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Rogue Christian
Understanding the Greatest Commandment: Loving God with All Your Heart, Soul, and Mind
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We're going to take a look at the greatest commandment. Who knows what it is? Almost love the Lord your God. Right. So we're going to look at what this. What this actually is and what it actually means and things like that. Okay. We'll see where it comes from. So we will be in Matthew 22, verse 37. I know, shocker. I'm only going to do like one or two verses, but there's enough in that that I think we could really tear into it a little bit. Okay. Oh, while you guys are getting there, if you don't mind, I will pray maximize some time here. We're trying. I'm doing my best to keep this to that half hour mark. Okay. Oh, Father in heaven. Lord, we thank you. We praise you that we can come together to hear your word today. Lord, we pray that you would speak to our hearts and to our minds, Lord, that you would penetrate deeply to help us know and better understand what it means to love you with all our heart, our soul and our mind, Lord. Lord, I pray that you would continue the work of transformation that you've been doing in. In these men, Lord, and in us as the staff members. Lord, I pray that you would speak through me today, Lord. Set aside any of my own thinking, any of my own thoughts, Lord, and let your words come through. So Father, again, I lift up these men that you would guide them, direct them, Lord, and use them for your purposes, Lord, may all glory and honor be to you today. In Jesus name, Amen. All right, so Matthew 22, verse 37. Okay, we're not. We're not going to touch. We might touch on the love your neighbor as yourself part just a tiny bit, but we did kind of talk about that last week, right? Because we talked about what it means to love one another. So. Matthew 22, verse 37. And he said to him. So he's being asked a question by a teacher or lawyer or some sort of Pharisee. Okay. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. End of message. See you guys later. No. No. What? Doesn't make sense. So what is this. What is this talking about? Give me. Give me some ideas. Tell me what you're seeing there and what this means. Okay. Love God with everything. Okay. Okay. No one else. Your heart, soul and mind. With all. Where does this come from? What does it originate from? Okay. Hey, Damien got it from. Deuteronomy is from the Shema. Okay. This is a phrase that very staunch Jewish people will Recite every morning and every night they will recite the. What's known as the Shema, right? Hero, Israel, the Lord is one. You know? Have you guys read that before? No. You've never read the Shema? Oh, okay, now we have to turn there. Deuteronomy 6. We'll read that. We'll read the whole. The whole thing. So it starts at Deuteronomy, chapter six, verse four. He's only quoting verse five. Okay, but we'll start it at four. Hear, O Israel, Yahweh is God. Yahweh is one, or the Lord God is one. You shall love Yahweh, your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And then if you go back to what Jesus said, what does he do? What does he change mind, right? He changes might to mind. Okay, now you might think, wow, that's a little bit of a contradiction, but it's really not. What Jesus is doing is that he is. He is clarifying what it means. He's giving greater understanding of what might means. Because in the Hebrew language, when they talked about the heart, they understood it as the whole being. Not just. Just the thing that pumps, right? The thing that pumps blood throughout your body. But that's what one of the translations of the word heart is. It's about that thing. And let's take a look at what's what I have put on this paper here. This commandment is foundational, right? This is the foundation that Jesus has built all of everything on, Correct? He's saying that everything is based and comes off of this commandment, right? Love God, all of it. All of it is based on that. All of the law is based on it. You see that all throughout the Bible. Correct? You see that there's this aspect of God's love towards us, but then he's calling us to love him. Right? You don't put it as something that important and something that he. He says to remember and to teach to your children, to recite and to commit to your heart and to your mind. You don't just do that with flippant things. Now, they eventually did start doing it with random things that they didn't need to do it with. But it's one of those things. It's a very important thing. God says to remember it, to recite it, to write it on your doorpost, to teach it to your children so that generation after generation after generation will know that they need to honor, love and worship God above all else, and that everything will be built off of that. Just like everything that you see going on here, right? It's all built off of the honor, worship and love for God. If it's not, then we probably shouldn't be doing it. Correct? Right. So if it's not all built on that, then go away from it. If it's not built on the honor, love and worship of God, move away from it. If you go to a church where it's not about