“All You Need is Love”
(Matthew 22:34-40)
Series: The Gospel for Real Life (8 of 8 )
Words in Black: Todd Linn
Words in Red: Rich Stratton
- Take your Bibles and join us in Matthew, chapter 22 (p.666).
We have been in a special series on the Gospel. We have been reading through this book by Jerry Bridges, The Gospel for Real Life, and discussing our weekly readings in Sunday school. And in our worship time Brother Rich and I have been doing some team preaching, preaching through a passage that reinforces the truths of the book. We’ve been saying that every Christian should be actively involved in weekly attendance in both small group and big group—small group study in Sunday school and big group here in the sanctuary. We need both. So please be sure that you and your family and involved in both big group and small group. Today in big group, we are studying a passage sometimes called the “Great Commandment.”
- Stand in honor of the reading of the Word of God.
34 But when the Pharisees heard that He had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together.
35 Then one of them, a lawyer, asked Him a question, testing Him, and saying,
36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?”
37 Jesus said to him, “ ‘You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’
38 This is the first and great commandment.
39 And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’
40 On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”
- Pray.
Introduction:
John Lennon and Paul McCartney were certainly not thinking of God when they wrote the song, “All you need is love.” It is, admittedly, a very catchy song, in spite of the fact that the word love is a bit overused. Without the music, the lyrics seem a bit redundant. The popular refrain goes:
All you need is love, all you need is love,
All you need is love, love, love is all you need.
Love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love.
All you need is love, all you need is love,
All you need is love, love, love is all you need.
I get it, don’t you?! Talk about driving home a point! But if you’ll allow the comparison, there is a real sense in which Jesus answers His questioner by saying, “All you need is love.” Jesus had just been asked by a lawyer, “Which is the greatest commandment in the law?” And Jesus says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind (and)…you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” All you need is love.
We want to use this passage as a template to reinforce your readings from chapter 15 and chapter 16. We hope that this passage will show how we can live out what Bridges writes about in these last two chapters of the book. This short passage doesn’t require much explanation. It’s pretty straightforward and clear.
Jesus has just silenced the Sadducees by teaching the truth about heaven and the resurrection. And right after this a scribe of the Pharisees approaches Jesus. He is identified in verse 35 as a lawyer, but he is a scribe, an expert in the Mosaic Law, someone who really understood the Old Testament, especially the first five books of the Bible.
So this scribe asks Jesus a question and he’s asking with impure motives. The Bible says there in verse 35 that he is “testing Him.” He’s testing Jesus. The sense is that he’s trying to see if he can catch Jesus unprepared and trip Him up that he might discredit Him. So he asks in verse 36, “Which is the great commandment in the law?”
It’s a great question and Jesus gives a great answer. And the great answer is the great commandment. Verses 37 and 38, “Jesus said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment.”
Jesus is quoting here from the Book of Deuteronomy, a section known by the Jews as the Shema, something a faithful Jew would have repeated twice a day. It’s found in our Bibles in Deuteronomy 6:5, “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.” It’s a way of saying, “Love God with every fiber of your being.”
Jesus says this is the first and great commandment. Now, the lawyer didn’t ask for a second command. He didn’t say, “Jesus, give me the Top 2 commands.” He wanted to know only the greatest command. He didn’t ask, but Jesus felt like he needed to know the second because you can’t really have the first without the second. So Jesus says in verse 39, “And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”
Then Jesus concludes this brief discussion in verse 40 by saying to the scribe, “On these two commands hang all the Law and the Prophets.” That is, “The entire Old Testament is encapsulated, is summarized, in love for God and love for others.” And because Jesus Himself fulfills the Law and the Prophets, then to live for Christ means that we will love God and love others.
So let’s talk about this two-way kind of love, this vertical and horizontal love.
1) We Love Upwardly (Vertical Plane; Love of God)
Jesus says we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, and mind. Mark’s Gospel adds, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength (Mark 12:30).” Remember that Jesus is quoting from Deuteronomy 6:5 and the point is, “Love the Lord with every fiber of your being; be wholly and entirely devoted to God.”
Now it’s vitally important that we Christians remind ourselves that we love God only because He first loved us. That’s what the Apostle John says in 1 John 4:19, “We love Him because He first loved us.”
One of the most wonderful teachings about the Gospel is that God in His great love comes down to us in the grave of our spiritual death and wakes us up, giving us the ability to trust Him and to be saved. The Bible says in Ephesians 2:1 that we were once “dead in trespasses and sins” and then in Ephesians 2:4-5, “But God, who is rich in mercy because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.”
God sets His loving affection upon us and, through the Gospel, saves us from our sin. So He makes the first move. He comes to us. He loves us first.
