How Do You Show God that You Love Him?

 What Does It Mean to Love God with All Your Heart?

Sunday 102520 (21st after Pentecost)

How do we show God that we love Him? Now I know this sounds like a question we would talk about in our Youth Group on Wednesdays, but it is a serious one. Do you love God? If so how? Jesus had many questions to answer throughout his life but this one was amongst the most fascinating. How can I please God? It was a question that often-fascinated Pharisees. They knew the OT had a total of 613 different laws (of which 248 encourages actions and 365 discourages certain actions) The question quickly becomes: With that many laws, which one is the most important? You want to please God? You must know which law is the greatest! It makes sense! In the same way we also, would love to know what we need to do to show love to our family! Don’t we? For some of us, doing something good to help them show that we love them. For e.g. my children might clean and do the dishes for me. And I love it! That’s not to say that I will love them only if they do it! But what do you do, to show your family that you love them? Do you only say to them I love you? and add what? I am sure your list will be different from mine because what pleases you is different from what pleases me. This brings forward the question they put to Jesus: What pleases God? What must I do to please God? This morning, I want us to explore the implication of Jesus’ answer to this question, because it leads us to true religion.

It appears that the lawyer who asked Jesus really wanted to know out of curiosity: All of God’s laws are good, but there are much weightier matters of the law of which some guiding principles can be deducted. Some people might have found other laws to be way more important (circumcision, sabbath…) Jesus’ answer comes as a final referee’s pick, that the greatest commandment is to love God and our neighbor. These two commandments as Jesus explained are two sides of the same coin: The love for God is seen (in practical terms) in the love for one’s neighbor. In order words, God is saying your love for me is shown by how you love your neighbor! Now how do we achieve that? First, we have to love God with all our heart, soul and mind, with sincerity, not only with our lips. And love Him with the most intense degree!

You see, all obedience begins in our affections. We love many things in life… and we pursue them with strength and passion but, when this passion goes beyond the natural, it corrupts us and, in the process, others begin to suffer because of our extreme self-love. (Like when we buy all the toilet paper from the stores!) Our natural self-love is good until it turns into selfishness. Which makes us disregard our neighbor (Two sides of the coin) therefore failing to love God. The Second Commandment really teaches us how we can love our neighbor as ourselves: To make ourselves true servants of the welfare of others! This can be a hard one for us, because as you know, we are all wired to love as we are wired to breathe, the love for other things may lead us into this corrupt version of self-love called selfishness, which can creep into our lives if unchecked.

Since Jesus knew that this lawyer and religious leaders were seeking the way but were stuck in the corrupt version of unchecked self-love, Jesus tried to guide them slowly and cleverly towards the purest form of love which is Himself: Jesus Christ the Messiah. He pointed them to Holy Scriptures to discover that the Messiah is the Son of David. He tells them: If David thus calls him Lord, how can he be his son? Unfortunately, these leaders did not understand.

I am afraid that like the Jewish leaders we, also can be in danger of this corrupt version of self-love, where we claim to love our neighbor while the truth is otherwise. There are plenty of examples all around us: (1) Wear your mask to protect others; (2) moderate the pursuit of your interests if it means they would hurt others; (3) always choose the way that helps others…And many more… God help us!

Amen

 

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