Cultivating Love For God

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.

Love as the Great Theme of Christian Ethics

Well, as we just heard our brother read, the theme of our text for today is love. 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 Carlton card that you get at the bookshop or the gift shop at the airport or the mall.

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 Christians who love, who love God and who love neighbor.

What a magnificent and critically important theme it is to spend our day dwelling on. D .L. Moody, writing about love, once said, There is no use trying to do, think about this, trying to do God's work without love.

The doctor can go without it. The lawyer, our brother might know, can go without love. But God's work cannot be done without love. In a similar fashion, Alexander Strauch, some of the men here that are going through the Institute, you certainly know his name.

He once said that every man is faced with a decision. He must either love or die. Even the disciple whom 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, he wrote, anyone who does not love does not know God because God is love.

Now, few of us in this room would argue with the fact that love is one of the most important themes in all of Scripture. 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 Christian after the words repent and believe is the word love, 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. It is to be the chief interest behind every impulse to share the Gospel with the lost.

It is to be the driving force behind the Christian's concern for every single social issue. It is love for God, singing about it this week, love for God and love for neighbor that compels every 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.

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. Like the evils of abortion, which is murder or slavery or the abuse of children.

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 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. Now, I spent just a couple of minutes trying to make a case for how important love is. 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. But if we're honest with ourselves, this is a theme that is often misplaced in the lives of the everyday Christian.

It is often the case that we go days or even weeks without this great commandment coming to our minds. To love the Lord your God and to love your neighbor as yourself. 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 Lord Jesus Christ said to the Ephesian church in Revelation chapter 2 and verses 2 -4.

To paraphrase that for a moment, it could be said of us that we, like the Ephesian church, labor diligently. We patiently endure. We love, don't we? We love to test those who claim to be Bible teachers and are not.

We are eager to know and to believe sound doctrine. 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.

We read our Bibles. We read our systematic theologies. Our heads have grown big and our hearts have grown cold. 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, I don't think I love God as much as I used to then.

We might be able to say, oh, how 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.

But now when I look at it, that same task that once brought me joy now feels like a chore. Dear saints of God, what are we to do when that kind of experience describes our lives, when God commands us to love and we feel like our hearts have grown cold?

The Great Commandment in Mark 12

Well, this afternoon we find ourselves, as we know, in the Gospel of Mark. For this last week, I keep orienting us to the day. It's Tuesday still in Christ's last week on this earth. 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.

And at the very climax of this scene, we see three questions put to Christ in this chapter 12. Our Lord is going to deal with this vital issue of love. And in this brief encounter, what I think we're going to discover as we learn and study is that Christ not only issues the command to love.

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, 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 ourself.

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 Christian lives?

Every single one of us in this room, whether you are a baby Christian or a veteran of the faith, you know who you are, maybe. Maybe your kids will point you out. You don't have to love, sorry, you have never loved God as you ought to.

All of us, every single one of us in this room are defective in our love in many ways. And Christ not only challenges us in this respect, but by His grace, He's going to show us the way. 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. 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.

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. 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 God and to cultivate God in our lives, cultivate the love of God in our lives.

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. So one of the scribes came up and heard them, that is Christ and the Sadducees, disputing with one another.

And seeing that he answered them well, asked him, which commandment is the most important of all? Jesus answered, the most important is, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. We're going to pause there mid-sentence for a second.

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. 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.

In Mark chapter 12 and verse 13, if we turn there briefly, we found that unlikely coalition of the Pharisees and the Herodians who came to trip Christ up with questions about paying taxes to Caesar. Not only did Christ navigate those questions, or that question, brilliantly, but he left them stunned.

They marveled at his response, the text says. And then in verse 38, we read that the 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 Bibles, even though they were the teachers of Israel.

They did not know God, and they did not know his word. And not only that, but he showed them how foolish their perspective was. 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.

And we're told that he came to Christ seeing that he had answered them well. 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.

And it's obvious here from Christ's response that he was in fact right. 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.

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. I believe from everything that we can see here that he was sincere.

