most mundane, kids, listen to this carefully, the most mundane and the most meaningless and the most futile life that one can live is a life devoid of love for God.
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I'm telling you, you're going to live a far greater life if you use your mind to serve
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Christ and to love Christ than to use the faculties that He has given you every day to play
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Sudoku or crossword puzzles. He's going to do it.
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Thomas Brooks says, A greater hell I would not wish on any man than to live and not love the beloved
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God. To love God is the greatest adventure in the universe.
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And then verse 31. Don't worry, we're almost over here. Christ says, greater than these.
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Now, for the sake of time, we're going to make our way fairly briskly through these last two points. That's okay.
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We focus on loving God first. But what I want to do is break this up into two categories. First, love for the brethren, love for Christians, love for the saints, and love for the unbeliever.
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Here, Christ does something. He quotes first from Deuteronomy 6, and then next for the second part of His great commandment,
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He quotes from Leviticus chapter 19 and verse 18. You shall not take vengeance or bear grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
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I am the Lord. And what Paul says this in Galatians 6 .10,
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he says, So then we have, as we have opportunity, let everyone do good. Sorry, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith.
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First John is filled. I'm not going to read them all. It's filled with commands, the new command to love one another.
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The Christian church is to be the strangest place in the whole world. It's a people who come from every background, who are diverse in every possible way imaginable.
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In our modern culture, which loves to divide people based on their skin color and their socioeconomic status and everything else, the
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Christian church stands, ought to stand as a beacon on a hill where you have a plethora of people, a sea of people who are different in every possible respect, and yet they love each other more than the world has ever known the meaning of the word love.
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The Christian church is to be filled with people who have our heads on a swivel, looking for every possible opportunity to love this person and to love that person.
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The church is to be earnest, sacrificial, and enthusiastic in its love, birthed out of a penetrating awareness of God's great love for us in Christ as sinners.
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As one Puritan said, we're to see a clump of rocks and soil, which is our brother, and we are to see that nestled in that clump of rocks and soil is the gold, the most expensive and treasured gold in all the universe because in each one of us, we see
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Christ and the Spirit, and we are united with one another in Christ. The church is to be marked by a humble,
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Christ -like love that counts others as more important than ourselves. We're to be in competition with each other to outdo one another in showing honor.
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I like what John Street said. Our Institute men know John Street. Our sister Amy certainly knows
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John Street. He was her professor at the Master's Seminary and the
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Master's University, and he said this, the branch that bears the most fruit is bent lowest to the ground.
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The Christian that is the most mature is going to be the most humble and the most loving in the group.
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And this is our example, 1 John 3, 16 and 17, by this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers.
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If anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does
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God's love abide in him? And there's a beautiful story from the 18th century that I can't help but share about this group of Christians that were in a big church.
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The church was called the Metropolitan Tabernacle. I have to introduce it in different ways, you guys, for those of you who know.
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And one man planted a flower garden in his yard. Now, when most of us plant flowers, it's to beautify our front yards.
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But this one man in the church planted a flower garden in his yard for the express purpose of whenever the flowers would come to bloom, he would cut down each of the flowers and put together a range of bouquet and deliver them to fellow church members who were ill at home or in the hospital.
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He had a garden to express his love to the brethren. Another man owned 10 cows, not because he was a dairy farmer, but he purchased and maintained 10 cows in order that he might milk them and then sell the milk.
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And he used the proceeds of those milk sales to care for one of the widowed sisters down the street.
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Gospel -informed love. Our love is to be offered in direct proportion to the love that we have received in Christ.
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We have been forgiven much, and we are commanded, therefore, to love much. I have a thousand verses from 1
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John. I'm going to pass them over. Read that book this week. And last of all, love for the lost.
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When the Jews read Leviticus 19, verse 18, they believed that this command to love neighbor was exclusive to love to the
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Jewish neighbor. It was love for the fellow Jew. We saw
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Christ turn that on its head in his parable of the Good Samaritan, that our neighbor is not just our fellow
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Jew, but the one in front of us who needs to be loved. Christ himself said in Matthew 5, verses 43 and 44, you have heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.
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That's a lot of what our world says today. Love your person on your side of the political aisle and hate the person on the other side.
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But Christ says this, but I say to you, in the face of what the world says, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.
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A brother once asked a question, I thought it was a tremendously important question, that if you were to die tomorrow or if this church were to die tomorrow, would the unbelieving world miss you?
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Would your unbelieving coworkers go, that man or that woman was so unbelievably kind, so willing to go out of their way.
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That church was so careful and loving to the poor. What would the world say if we were wiped off the face of this earth today?
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The Puritans were known for their vivid metaphors, their vivid word pictures, especially from nature.
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And John Trapp, he says this, love offers honey to a bee without wings.
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And that's an interesting picture, isn't it? It might seem far -fetched, but I remember my daughter when she was young, we had a big apple tree in our backyard and the bees would get tired and thirsty, buzzing from flower to flower.
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And what she would do is stand beneath the apple tree with a wet cloth,
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I have photos to prove it, if you want to see after the service, and would hold it out and the bees would come land on the cloth and suck the water out of the cloth and would be refreshed with the water and then would get back to pollinating all of our apples for the fall.
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Love for the unbeliever is to offer honey to a bee without wings.
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It takes that which a lost man needs, even though he does not have the faculties to get it for himself, and it offers the sweetest and the best to the helpless.
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It is applying gospel salve to the eyes of the blind man.
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It is giving to a man who does not deserve anything the same love that we did not deserve in Christ.
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So brothers and sisters, we are called to and commanded to love, love
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God and love neighbor. And I have very little time to say it, but I will say this, and none of us has done it perfectly and none of us will do it perfectly.
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And so we are dependent on the one who has. We are dependent on the one who
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I will call love incarnate. In verse 34, the scribe repeats all that Christ says, and Christ says, you are not far from the kingdom of heaven.
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If you leave this room and all you hear is go out and love God better and love people better, you will be close, but not close enough.
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And what it means not just to be not far from the kingdom of heaven, but to belong to the kingdom of heaven is not first to love
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God, but to take hold of love incarnate. It's more than to understand the law.
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It's more even than to keep it, but it's to recognize what Paul said in Romans 3 .20, for by the works of the law, no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes the knowledge of sin.
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But it's this, to take hold of Christ, who in Romans 5 .8 says, God shows his love for us, that while we were still sinners,
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Christ died for us. Brothers and sisters, love
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God with all of your soul, with all of your person, with everything that he has given you.
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Love your neighbor. Sell your possessions. Do what you must.
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Give honey to that honeybee without wings. But at the end of the day, our hope is not in our law keeping.
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It's not in our loving. It's in God's loving. And children, you learned this today. Who is the
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Redeemer? Question 19 in the Catechism, who is the Redeemer? The Redeemer is
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Jesus Christ. It is not love. It is not law keeping. But we'll end with this. The only
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Redeemer is the Lord Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, in whom
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God became man and bore the penalty of sin on himself. Let's pray.