Loving God And Neighbor Transcript

So a man comes up to Jesus and asks a question, just one Says which is the greatest commandment? What is the one thing that I have to do that's more important than all the other commandments? Now, it's important to remember that this idea of the commandments and the law encompasses all of the law, all of the commands of God, including both how to live and how to treat other people, but also how to worship God. So sacrifices is part of the law, and the commandments Going to the temple, giving all of these things are included in this question. Of all the things we're called to do, of all the things we're commanded to do, which is the most important? It's a pretty good question when you have so many things that are drawing on your mind, drawing on your attention, drawing on your time, and there's so many things that you need to be doing that it is good to find the first place to start. And so he asked this question. Now, I love the fact that he asked for what's the greatest commandment? The one thing, and Jesus gives him two, but I think he does so deliberately. The first thing that Jesus says is love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, your mind, your soul and your strength. And the second love your neighbor as yourself.

Now we have a problem usually because we gravitate towards one of those two things. Usually we either fully devote ourselves to loving God in our worship and our living and our prayer and our fasting and that sort of thing, and we think this is the most important thing for me to do. This is how I honor God, this is how I love God, and so this is where I'm going to put most of my energy, this is where my passions are going to lie, and when we do that, we seek to honor God. But sometimes, eventually, sometimes God feels distant. We don't feel his presence, we don't understand or have this acknowledgment that he is immediately with us.

Somehow, following God becomes a mental exercise. The thing we check off. We go to church on Sunday, we read our Bible every day, we pray in the morning, perhaps in the evening, we pray at mealtimes. We check it off as we go through our day. Do we make sure we do each thing as if checking things off is the most important? But why is that not enough? Why didn't Jesus answer the man's question with love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, your mind, your soul and your strength. That's a good one to end on. And when the man asks for what's the one thing I need to do, why doesn't Jesus just stop there? I think because that when we get lost in that checklist, when we get lost in that what do I need to do to honor God, we lose track of what God wants us to do.

God himself says that if I needed a bowl, if I needed an offering, if I needed something, I could make it. I could get it myself. He owns it all. So God says I don't need your sacrifice, I don't need your burnt offerings, I don't want your solemn assemblies when there is injustice in the world. What I want is mercy. So even God, as he talks about the people in worship in the Old Testament, he's directing them to the second answer that Jesus gave. But we also have a habit If we are not in the first group, we tend to be in the second group.

I show God love, I honor God, I live out God's command by loving others, at which point worship is okay, but not the most important thing. Gathering and prayer with other people is okay and good, but more importantly is how I love my neighbor and we end up focusing so much on loving our neighbor that we lose sight of giving God glory, we lose sight of honoring God in our lives. We lose sight because we think that loving our neighbor is enough and so we focus solely on our neighbor. But this too leads to challenges and problems, because we forget why we're loving our neighbor, we forget how to love our neighbor, we start justifying ways that we call loving our neighbor which ultimately aren't. That does pain and damage to them, because we've disconnected ourselves from the love of God and in some ways we make loving our neighbor, we make our neighbor, and that love and those actions are God.

What I would say for us today is where we expect to meet God, when we want to meet God. We're not going to encounter the living presence of God consistently if we focus on one or the other, but when Jesus brings them together, when Jesus answers the question of what is the one most important thing, he unites these together so that there is overlap. And in our lives, when we are loving God and loving neighbor, when those two circles overlap, is where we will encounter the presence of God and we will feel his presence in our life. And so, as we gather as church, as we live out our calling, both here in this building and out in our community. My desire is that we do both, to make sure that we're not doing one and neglecting the other. To make sure that we're not just gathering for worship on Sunday morning and saying, I'm good for the week and it doesn't matter how we're loving our neighbor, or even if you're not one of those people that say I'm good for the week. You read your daily devotion, you pray, and then how you treat your neighbor and how you show love to your neighbor is an important. Likewise, you can be a lover of your neighbor. You put your hands and your feet in action every single day, but if you are not approaching God in prayer, if it's been here since you've last fasted, if church gathering together as the body of Christ is not as important, then you won't encounter the living Christ. It is truly a unite, uniting of both, that we find the. How do we live that out? How do we live out this calling of head, heart and hands, of mind, heart and soul, or soul and strength? My vision for the church, my vision for each and every one of us, is that we don't ask people to check their minds, their heads.

At the door I caught the tail end of ETC. I didn't do that so I could mention this during the sermon, just in case, because I usually don't make it over there on Sunday morning. In the conversation that I heard they had listened to the story. From what I gathered in the last 10 minutes of it five minutes it was a story of an agnostic poet who was exploring out faith in some sort of way as a Catholic and going to the stations across even though he wasn't entirely sure whether God existed at all. This is a group of people uniting together, bringing their mind to bear, their questions, their doubts.