It was H .A. Ironside who said the scribe seems to be an honest man of a different character than the cruel hecklers. And so here the scribe comes. And it's hardly surprising that he would pose this particular question to Christ.

In fact, it was common practice for Jews in Christ's day to go to particular rabbis and to ask them just this question. 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.

And so this lawyer comes with that same type of question. The Jews, after all, if we were to look at the Old Testament, were bound by... Does anyone know how many commandments in the Old Testament? A general guess?

600, brother. That's from a lawyer. 613 or student at law. 613 Old Covenant laws. And the law itself was exhaustively detailed in that Old Testament. If we were to go and parse each of those commandments, what we could find is that you could distinct or divide those 613 commands into two groups.

You'd have the 248 positive commands. Commands that you must diligently and judiciously obey. And then 365 prohibitions. Things that you shall not do. 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 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.

It was exhaustive in its detail. And for the Jews, it was to be a law to be studied and loved. It was a law to be carefully observed and obeyed. And in the end, if the 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 God ready and willing to save them. But the Jews never fully understood the full intent of the law. And they were trying to keep every command or prohibition.

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. Commands that demanded a strict and a swift punishment upon lawbreakers.

But when you have a group of heavy commands, it also necessitated an opposite group. Which were the light commands. 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. 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 Gospel of Mark.

Rabbi Hillel, who issued what I have coined in my own mind as the golden prohibition. You have to love the legalistic mindset of these Jews at that time. It wasn't the golden rule, but the golden prohibition.

And he said, what you do not want done to you, don't do to your neighbor. Another rabbi who came after Christ, he said, his greatest command was in all your ways acknowledge God. Now certainly neither of these are wrong.

But what we see is that Christ has a different answer for this scribe. And rather than being creative or novel, he goes back to the revealed will of God in God's word. That makes me, if I can just deviate from my manuscript for a minute.

It makes me really glad actually that when the Lord is asked challenging questions. That he goes back to God's word. I often see so many of these celebrity preachers who are very, very creative. And I think to myself, 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. And where he starts, rather than being creative or novel, is he goes back to what the Jews would call the Shema.

Which literally means to hear. It was a portion of the law that every pious 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.

And it came directly from Deuteronomy chapter 6 and verses 4 and 5. And Christ quotes it almost exactly. He says, 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.

The Jews wanted to command, Christ did better, he gave them to. The great commandments. Now, it begs the question. We're familiar with this. But how, brothers and sisters, can we love and obey God in this way, in this life?

How can we cultivate a greater love for God? I think Christ makes it here abundantly clear. As we study this text, what I'm going to do is we're going to hone in on verses 29, 30, and 31 for the remainder of our time.

And we're going to look at six ways in which we are to love God and to love neighbor. And perhaps like Christ, at least in this instance, it's not that creative. It comes right out of the text. So in verse 30, Christ begins with these words.

He says, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart. Not surprisingly, the first manner in which we are to love God, brothers and sisters, is to love. Notice the language here. To love God from a whole heart.

To love from the whole heart. What I find interesting is in each of the manners of love that we see in verse 30, Christ prefaces each act of love or each faculty for love with the Greek word ex, which means from or out of.

And this is not, you know I love words. This is not a highlight of mere semantics. But this is an important detail. Because what this means is that we're not merely to love God with our hearts. That is true.

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. And this love in the original language is an active, it's in the active verb form.

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. And so we are to love God first.

As a verb.

From the whole of our hearts. And this inspired scripture is very specific about the kind of love that we are to offer God. The kind of love that God demands. We remember if you were here when we studied 1 Corinthians.

When we were in 1 Corinthians chapter 13. The love chapter. That we talked a great deal about love. In the Greek language there were four words that were used to describe four different kinds of love.

Kids, does anyone remember? Or adults? Anyone? Don't name the one that starts with A. We're saving that one for the end. 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 Daryl gets some help. What do you think Daryl? How's your Greek? We'll let him off the hook. 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. And storge the way that I remember this in my own mind. Because I'm amateur in my Greek. It's similar to a stork. And what does a stork bring? At least in the cartoons it brings a baby.

