One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, "Of all the commandments, which is the most important?" "The most important one," answered Jesus, "is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these." "Well said, teacher," the man replied. "You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices." When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, "You are not far from the kingdom of God." And from then on no one dared ask him any more questions. (Mark 12:28-34)
Often we are surprised when the most simple concepts turn out to be the most profound. Yet, that is often the case. For instance, take love. It is so simple, yet defies a simple definition. If there ever was a topic which could qualify as the most thought about, written about, talked about, and sung about, it is certainly love. Love has been defined as "a many splendored thing," "a flower," "a rose," and as a thing that "the world needs now," although some would ask, "what’s love got to do with it?" The love story has not only been told, but written about in poetry, in quality works of literature, as well as in romance novels and screenplays.
But for all this talking and writing and reading and watching and listening and thinking, it defies a simple definition. However, one thing is universally clear. Everyone knows that love is something they need. All of us want to be loved, and to love.
We have tried everything to find real love. We have tried "free love," which wasn’t free at all. It cost many not only their purity, but their self-respect. We’ve searched for that "perfect person" to love us, only to find there was no such human being. People try extra-marital "love" affairs, only to find it’s a dead-end street.
There is one love affair, however, which is not only good for us, but it is altogether necessary. This is the love affair which every Christian needs. And the One who prescribed this love affair was Jesus Himself! It is a love affair with God. In fact, it should be the top priority for each of us.
As we examine our text, we see that for some time Jesus had been engaged with various religious leaders as they put question after question to Him, attempting to trick Him into a wrong answer. Over and over, Jesus had baffled these buffoons with a dazzling display of knowledge and wisdom. Undoubtedly, there was a Scribe who had been impressed with Jesus’ answers. He came to Jesus and put a very important question to Him, "Of all the commandments, which is the most important?" This appears not to be a trick question at all, but the Scribe’s own question. Here was a man truly interested in cutting through all the word games and getting to the real meat of the issue. He was asking Jesus to explain, in a nutshell, the bottom line of what it meant to follow God.
In His reply to the Scribe, Jesus pulls together two well-known passages of Old Testament Scripture. One concerns itself with love for God; the other with love for your neighbor. We have dubbed them the Great Commandments. All the law and the prophets boiled down to these great commandments, and the key is found in verse 30: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. This is the top priority. This is where we begin. Loving God is the catalyst for dynamic spiritual life.
A lack of genuine love for God is probably why so many churches are dead and dry and so many believers are listless and apathetic. We find such a group in the book of Revelation. There, Jesus speaks to the church in Ephesus and says, "I know your deeds, your hard work and your perseverance. I know that you cannot tolerate wicked men, that you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them false. You have persevered and have endured hardships for my name, and have not grown weary. Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken your first love. Remember the height from which you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place. (Revelation 2:2-5)
A church can be large and powerful. A church can be doctrinally pure and hard working. But when a church loses its first love, all else is for nothing. Without a love affair with God, all that we do becomes meaningless. Without a love affair with God, we lack the motivation and the passion to do His work. There is a desperate need today for a passionate, hot-hearted, intense, consuming love affair with God.
But how is that love relationship to be worked out? Jesus gives us four ways. He tells us first that you must love the Lord your God with all your heart. To love the Lord with all your heart means to love Him with pure devotion. It’s not enough to give Christ a place in our hearts. We are called to love Him with all of our heart. We are all familiar with how it was when we met that one who captured our heart. We’ve all seen two dreamy-eyed young people looking longingly at one another. We’ve all heard of the "look of love." When you love someone with all of your heart, you think about them almost all of the time. You long to be with them. They are the priority in your life. We call this being "in love" and it is wonderful.
Being in love is a genuinely thrilling experience. It is so exciting that many people are overwhelmed by it. And to love God with all your heart is much like that. It means that your heart is devoted to Him. It means that you are faithful to Him. He becomes the most important thing in your life.
We experience that kind of pure devotion when we first become Christians. The Scripture calls it our "first love." Do you remember it—the thrill of meeting Jesus for the first time? You came to Him and confessed your sins, and received His forgiveness. You experienced His unconditional love and acceptance. Oh, what a wonderful Savior! How could you help but love Him? Do you remember that time when you gave Jesus your heart? That love can be fresh every day. We never have to forfeit that first love. With all our heart we are to continually love Him.
But the love we are to have for God has another characteristic. You are not only to love God with all your heart, you are to love Him with all your soul. The soul speaks of our emotions. To love God with all our soul means that our love for God ought to be full of passion. Indeed, when we think of a love affair, we think of passion. And we are all people of passion. While we may try to deny our emotions, our emotions have a way of rising to the surface in spite of all our efforts to hide them. Now, emotions are good. God created them. Rightly channeled, our emotions can be very positive indeed. And we need to say that it’s OK to express them, especially as we express them in love for God. We ought to be emotional about our love for God. Now, I’m not talking about a sloppy sentimentalism. I’m not talking about emotion for emotion’s sake. But I am talking about a hot-hearted, passionate, consuming love.
Unfortunately, our culture is growing more cynical every day. People are disillusioned and have become apathetic. The word apathetic literally means "without passion." I remember a Peanuts cartoon in which Charlie Brown was talking to Lucy. He remarked about the tragedy of so much apathy in the world today. Lucy responded, "Yeah, it’s terrible. But who cares?"
We cannot afford to be apathetic about our love for God. We must be excited about our relationship with Jesus. We must be passionate. In the Song of Solomon, we hear about the passionate kind of love we ought to have for God. It is likened to the love between a man and a woman. "Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth— for your love is more delightful than wine."(1:2) Again, we hear: "Show me your face, let me hear your voice." (2:14) And again, "You have stolen my heart with one glance of your eyes." (4:9)
Real love is passionate love. To love God with all our soul means that we must be involved with all our emotions in our relationship to Him. And when you’ve really given Jesus all of your heart, then it’s easy to become excited about following Him.
