If You Love Me Part 3 - A Deeper Dive
Message Recap
This week we continue our sermon series If You Love Me. Two weeks ago, we introduced the series by reflecting on Jesus’ words to the disciples, “If you love me, keep my commands.” John 14:15 (NIV). We learned that our love for Jesus should lead to some form of action. Saying we love Jesus is easy. However, being obedient as a demonstration of that love is much more difficult. We also considered how challenging the world makes it to follow the path Jesus laid out for us. Fortunately, we have the gift of the Holy Spirit, who lives and works within us to help us resist the world's temptations and remain obedient.
Last week we continued the series by asking, “What commands are we expected to keep?” Based on his words recorded in the New Testament, Jesus issued over 1000 commands, and they. fall within three themes: love, grace, and forgiving others. Using the parable of the wicked servant, we considered how grace, and by extension, forgiving others, demonstrates our love for Jesus. It is important to remember forgiveness does not excuse the act committed against us, but it does remove our right to collect on the debt or seek revenge for the harm done to us. God forgave us when we asked, so we are expected to forgive others similarly. If we are to honor Jesus when he said, “If you love me, keep my commands.” (John 14:15 NIV), then we must be willing to forgive everyone - even those who are difficult to forgive. Again, the Holy Spirit guides us along a path of righteousness and helps us extend forgiveness.
This week we focus on the command that Jesus placed at the top of the list when the Pharisees asked him which was the greatest.
“37 Jesus replied: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
Most churches use a particular theme or passage as a focal point for their ministries. However, at the heart of every church is - or should be - Jesus. Like our bodies, the church consists of different parts with different purposes and different strengths. The end goal of all those different parts remains the same: bringing people to Jesus. For us, Ocoee Oaks UMC, we are the “love God and love people” church. This oft-repeated phrase reminds us that the most important thing we can do in our ministry and outreach is to love God and others.
It is no surprise there are dark forces at work trying to distract us from our mission to love God and love people. For example, sometimes distractions come from the world in the form of advertisers trying to tell us that their product will bring us ultimate joy and fulfillment. Their goal is to make money, not really to enrich our lives. Other times the distractions may come from within the Christian community. Arguments over theology and doctrine can lead us to focus on non-essential elements of the faith and away from our salvation. No matter the noise and distractions, our mission remains to love God and love people.
In this week’s scripture, Jesus is responding to the Pharisees who, once again, are testing him. The three commands included in Jesus’ answer - love God, love others, and love ourselves - are simple but also quite complex. Consider Jesus’ statement found earlier in Matthew,
“17 Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.”
Jesus’ statement that “all the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments” suggests that the law given by God through the Ten Commandments can be boiled down to the simple instruction to love God and love others. Jesus isn’t changing the law; he is fulfilling it by making it easier to understand. Rather than simply following a set of rules, Jesus tells his disciples that it is far more important to love God with our entire being. When we truly love God, we give him his rightful place in our lives. We acknowledge his sovereignty and put him at the center of everything we do.
When Jesus instructs us to love God, he encapsulates the essence of the first four of the Ten Commandments - no other gods before me, no graven images, etc. He says to love with our entire being, including our minds. We are encouraged to engage our intellect by studying God’s word and meditating on his instruction to understand God’s character better. Knowing God’s character, we better understand the things happening around us.
When Jesus says to love your neighbor as yourself, he captures the remaining six commandments - do not steal, do not covet, honor your father and mother, etc. These commandments describe how we interact with others. They focus on how we are to have respect and show compassion for one another. When we love others as ourselves, we discover how each of us has inherent value. Through Jesus’ instruction, we are encouraged to evolve from superficial acts of kindness to sacrificial acts. This means we love even those who are difficult to love.
What is Jesus really asking of us when he says, “If you love me, follow my commands”? Based on what we have studied thus far, we can conclude that to truly love Jesus we must love God, love others, and love ourselves.
Using Our Intellect
Did you notice that when Jesus responded to the Pharisees about the greatest command, he said that we are to love God not only with our hearts and soul but also with our minds? The study of scripture is an act of love. God gave us the faculty to reason to understand the world around us better. We are encouraged to use our intellect to learn about and explain complex concepts. Jesus included everyone he came in contact with when he taught about the nature of God. He didn’t reserve his teaching for just a particular group of people. Some religious elite of the time believed they had all of the answers and that the common person was incapable of understanding such lofty subjects. The religious leaders maintained their power by restricting the source of knowledge.
Still today, there are those who believe only certain people can truly understand and interpret the complexities of our faith. They preach down to the common person and establish their personal beliefs as absolute truth. But God gave us all the ability to reason and learn. We don’t have to have a seminary degree to understand the nuances of our faith. The Holy Spirit will guide us when we study God’s word.
John Wesley, the leader of the Methodist movement, believed there are four sources for understanding our faith: scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. This approach to theological understanding became known as the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. It emphasizes the idea that we can learn more about our faith by not relying on a single source of truth but by also considering our life experiences. Using our ability to reason combined with our experience is a radical but important departure from the idea that only certain people can accurately interpret scripture.
Studying God’s word is a spiritual discipline. We are all expected to grow our faith through the study of scripture. Don’t be misled - we all possess the ability, through the Holy Spirit, to interpret and understand what God says. This is how we fulfill Jesus' command to love God with all our mind.