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. And so you have storge love. One of the other types of love that you would encounter in the Greek language. Is eros love. And that eros love informs our 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. In scripture it never actually appears as a positive form of love.

But at least for the Greeks there was the eros love. And then one could find phileo love. Now if you have ever been or heard of the city of Philadelphia. We know that it's called the city of brotherly love.

And that comes from phileo or phileo and delphoi. Which means love and brother. And phileo love is a tender affection kind of love. Think an old friend. Think a good friend. Think Alex greeting you at the back door on a Sunday.

Or Steve not letting you leave without a hug. It's a tender affection. It's the love you have for a good friend. Now when the inspired author Mark used this word love on behalf of Christ. He did not use storge or eros or phileo.

But he used the fourth kind of love. And you know what that kind of love is already I think. And that is agape love. Now what is agape love? We hear so much about it. The kind of love that God commands for every single one of us toward him as agape love is this.

It is a deep and a constant affection. It is a persevering love. It is the kind of love that you read about in 1 Corinthians chapter 13 verses 4 and 7. It is a patient love. It is a kind love. It does not envy or boast.

It is not arrogant or rude. 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. It is the kind of love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

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 triune God has even demonstrated in the gospels.

It is a John 3 .16 kind of love. For God so loved the world, agape. He so agape the world that he gave his only son so that whoever believes in him should not perish. 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. It is love from a whole heart. And that word heart comes from the word cardia. Which was in that day and should be interpreted by us today as the seat of the affections.

The seat of the emotions. The seat of even the intellect or the will. What God commands of every Christian first and foremost is that we love him from the very core of our being. That is our affections, our intellect, and our desires firmly fixed on him.

To love God from the seat of our affections is to love first in our heart. 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.

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 aflame for God. And I think that this is probably the kind of love that comes most naturally to new believers.

If you can think back to your early days as a Christian, I think I've told you my story before. I wanted to get in law enforcement, but I still had a humble job at that time as a mall security guard. And when the Lord saved me, I found that in my front pocket, there was just enough room to tuck in my Gideon New Testament.

And I would sit on the balcony overlooking the mall, so at least I was kind of doing my job overseeing the mall. 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.

And it was my great desire, my total joy, to be there with my 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, is there not?

There needs to be. There must be. When we used to tell our students at McCune University that a newborn babe is just like a newborn child. I marveled when my children were born that within 20 minutes, they were nursing.

They were hungry and they knew what to do. There was a desire and there was a mechanism to fulfill that desire. 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 Christian might have worn off.

But has that given way to a mature love from the heart? 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.

Now, some might ask, where did I get that expression, a heart aflame for God? 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, I want to preach, but no one is coming to hear me preach. Or how do I gather a crowd who will hear me preach? And Spurgeon said to that young minister, he said, dash yourself with gasoline.

Set yourself on fire and invite people to come watch you burn. To be filled with love for God to the very core of your being. 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.

But Thomas Watson says, this love is the only thing in which we can retaliate with God. If God be angry with us, we must not be angry with him. If he chide us, we must not chide him again. But if God loves us, oh, we must love him again.

We must not give him word for word, but we must give him love for love. And the way to cultivate this kind of love is to reflect on the love that God has shown to us in his gospel. To meditate on all that God is and that all that God has done for us in Christ.

In Psalm 63 it says, Oh God, you are my God. Earnestly I seek you. My soul thirsts for you. My flesh faints for you as in a dry and weary land where there is no water. What are we to do when we feel like our hearts are as cold as the glaciers of Antarctica?

And our souls are dry and dusty like this psalmist feels. He says this. He says, So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and your glory. Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you.

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. And my mouth will praise you with joyful lips when I remember you upon my bed.

And meditate on you in the watches of the night. Brothers and sisters, we are to have a heart, a flame for God. 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 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.

And if we are not experiencing that, it is because we are not meditating on God. We are not reciprocating or to use Thomas Watson's terms, retaliating with God. 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. 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.

