Matthew 22:34-40

34 But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees with his reply, they met together to question him again. 35 One of them, an expert in religious law, tried to trap him with this question: 36 “Teacher, which is the most important commandment in the law of Moses?” 37 Jesus replied, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.”

What we learn about the Pharisees here was why they question the question they asked, the motive behind their question.  What we discover is that they were not really interested in discovering God’s will but in picking apart God’s Word. Jesus could have just dismissed them and yet He answered their question by boiling down God’s commandments and reminding them that it’s about relationships not rules: Love God and love people. The greatest thing a person can do in this life is to love outside of ourselves and that journey begins with a pursuit to love God. This is not a casual convenient love but a fully giving yourself over to, a total love commitment. Pursuing a relationship of love with God and others means pursuing what is a priority and when we do that most everything else will fall into place.

One of the greatest struggles to loving God is understanding that it is about relationship rather than rules. The Pharisees missed the Lord because of legalism which always focuses on following laws instead of following and imitating God. They had taken the 10 commandments and the first 5 books of the Bible and came up with over 600 rules and regulations that they determined had to be followed in order to please God. This was compounded in that they couldn’t determine which of the laws were the most important to follow. Today many people look at God as being solely concerned with keeping rules and regulations and they miss the relationship. When this happens the rules and regulations become the focal point of our faith not the Redeemer of our Faith. Where is your focus, on the rules or the relationship, on the regulations or the Redeemer? Some may say but what about all the rules in His Word don’t you love His Word? Yes but don’t miss what Jesus was saying, we are called to love the author that the Word points us to. So what does it mean to love God with all of our being? Jesus breaks our being down into three areas, heart, soul and mind to remind us to relate to God and love Him with all three. We all tend to lean toward one aspect more than another and could fall short in the others but in order for our love to be complete we must love with all three.

• Heart

The heart is the source of our thoughts words and deeds and there is a connection to what we believe and how we behave. Scripture talks a lot about words and deeds and our lives have to be consistent, our talk has to match our walk. Love is not just a feeling but an action, a tangible deed that we share in a visible and practical way. It isn’t just about trying to get high on experiences but simply serving and loving God. The danger is when we focus on the serving instead of the Savior, it is easy to allow the ministry to become our Messiah.

• Soul

The soul is the center of our emotions and the trend in our culture today is to check our minds at the door because we are told that God is to be experienced and we don’t need to rationalize Him. We live in a feeling society where people say they love the Lord but don’t want to understand Him. For many, theology is dry and cold and today it is even considered ungodly because it doesn’t allow us to feel God. The danger in this is that truth becomes relative, what is true for me may vary with what is true for you. We create an “I’ll live my faith out in the way that feels right for me” environment. This is the heart but no head Christian.

• Mind

The mind is our intellectual thinking center along with our disposition and attitudes. In reaction to emotionalism and the empty-headed faith of others we can focus on the mind. We rationalize that the more we learn about God the deeper our relationship will become. We say we will know exactly how we are to live out our lives with no guessing or feelings involved. The danger is that it can become legalistic, cold, fact oriented rather than relationally oriented. We can reduce faith to facts believing that if we teach people about God they will believe in Him as a matter of logic.

Is there one aspect that you tend to lean to more than another? Is there an aspect that you fall short in? Do you have a complete love?

So you may be asking what does loving God with your ALL really look like? Not so you can have a repetitive model but a relational guide line. In Luke 7:36-38 we see an incredible picture of loving God:

“Then one of the Pharisees asked Him to eat with him. And He went to the Pharisee’s house and sat down to eat. And behold, a woman in the city who was a sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at the table in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster flask of fragrant oil and stood at His feet behind Him weeping; and she began to wash His feet with her tears and wiped them with the hair of her head; and she kissed His feet and anointed them with the fragrant oil.”

This woman didn’t come to receive a blessing she came to be a blessing and show her true devotion and passion for Jesus, she loved Him. She came knowing that she would probably be ridiculed by the Pharisees and others who were present, yet she took a risk and poured out all that she had upon Jesus. Love does not focus on what others think or say. Love is willing to take a risk no matter what it costs. Passion flows from a heart that is consumed with love for Jesus. The reality of a love for God is that it must find a way to be released in His presence. Are you loving God today?