that, get out of that church. Right? If a teacher is standing up here and they do not believe that everything is based on the love for God and the worship and glorification of him, you should probably walk out. If that is not what they are about, don't listen to them because it's dangerous. Because now they're not speaking about themselves. They're not speaking from a foundation that is built on God, that is built on Christ. They are not speaking the truth and therefore would be considered false and even could go to the level of heretic. Now, I'm not saying that that's anybody who has come here, so don't misunderstand that, okay? What I'm saying is if anybody ever comes up here and they start teaching things that do not align with what this says and are not built on your whole being, love for God and the worship and glorification of him and built on the foundation of Christ, death, burial and resurrection, don't listen to that person. It could happen. You don't know. You don't know until you're actually hearing them and you see what their heart is really about. Okay? So again, it's a foundational thing. And it comes from the Shema, which we read in Deuteronomy. It talks about the Lord being one. He is one God, three persons, all eternal, all existing in three different essences. Okay? But all God, okay, this is a declaration. The Shema is a declaration of faith recited daily. Right. Told you that they were doing it as a daily reciting of their faith to remember God, to honor him and to worship Him. Plus, it's a good reminder for ourselves, right? Reminding ourselves to love, honor, worship God with all of us. When Jesus quotes it, he is affirming the core of all God's law in this single principle, unreserved law, love for God. Did you catch catch that part? Unreserved. No holding back. No holding back. Right. I think a lot of times we find ourselves holding back. Holding back because, well, I don't want to look weird to somebody. I don't want them to think about me in this way. I Don't want to seem like one of those Jesus freaks. I know that's kind of an old term now, but I don't want to be put to death because I follow Jesus. I don't want to do this, I don't want to do that, blah, blah, blah. You name it. There might be a problem. Correct? Because it could be that you are reserving your love. You're holding back just a little bit, going, I can't do all of it. I can't give all of me. But he's calling us to give all of ourselves, right? Don't hold back. Don't reserve it with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind. So what are these? And what kind of love is he talking about? Based off of last week, what love do you think is being said here? Agapeo, love in action. Actual doing and living out. Not just this, like, familial or other type of love, but the agape. Love in action. That's why it's agape. O. It is agape. Love in action. So now, real quick, I want to read this next paragraph because I think this gives, like I was talking about with the whole might and mind thing, okay? Jesus's version in Matthew adds mind to the original heart, soul and might. This isn't a contradiction. It's a translation that clarifies the depth of the Hebrew words. The ancient Hebrew heart already included the intellectual, so it included all of it. But the Greek edition of Mind makes it explicit. God wants every single facet of our being, every single part of you, every. Every ounce of who you are. That's why it uses these three things, because it is all of you, right? All of you. How's that accomplished? Grace? By the grace of Christ, right? By the grace of God that we've been given in Christ through Christ because of what he did for us, right? And it's the only way we can truly love God with all of ourselves, with every ounce of who we are, right? Outside of that, it's totally impossible, right? Because we don't have that capacity. As we're told. No amount of things that we do will get us to that point. No amount of sacrifices will get us there. It is all based solely on what Christ did in the grace of God. So let's look at these three words, okay? Love with all your heart, okay? This is the core and the will. Like your core. Like I said, the word here is cardia, or it is also known biblically as like, the control center. That's kind of the Idea. Look here at the definition in the Bible. The heart, or cardia is the control center, the foundation of thought, will, purpose and affections. It is the seat of your devotion and choice. Does that make sense? Like it's the core of who we are right? Now, the heart used to be described as here, right? It wasn't like here, but here. This is where the seat of everything was. Your emotions came from your. From your guts, right? People say, well, I had. I had a. I had a gut feel feeling, right? That's what that comes from is they. They thought at one point this is where it all was. And then they discovered where it was. But still they used the terminology your whole heart, your whole being, because this is the center of who you are. Right? So he's. He's saying. He's saying your whole heart or cardia or cardiac, Right? That's where we get the word cardiac from. Right? Cardiac is the word that is used medically for heart. Like