Maybe you heard about the older woman who was staring at this man at a retirement home. She just kept staring at him and smiling at him, making eyes at him. Finally, she came over and said, “I’m sorry for staring at you, but you look just like my fifth husband!” He said, “Your fifth husband?! Well, ma’am,” he said, “Forgive me for asking, but how many times have you been married?” She said, “Four.”
God comes to us. He makes the first move. He sets His loving affection upon us and changes our hearts so that we can believe in Christ and be saved. Our hearts were cold and dead, but God gives us a new heart. He takes out our heart of stone and gives us a heart of flesh (Ezekiel 36:26) so that we can repent and believe in Christ. Never forget that God in His love makes the first move and loves us.
We talked about this a couple of weeks ago, about how God regenerates us and gives us a new heart to repent from our sin and believe in Jesus Christ as our Savior. Truth is, this work of God through regeneration happens so closely to our hearing the Gospel and believing, saying “Yes” to Jesus, that it’s difficult to see that He actually made the first move. I said that from our perspective it may seem to some of us that we just placed our faith in Christ one day, but from God’s perspective, He sees us dead in trespasses and sins and gives us a new heart so that we can repent and believe.
This poem by my favorite author, Anonymous, really illustrates how it seems to us that we made the first move, but it was actually God seeking us first and setting His love upon us. Listen:
I sought the Lord, and afterward I knew He moved my soul to seek him, seeking me;
It was not I that found, O Savior true; no, I was found of Thee.
Thou didst reach forth thy hand and mine enfold; I walked and sank not on the storm-vexed sea;
‘Twas not so much that I on thee took hold, as thou, dear Lord, on me.
I find, I walk, I love, but oh, the whole of love is but my answer, Lord, to thee;
For Thou wert long beforehand with my soul, always Thou lovedst me.
Meditating on this love of God for us grows our hearts of love for Him. Thinking about His love for us causes our hearts to beat harder for Him. We love Him because He first loved us.
Our love for God is what motivates us to live a life of holiness. Bridges wrote about sanctification in Chapter 15. Sanctification is generally understood as a process, day-by-day, in which the Christian grows in holiness, becoming more and more like Christ, more sanctified, more holy, more like Jesus.
In this life, the Christian continues to battle sin. Remember: though we have been saved from sin’s penalty, sin’s presence is still very much with us. We have this sin that remains in the body until we go to be with Jesus. And we’re always battling this sin in the body.
Theologian George Smeaton writes about this in your reading this past week:
There [is] an internal conflict between flesh and spirit—between an old and new nature. And the strange thing is, that in this conflict the power and faculties of the Christian seem to be occupied at one time by the one, and at another time by the other. The same intellect, will, and affections come under different influences, like two conflicting armies occupying the ground, and in turn driven from the field (160-161).
Bridges used the analogy of tug-of-war to illustrate this battle between the sinful nature and the Spirit within us. He said the battle between our sinful nature and the Spirit is like a rope that keeps moving this way and that until the Holy Spirit prevails. He writes, “Though the rope may move back and forth, over time it moves in the right direction until finally we win the tug-of-war against sin at the end of our lives (163).”
This is so encouraging! As we grow in Christ and battle sin each day, over time, the rope moves more and more in the right direction. We improve over time as we continually confess our sin, repent, and grow in Christ. And though the sinful nature often “digs in its heels” we will eventually win at the end of our lives when we no longer face sin and temptation.
It is knowing this truth, it is believing the truth of the Gospel, that motivates us to grow in our sanctification, to become increasingly holy and more like Jesus. Remember from last week? When we as Christians face sin and temptation in this life, what are we to do? Romans 6:11, “Reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
To reckon means to consider or to believe. Believe yourself to be dead to sin. He’s not saying to do something here. He’s saying to believe something. Believe that God has taken care of your sin through the Gospel. Believe that you have died to the penalty of sin and that there is no longer any condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1). Do you really believe that? Do you really believe that God has literally forgiven and removed your sin and guilt? As the psalmist says in Psalm 103:12, “As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us.” Believe that. Consider, regard, believe yourself to be dead indeed to sin. You are no longer condemned before God. You are completely forgiven. Believe it!
And if you will believe that then, in love, you will be motivated and inspired to live your life as a “Thank You Note” to God. You will grow in holiness, becoming more like Jesus Christ. Because you have died to sin’s penalty, you will grow in dying to sin’s power. Let me say that again: because you have died to sin’s penalty, you will grow in dying to sin’s power. Because you marvel at how you have been lovingly saved from sin’s guilt, you grow to become more free from sin’s grip. Love motivates you to become more like Jesus Christ. Like the Apostle Paul, you can say, “The love of Christ compels me” to live for Him (2 Corinthians 5:14).