Our love for Christ begins with a pure devotion and expresses itself by being full of passion. But there is yet another element. Jesus says that you are to love the Lord your God with all your mind. This is a love that is thoroughly considered. Loving Jesus doesn’t simply mean turning cartwheels in the aisle. While we ought to be excited about Him and express our emotions, we are not talking about an emotional expression which bypasses the mind. There is a certain brand of Christian teaching which contends that the mind can get in the way of your relationship with God. Now, it is true that when people rely on their own intellectual capacity to figure out God, they always come up short. God cannot be figured out by human minds. And if you wait until you’ve figured it out, you may not get in on the blessing in the process. Our minds can be a hindrance. But our minds can also be a help.
It is clear from the Scripture that God fully intends for our minds to be involved in our love for Him. In Romans 12, we are told that our minds need to be renewed. In 1 Peter we are told to prepare our minds for work. And here, we are told to love God with all our mind. A mind committed to Christ and being transformed by His renewing power can be a tremendous asset to the Kingdom. Christianity makes sense and anyone who thoughtfully considers the plan of God will soon be able to effectively communicate just how reasonable Christianity really is.
Further, I believe that a mind committed to God will become a mind into which God will pour His wisdom and His knowledge. Think about it: we have a relationship with the God of the universe. He has all wisdom and all knowledge. And as we commit our ways to Him, even our thought processes, He will begin to impart His wisdom and His knowledge to us. All of our mental ability ought to be dedicated to God. When it is, I believe He will show us how to really think. It is said we only use about 10% of our brain. Perhaps God is the one who must activate the other 90%.
Not only are you to love God with all your heart, all your soul and all your mind, you are to love Him with all your strength. Christianity is not just a heart dedicated to God, a soul full of passionate love for Jesus, and a mind committed to thoroughly consider the whole Word of God. Christianity must be fully lived out. To love God with all our strength means to love God in all that we do.
In Colossians 3:17 it says, "And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him." Again in that same chapter, verses 23 and 24 say, "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving." You see, Christianity that is just in the heart and in the head may be either sentimentalism or intellectualism. For Christianity to be alive, it must be lived out. This is what makes the Christian faith the most powerful force in the world.
There is a notion propagated by some civil libertarians in our country that it is OK to believe whatever you want, as long as you don’t try to practice what you believe in the public arena. But that is not religious liberty at all. To tell a man that he can believe anything he wants is, in itself, nonsense. Of course he can believe what he wants. Who can stop him? Others cannot dictate what you believe in the privacy of your own heart. You can believe what you want in the most atheistic society in the world, but you may not be able to live out that faith in practice. For the Christian faith to be a life-changing, world-altering force, it must be lived out in the lives of those who say they believe. Otherwise, it doesn’t make any difference at all.
To truly love God, you must love Him in all you do. A distinctive Christian lifestyle must be evident in the way you live your life, conduct your business, function on the job, and deal with your wife or husband or children. James tells us that we ought to be "doers of the word." Christianity becomes powerful as it’s lived out in the marketplace of this world.
When the Scribe came to Jesus, Jesus told him what the top priority in life was. It all begins with loving God. The Scribe commented that he understood this great commandment and that keeping this commandment was more important than all the burnt offerings which could ever be offered. This was a tremendous insight that indicated he had given the nature of the Kingdom of God some thought. In fact, this Scribe was light years ahead of his contemporaries. He understood that the sacrificial system of burnt offerings was a pale substitute for true, full, passionate love for God. He had comprehended this intellectually.
Jesus makes an interesting reply to the Scribe. Commenting on the Scribe’s insight, Jesus says, You are not far from the Kingdom of God. It is an interesting statement indeed. Notice that Jesus did not say that he was IN the Kingdom, but simply that he was NOT FAR from it. The Scribe was not far, but not in.
You see, it’s not enough merely to intellectually believe in the truth of God’s Word. We must be willing to act on it, to commit ourselves to follow it. The Scribe was not far from the Kingdom, but he was not in. Not far, but not in.
Most of what passes for modern, mainstream Christianity is found symbolized in this Scribe. He had given mental assent to the facts of God’s word, yet he had never given himself to God. We see it all too often in our churches. Pews are populated every Sunday by people who have only an intellectual faith, but not a faith lived out in daily life. They come to church, throw a few dollars in the offering plate, go through the motions, and go home. There is no passionate love for the Lord, no real desire to spend time serving the Lord and no power in their lives. They are like the people in Jesus’ hometown who had grown up with Him but had never experienced His power by committing themselves to Him. The powerlessness of a church is because so many whose names are on their rolls are not far from the Kingdom, but not in it.
This is characteristic of religious philosophy and religion in general. Hanging around a church doesn’t make you a Christian. It is the commitment of your life to Christ that makes the difference. Having your name on a church roll doesn’t put it on the roll that will be called up yonder. Not far, but not in. What a tragedy it would be to be so close, and yet, on that great day of judgement have God say to you, "Depart from Me; for I never knew you."
What is the top priority in your life? God is the top priority for human existence. To simply believe He is important may bring us close to the Kingdom, but will leave us outside its gates. We must surrender all that we are to all He is, and dedicate ourselves to live for Him. We must live a life that reflects a love for God that is genuinely devoted, full of passion, thoroughly considered, and fully lived. That is the top priority. To fall short of experiencing a full love for our Lord is to fall short of the Kingdom.
Copyright © 1997 J. David Hoke. This data file is the sole property of the copyright holder and may be copied only in its entirety for circulation freely without charge. All copies of this data file must contain the above copyright notice.
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