cardiac arrest. Right. Something none of us really wants to have happen. Okay, Right. Or cardio. You know, it's the strengthening of the heart. Cardiac. So it is your core, your whole, your will. Let's look at the practical application we. This love is not merely a passing emotion. It's not just a fleeting thing, right? It's not a. I feel it one minute and I don't feel it the next minute. It's a continual kind of love that doesn't pull back. Shows our frailty a little bit though, right? Because in our frailty, we pull back love and we try to reserve it. Like if somebody does me wrong, I'm going to pull back love for them. We see this sometimes in marriages where a wife will pull back from the husband because he didn't do enough stuff, or the husband will pull back from the wife because she's not satisfying his sexual need. We'll see this pulling back and this reserving. But we know that God doesn't do this, right? God doesn't pull back his love just because we mess up. He doesn't reserve himself, right. It's because of our failure and our frailty that we will. We will become kind of standoffish from him, that will push away from him and we'll start to keep him at arm's length. And we do this with people, too. We start to push people away because I don't know, man, they're going to start making me feel some sort of way because they're calling me out on my stuff and I don't like that. I don't want to be called out. And that's the same reason that we kind of put God to the side, because he's calling us out of our stuff. He's pointing out our sin by the Holy Spirit, convicting us. And sometimes we do not like that. Right? We don't like to be told when we're doing something wrong. I know I don't. So I know you guys don't either. I don't think any of us can hide that fact. Okay, but do we need to pull back from people who are trying to help us, who are trying to show us love by pointing out, hey, there's a problem here, There's a sin issue, there's a pride issue, there's an anger issue, there's a this, that, and the other thing and doing so in love, right? Jesus did it this way. He showed people their sin by loving them. Like the woman at the well. What does he do? He goes, well, you've had five husbands and the dude you're with right now is not your husband. But then he reveals that he's the Messiah to her. First person he reveals it to is a Samaritan woman because he loves her so much. And he knows that he is here to. To give himself for all that sin that he just showed her. And she didn't feel condemned. She felt loved. She felt cared for in a way that she's never felt before. And it made her so excited that she goes and tells the whole town, You guys experienced love in that way, right? Think back to when you first came to Christ, when you first truly surrendered yourself. Most of you probably were like, I want to go tell everybody. I want to go and scream from the rooftops that I am a follower of Christ and that he set me free from my sin and that I am being sanctified, that the Spirit is within me. How many of you had that kind of excitement and wanted to go do that? Yeah, a fair amount of us. We were like, yeah, I want to go. I want to go and tell them. I want to go and show them that, look, I'm some messed up, jacked up sinner that Jesus just saved. And now I am a saint, dead to sin, who sometimes messes up. God's grace came and showed me how to love and to love him with my whole being, right? It's that actually stepping into with all of who you are and loving others the way that you love God, right? Because that's the only way we can. So in action, we choose to obey God's commands and put him first. Even when our feelings are dry. So even when we don't feel like it. How often do you not feel like doing all this? How often do you feel like, man, I don't really want to serve the Lord today. It's a hard one to admit, huh? A hard one to admit because there are days that sometimes we're just like, I'm done, I'm done. I don't care. Nobody likes me, so why does it matter anymore? He says it doesn't matter. Doesn't matter if you want to or not. You're going to and you should. Because I have saved and set you free. Because I have given you my spirit. And continue. Or when a different path seems easier, right? The wide path is very easy. Says it's easy, but it leads to where? Death, death, destruction, separation from God. The place that God doesn't even want people to go because it's not reserved for them. It's reserved for the devil and those who fell with him. God wasn't meant for. I mean, the hell wasn't meant for us. That's crazy. The thing, it was never meant for us. But because God gives us the choice to follow him in his grace and his love, he gives us that choice. So we get to choose. Which way are you going to go? You going to go the wide path? Are you going to go to the narrow path? This one's easy, this one's hard. This one leads to life, this one leads to death. This one is filled with grace, this one is filled with striving of your own accord, Right? Just because it's easy doesn't mean it's better. As many of you are learning, the hard thing is the right thing. So go after the hard thing. Just because something's easy doesn't mean that you should be