Now again, Mark uses an interesting word there. He uses the word Psyche. Which literally means the life. We are to love God with all of our life. With all of our inner self. 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. To love God with all of our souls is to love God with all of our lives. It is to love God with every decision of our life. It is to love God with every aspect of our eternal souls.

It is to love God both in our willingness to do that which pleases Him. And in our refraining from doing that which dishonors Him. It is to take all of our souls and all of our lives and say, Blessed be the name of the Lord.

Now I thought about it this week. We are surrounded by a Christian culture that loves to say that they love God. And we are surrounded by a Christian culture that loves to sing about how much they love God.

But let me tell you how we know one who truly loves God from the whole of their souls. It is not by what they say. It is not by what they sing. But it is by how they live. 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. In John chapter 14 and verse 15, Christ himself said, If you love me, you will keep my commandments.

1 John 5 verses 3 and 4. I understand our brothers' struggles with 1 John and others. I read 1 John this week and thought I could just read this whole book in place of the sermon. But 1 John 5 verses 3 and 4 says, For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments.

And His commandments are not burdensome. For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world. Our faith. There are many people today who claim to be Christians.

And who claim to love God. And yet their life screams, their soul screams in opposition to that profession. Thomas Watson, to quote another Puritan, he said, He that loves God. And we understand, brethren, there are limits to this.

But he said, He that loves God will have nothing to do with sin. Unless to give battle to it. 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?

Is he a friend of God who loves that which hates God? The love of God and the life of sin cannot dwell together. He said, A child which loves his father cannot but weep for offending him. Did not my Lord suffer enough on the cross?

But must I make him suffer more? Shall I give him more gall and vinegar to drink on that cross? Brothers and sisters, we are to love the Lord our God with all of our hearts. And with all of our lives.

And the best way that we love 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. Greater love through the joy of obedience.

I'm sure many of us have experienced that before. That sometimes the best thing to do to love and to obey God is to love and obey God. And the joy that comes from that. I remember as an early Christian, this was about 2009 at the height of Facebook.

And I remember every week I would go and delete more friends off Facebook to rid myself of the addiction that was early 2000s Facebook. And every time I would remove 10 more friends and I would be filled with joy and emboldened.

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 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. The next thing we see, to love God from a whole heart, from a whole soul. And next from a whole mind.

Dinoia.

It means to love God with all of our intellect. And oh how that is needed today in Christ's church. We have a lot of people who are prepared to love 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. I think I've shared this quote before. The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is no evangelical mind.

Despite dynamic success at the popular level. Modern American evangelicals have failed notably in sustaining serious intellectual life. 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. The historical situation is curious. Modern evangelicals are the spiritual descendants of leaders and movements.

Distinguished by probing fruitful attention to the mind. And yet the scandal is that mainstream Christianity is largely all whim and no wisdom. All mush and no mind. R .C. Sproul said burning hearts. You want a heart filled with love for God.

He said burning hearts are not nourished by empty heads. But by minds that are filled with the living and abiding word of God. We live in one of the most anti-intellectual periods in the history of Western civilization.

We have passion but we are surrounded by an anti-intellectual spirit of the world. Around the same time that R .C. Sproul quoted or penned that famous quote. There was a Gallup poll that conducted or that summarized their findings in one of their surveys.

And this Gallup poll said this. It says we are having a revival of feelings but not of the knowledge of God. The church today is more guided by feelings than by convictions. We value enthusiasm more than informed commitment.

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. 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. God not only created our emotions but he created our intellect. And we are to use every faculty that God has given us for his glory. Claudius Buchanan. There's a story about Claudius Buchanan who was an English missionary to India.

A missiologist actually. He was a brilliant theologian. He's probably like a few people in this room that we just wonder how do they fit that much in their brains. And despite the fact that he could have applied his mind to a thousand different things.

He could have been the 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 Bible from the Syriac into the Malayalam language. For the benefit of a small Christian community in India. Brother, it 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.