We love God with all of our mind, our intellect. He has given us reason and we don't want to leave that behind. But it cannot drive us alone, and so we bring our heart. There are people in this church who have a love of the least and the lost beyond anything that I could imagine and that I've seen it. The dedication and the passion that it takes to run the food pantry and the so many hours that it takes to do just that, and they can help, by the way. So if you want to be a part of that, let Carol and Claudia know. It takes a love of neighbor, it takes a love for God to do that.

And so when we gather for worship, when we're serving, we want to make sure that we bring our hearts to bear, that we don't just stay in the world of logic and intellect, which is where I tend to live. I tend to live and encounter God in the space of logic and reasoning and reading the scripture and study and all of that. That's one of the reasons why I became a pastor, because a lot of that time and energy is spent in doing just that. But I know that if I want to encounter the fullness of God, then I have to make sure that I don't let the intellect overwhelm the heart. I want to feel the presence of God in our midst. There's music that I turn to, there's spiritual practices that I turn to that is meant for me to turn off my mind and sit in silence in prayer and feel, and I can feel myself. I don't know if you fit into this category, this heart category or the head category, but I can feel myself when I've spent too long over here and I have to spend time reconnecting my heart to God, and then there's love in God with all our strength, and some of you may fit into this category. I've already laid out where I am. I'm all the way over on the other side.

Some of you may encounter God the most when you are serving, when you are putting the love of neighbor into action, when you are making sure that you are challenging the powers and principalities in this world and the ways that injustice are created, or you are meeting the needs of an individual who is standing in front of you and you see God in that person and you feel God's presence in the serving. But I would contend, just like there are failings, that if you spend too long in the one or the other, in this one as well For God does not just want part of us, he does not want to encounter us and he does not encounter us all the time, only in one of these three areas, but instead we're all three overlap or when we are intentional in spending time in head and heart and hands, we experience the love of God, and so our worship, our worship, tends to stay in the head. We have written prayers, we study the scripture, you listen to me preach. A lot of this is the head, and sometimes I think we need to find ways to make sure that we spend time in the heart. And sometimes the music helps with this, but not always. Our beautiful hymns are powerful. They convey the theology of our heart, of our history and how we understand God, but do they touch the heart?

And I think, to be honest, the third one is the hardest place that we have encounters with God in our worship. When we gather, you could come in through the doors, you can sit in your pew, you can sing, hear the Bible read, sing praises, listen to the sermon, say you know that was a good sermon or a bad sermon or anything in between, and then you could go and you feel no more connected with the people that came here than when you came. You feel no more like you have given each other, yourself to each other, than when you came. The act of worship becomes solitary. You came, you worshiped, you left, and maybe you say hi to one another, maybe you say hello to the people you haven't seen for the last week or two. But has the barringing increased? Do you feel like you belong to one another as a single body? As we had told of the worship, as we had told of the worship.

So my hope, my plan and my desire for us as a church and the work that I'm doing, is to make sure that we are uniting head, heart and hand in all that we do. Now, some things are going to emphasize one over the other, but making sure that no area is neglected, and so in a little while in our worship, I'm going to make you do something that you're going to probably feel is incredibly uncomfortable, but I hope and pray that you'll give it a shot. When we move into the time of communal prayer, the pastoral prayer, what I'm going to ask you to do, rather than where we raise our hands and speak up and share prayer requests and there is a place for that, and I'm not getting rid of that forever what I'm going to ask you to do and this is going to be really, really hard for the introverts among you, I absolutely understand that because I'm an introvert myself I'm going to ask you to gather together with a few people in your area and say how can I pray for you? How can I pray for you today, how can I pray for you this week? How can I support you through prayer and share that with one another and then pray for one another.

I know it's terrifying and maybe you haven't done this before and maybe praying in a small group just is so outside of your comfort zone that you don't think you could speak up. That's okay. So I'm going to open us in prayer, I'm going to ask God to anoint our time together with His presence and then, in the midst of that prayer, I'm going to have you break up into those people around you and share requests and pray for one another and then, after a time when I've got a sense that we've put as much time into this as God is leading me to, I'll move us on. I'll be talking to you about that one and I'll close the prayer and close that time together. It'll be tempting to talk through this as checking in or conversations that can happen around the outside of the table.

Leave this as a time of prayer so that last week, in our new music style that we had, we tried to encounter the heart in our worship and looking out of the mental, the intellect side, this week we're going to break into the hands part and I encourage you to do so, to open yourself up to the possibility to be transformed, so that we might find ways. Just as Jesus had combined in his answer of what is the greatest command, and he said loving God and loving neighbor, he answered it by loving the Lord, your God, with all your heart, your mind and your strength. This is our challenge. This is where we will encounter the living God, amen.