doing it. Our relationship with God begins here in the heart, in the core of who you are. In the daily choice to prioritize him above all rivals or your possessions, your comfort and your ambitions. So to put yourself above. Choosing God daily, choosing to live for him with the whole core of who you are, Love with all your soul, okay? This is the life force or your energy to put it in one of the most simple ways possible. The word here for soul is suke or psyche. Okay? This is where we get the word psychology from. Okay? Psychology is the study of the soul. And I'll just leave it there for now, okay? Because if I go any further, get myself in trouble. Okay? So the soul, or psyche, suke, represents your life force, okay? The real you the real you, the inner man, the one that's truly animating the body, your entire essential being. And the part of your. Of your. Your design, the part of you designed for eternal life. It relates to your energy, conviction and very identity. So clearly the soul is very, very, very, very, very important because this is. That's the part of you that lives, right? That's the eternal part of you, okay? Because right when we die, this body goes to corruption until the return of Christ, when we will be resurrected and given new bodies, glorified bodies that are incorrupt and imperishable. So your soul is that part of you that God breathes into you right at conception, God puts a soul in you. You guys ever seen these videos of the sperm fertilizing the egg? There's a burst of light and they don't even know why. And I'm like, well, the Bible kind of describes this. It's the soul being planted. Okay? Did you know that human beings emit light? Yeah, from within. Where do you think that light comes from? From God, the one who breathed a soul into you, the eternal you. It's pretty cool to think that God to this day is still creating. He's still creating. He's still making people, right? He knits you together in your mother's womb, and it starts right there with the soul. He gives you exactly who you are at that very moment. Without that, you truly are just a clump of cells. Without the soul, you are nothing. Without the soul, your body does not move, your body doesn't breathe, your body does nothing. It's just a shell, right? Paul calls this our earthly tent. It's a temporary dwelling, and we will get an eternal dwelling at one point. Practically, this is about dedicating the totality of our life and energy to God's purpose. God's purposes. Not our purposes. It's God's purposes. And yet we still think that we get to tell God what his purpose for our life is going to be. God is God, you are not. He says to love him with your whole being, but yet we think we can tell him what to do. Don't work that way, right? We don't tell God what to do. In his grace, he is giving us things to do, right? Apart from his grace. We're not going to do a whole lot of anything, right? We're going to just constantly live for the idol of self, living in pride and essentially doing nothing real with our lives. Because if it's not for God and it's not to glorify him. And it's not to join with Him. It's all meaningless. As King Solomon said. So in action, we use our time, talents, resources, the might or strength, okay? Because the other versions say might or strength as well. Again, the soul, all of you, who you are, to serve others and advance what God cares about. It is enduring hardships with faith, knowing that the essence of who you are belongs to him. Right? You belong to Him. He purchased you by his blood, and he makes it that you can be resurrected. Because he was resurrected, we're not living the crucified life anymore. We are now living the resurrected life. Yes, put yourself to death, but remember that you are raised with Christ, right? The Bible tells us that we identify with him in his death, burial and resurrection. If any one of those didn't happen, then we don't get to take part in it, right? If Jesus doesn't raise, he wasn't who he said he was, okay? So he makes it possible to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind. So let's look at the mind real quick. Or the intellect, the thoughts, our thought, life. I mean, mind is pretty simple, right? To figure out. It's how we think, mind what we think upon. But let's look at the definition. This is a harder word for me to pronounce, but the mind or dianoia, that's as close as I think I'm going to get. Signifies your intellectual and mental capacities, your thoughts, understanding and critical thinking. So put all your thoughts, all your critical thinking, okay? All your understanding. Again, what is God doing here? What is Jesus saying? Love the Lord, your God with everything of who you are, with all of you, not just some of you, but all of you. Application here. This emphasizes a mental, critical and rational love of God, right? We can actually think about this. We can rationally put thought to it and contemplate man. What. What does it really mean to love God? And he showed us right. It is to sacrificially love him and serve others, to be willing to lay down your life for the gospel, to live out a life that is wholly sold out for Him. So emphasizing that God's thinking, good thinking, loves