1 John 4:7-11

7 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.

George Matheson was fifteen years old when he was told that he was losing his eyesight and instead of giving up he continued with his plans to enroll in the University of Glasgow. His determination lead to his graduation at age nineteen and the pursuit of ministry as he declared that he would go on to do graduate studies in theology. At this time George was engaged until his fiancée learned that he was going blind and that there was nothing the doctors could do. She broke off their engagement and returned his ring telling him that she could not go through life with a blind man. George pressed faithfully on with his studies even though his heart was broken by the pain of rejection and he lost his sight later that year at age twenty. Yet his sisters stood beside him, willing to learning Greek and Hebrew in their effort to assist him in his studies so he graduated and become a preacher. George never did marry but some twenty years later as a well-loved preacher in Scotland his sister came to him announcing her engagement. He rejoiced with her even though he had been rejected, because he consoled himself in God’s love which is never limited, never conditional, never retracted, and never uncertain. Out of this experience on the evening of his sister’s marriage he wrote the hymn,” O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go”, which he called the fruit of his suffering and which he wrote in five minutes.

O love that will not let me go,

I rest my weary soul in thee;

I give thee back the life I owe,

That in thine ocean depths it flow

May richer, fuller be.

Human love is very uncertain and when it is retracted we all experience the pain of rejection, like George Matheson we need to learn to lean on and trust God’s perfect love. His love is both our hope and our goal, being a Christian means that we learn to love like Him. John, the one who was called the disciple who Jesus loved, reveals to us:

• The Standard of Love

In this passage John gives us the basics of the Christian life LOVE ONE ANOTHER. God’s standard for us is that we are to love one another, which sounds easy enough as long as we have positive feelings for those around us. Yet positive feelings for others is not what it says and to understand what it means to love one another we have to understand what the word love really means. There are three words in Greek which are translated as love, the first word is Phileo, which means brotherly love or friendship. This is the first level of love, as you get to know someone, you enjoy being around them and you form a friendship. The second word is Eros which is the word for romantic love. Imagine a boy and a girl who have been friends, Phileo love, when one day the boy says to the girl “I like you”. She says “I know, I like you too” to which he replies, “No, I mean I REALLY LIKE you”. “Oh” she says as she finally gets the message that he has moved from Phileo love to Eros love. The third word is Agape and this is the deepest level of love for it means sacrificial love. Imagine that the boy and girl eventually get married and all is perfect until one day when they have a big fight. At this point she does not love him as a friend and certainly not romantically but here enters Agape love.  Agape love is not an emotion but a decision, it is an act of the will. As they reach out in Agape love it draws them back together to work through their problems and eventually the relationship can be restored. God does not just call us to love but gives us a standard to shoot for. His command to love one another is sacrificial and that means that we will love others even when it costs us. It means we love people who are different than us, even those that our society deems unlovely.

• The Symbol of Love

Jesus did not tell us to do something that He was unwilling to do Himself, He practiced what He preached. He gave us the ultimate example to follow so that we would truly understand what love really looked like. There is more than just a friendship love that is revealed to us through the cross, instead we see a sacrificial love modeled for us. It was a love that cost Him and He held nothing back as He gave himself completely for us.

• The Show of Love

Let me ask you a simple question “do you love the people around you?” Notice that I didn’t ask if you liked them, Phileo love or if you are sexually attracted to them, Eros love. Do you love them the way Jesus loves you? Do you accept them, want what is best for them, and would you give of yourself for them? The love of God demands a change in our lives, we must love one another out of the love we have received through Christ. Jesus’ death was not the result of jealous Jews or hard-hearted Romans, it was the result of a loving God who saw there was no other way to save me. The show of love in my life will be the result of the overflow of His love through me. He has poured out His love and it can’t be contained so it must spill out like a cascading waterfall that flows over and over bringing life giving love. Do you have an overflowing love? As Christians, we will either live life from a loving relationship with God that spills over into all our relationships, or we will live on empty and have nothing to offer those around us. In order to live life out of the overflow of our relationship with God, we must connect with Him and reflect on the depths of His love regularly and love one another readily.