We love Him because He first loved us. Through the Gospel we hear God say, “I love you” and we then live our lives to say back to God, “I love You.”
We love God Upwardly (Vertical plane). Secondly, Jesus says:
2) We Love Outwardly (Horizontal Plane; Love of Others)
These two planes intersect. They must go together. The Christian must love both upwardly and outwardly. The Apostle John agreed. He said it was impossible for us to have one without the other.
1 John 4:20-21, “If someone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen? And this commandment we have from Him: that he who loves God must love his brother also.”
And Jesus speaks of a love that transcends even our Christian brothers and sisters. When Jesus speaks of loving our neighbor, He has in mind all people, Christians and non-Christians.
In verse 39 where Jesus is talking about the second command—You shall love your neighbor as yourself—He is quoting from Leviticus 19, the same chapter where God commands a love for both Jew and Gentile. He says, “The stranger who dwells among you shall be to you as one born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God (Leviticus 19:34).” Love your neighbor.
Remember from the Sermon on the Mount? Love for others includes even those we would label as our enemies. Jesus says in Matthew 5:43-44, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you.”
Then in Luke 10 another scribe asks Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus answers by telling the parable of the Good Samaritan. The answer is, in essence, “Everyone is your neighbor.”
We must love outwardly. We love not only on the vertical plane, but also on the horizontal plane. We love because we have new hearts that are soft, hearts that bend both upwardly and outwardly. We love Him—and we love others—because He first loved us.
In the last chapter Bridges discussed how the Gospel is not about God and us so much as it is about God and the world. We fail miserably if we think the Gospel is only about God and me. It is not about God and me. It is about God and the world.
John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” The Gospel is about God and the world.
How does the Gospel get to the world? Somebody tell me. Through us. Jesus says in Acts 1:8, “You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you and you shall be My witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” God is using you and me to get the Gospel to the ends of the earth.
Now that many of us have a fresh understanding and joyful appreciation for the Gospel, we feel a greater burden that more people hear this Good News that they might be saved. We have lost people living right around us in our community and lost people all across the globe in the continents. There are lost people in our neighborhoods and in the nations.
Where it comes to the nations, we should be praying regularly for the penetration of the Gospel across the globe, especially in the 10/40 window where the majority of unreached people groups reside. Located between 10 degrees north and 40 degrees north latitude, this is the rectangular area encompassing North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia where located mostly Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists.
Bridges comments on our lack of prayer for missional work. He says:
“If we honestly examine our prayers, we find that we give the greatest priority to our own earthly needs. We pray about health needs, financial needs, weather needs, and all other kinds of needs of this life….how many (of us) are praying about the spread of the gospel to the ends of the earth (170)?”
Last year we began thinking more missionally about how each member of Henderson’s First Baptist Church is a missionary. Every member is a missionary. And we all drew up our own MAPs, our Missional Action Plans. This year, we’re encouraging that this be done through our small groups, through our Sunday school classes. Brother Rich is going to share how to do this.
In recent months many of our Sunday School classes have been discussing how to take the Gospel from our neighborhood to the nations in 2011. I have challenged our Sunday School teachers during our regular monthly meetings to lead their classes in selecting one community missional action each quarter. These activities can be absolutely anything as long as they provide the opportunity for our small groups to work together as disciples carrying the name of Jesus. Some of our classes have already begun. Last month one of our young adult classes, led by Buzz and Stephanie Buzzell, spent an evening preparing and serving a meal at the Ronald McDonald House in Evansville for families staying their while their loved ones were in the hospital. If your class has not already started discussing how you can serve together in the community begin that discussion today as you begin completing your class MAP.
The other focus of this year’s MAP is to adopt a foreign missionary and the people group they serve. This primarily involves making contact with that missionary and finding out exactly how you can pray for them and the people they are trying to reach. This can grow into much more however. One of our classes has already been praying for a young lady that has shared with them her wish list of simple things that would allow her to minister more effectively and things that would make her life abroad a bit more comfortable.
Once we get to know a missionary and the people they are serving our hearts will steadily grow in love for people all over the world. We will, in Christian love, want more and more to do all we can to take the Gospel to the community, the commonwealth, the country and the continents. We will truly begin to “love our neighbor as ourself.”
- Stand for prayer.
COPYRIGHT DISCLAIMER: The text contained in this sermon is solely owned by its author. The reproduction, or distribution of this message, or any portion of it, should include the author’s name. The author intends to provide free resources in order to inspire believers and to assist preachers and teachers in Kingdom work.