God just as much as good feeling. So we can put our thought life onto God and we can begin to have a better thought life, right? This is why you have the renewing of the mind, right? I give. I have. I have to have a new mind. I have to have right thoughts. And God gives us those. God gives us those by his grace. Because in and of ourselves, we Want to think about all the things that we shouldn't be thinking about, right? We'd rather dwell upon. How am I going to make myself feel good today? How am I going to accomplish this, that and the other thing instead of dwelling upon God and thinking of him and having that mind renewal and letting our mind dwell on the things of old. How many of you got entrapped in the war? Storytelling. Yeah, we find ourselves in that at times, right? Talking about the good old days. But the renewing of the mind says that those were not good old days. A renewing of the mind and the loving of the Lord with your entire mind says that that's who you were, this is who you are, and this is where we're going. Right? Just like our testimonies. Our testimonies are very, very small amount of who we were. And then it's where God captured us and now where God is taking us. And we think and we dwell upon those things in action. We actively study and meditate on God's word to know him deeply. Get in this, commit it to memory. One day we may not have these, or if you have one, you'll be put in jail because of it. Looking forward to those days. We take control of our thoughts by the grace of God, right. And think rightly. So we take those anxiety, negative, unloving, judgmental thoughts and we place them upon Christ and we ask him, take these thoughts captive and give me right thinking, give me a right mind. No longer living that double mindedness or split mindedness as the Bible would put it, and replace them with the truth found in scripture, allowing our knowledge of God to set the direction for our emotional active life. So having a new mind that is set upon loving God with all of it brings about that renewal, brings about a change in thinking. How many of you, you've already noticed your change in thinking and you're longing for so much more. Yeah, yeah, I'm longing for so much more of that renewing of the mind. Hey, that, that sanctification process that is bringing about even more right thinking. Okay. And it is foundational. Upon loving the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind. Okay, now let's jump down to these questions. Here we can discuss out loud. I don't think it's too hard for us to just discuss a few things. Why is this the greatest commandment? It fulfills all the law and there's no law against it. I like that. Any other thoughts? I know, I was gonna say that does do it. Pretty well right there, huh? All right, next time you teach this. Okay. All right, so look at this. This part right here. Okay. Of the three areas, heart or desires, soul or you, or mind, your thoughts, where do you find yourself holding back the most from God? I'm not asking you to answer out loud, but this is the thing that I think we need to really consider and we need to put it up against what we're seeing here and go, God, where am I reserving? What part of me is reserving love for you? And then repent of that and trust that God and his grace will change it. God will change it. You sincerely come to him and repent of wrong thinking, of wrong actions. In his grace, he will set you free and change you. And here it says, the ultimate practical application is that no part of your life is excluded from. No part of you should be excluded from loving the Lord your God with all of who you are. How would your daily routine look different if you were constantly or consistently practicing obedience and seeking wisdom by God's grace because your heart, soul and mind were truly focused on him? How different would you and your life be? Look, if this was what we were living out with, our entire being, I think they would look drastically different. And as I watch, I see that happening here, right? The transformation is taking place. The sanctification process is happening, and it's really cool to watch, and I look forward to so much more of it, even in my own life. And I think that Craig would agree that he feels the same way. It's really fun to watch the changes that are happening in everyone. So any questions or thoughts? No? All right, then. Well, then let me pray. Oh, Father in heaven, Lord, we praise you and we thank you. Lord, we pray that if there be anything in us, Lord, as a group, as individuals, as children that have been adopted into your family by Christ and the atoning work that he has done for us, Lord, if there be anything in us that is causing reservation, if there is any part of us that is reserving whole amazing love for you, Lord, Eradicate it, Lord. Bring it to the surface so that we can confess it and repent of it and know that by your grace you have paid for that sin, Lord, bring the renewing of the mind, Lord. Help us to honor, love and glorify you in everything. And, Lord, today we do ask that you would, by your grace, help us to love you with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our mind. In Jesus name, amen.