Pastor Chris Reinhardt: Welcome to the Sandals Church podcast. My name is Chris Reinhart. I'm the campus pastor at Sandals Church San Bernardino. We're so happy to have you join us today as we listen to this incredible message. If you've enjoyed our content, consider leaving us a rating to help this podcast reach more people.
But for now, let's get into the message.
Pastor Fredo Ramos: This week I turned 40. Just deep breath. Oh, wow. Did not expect a clap. I was prepared to say that's the end of the sermon.
So let's just pray and pass the offering bucket, know. But one of the things that's changing in my life among the many things are the questions I'm asking. See, I was in my twenties and my thirties, when I was younger, the questions sounded like this. Am I keeping up? Am I doing enough?
Am I falling behind all my friends who are getting married and their grass grows and they have a $4.00 1 k and they already got bitcoin? Right? Am I succeeding? And over time, those questions started to quietly shape what I valued and what I did. So that if I felt behind, if I felt like I wasn't doing enough, I started to do more.
So that I felt like I was doing enough. But the longer I lived, the more I realized something very uncomfortable. It's that I I can be doing all of the right things and still becoming someone I don't actually want to be. Busier, more reactive, less patient, quicker to judge you, you know, for what you do, which tells me something really important as we start about my life and your life. It's that activity and maturity are not the same thing.
And at some point, whether you are 20 today, 40, 30, 50, 60, know I said it out of order, life has a way of shifting the questions you ask. And even for you young bucks in here, at some point you will stop asking like, what am I gonna do with my life? Who am I gonna marry? Am I accomplishing enough? And you will start asking, what kind of person am I becoming?
And I get it. That question doesn't show up on the resume that you need to get the job you want, but it shows up everywhere else in your life. What kind of person I'm becoming, it shows up for me in my relationships. It shows up in the way that I raise my kids. It shows up in the way that I, function as a husband.
Who am I becoming shows up when I'm stressed, When I respond to the world and what's going on today? And as you begin to wrestle with the question, what kind of person I'm becoming? What you begin to see is that your life is moving in a particular direction. It's aimed at something. We all have a target that we're aiming at.
And guess what? That is the question of the human condition. That is what we all have been asking about. What am I ultimately aiming at? And in Matthew 22, it is the question that Jesus in some unique way is also asked by a religious leader.
What's the most important thing I should be doing? What is God ultimately asking of me? What does he actually care about? And when you think about it, every culture has a way of asking this question. Today, for many of us, we'll say it like this.
What's the good life all about? What's going to make me happy? Now, Jesus, he's got a razor sharp response. Love. All of all your life.
All of my life is to be aimed at love. Think about that. We love ourselves some love, don't we? We long to have love. That's why it is the chorus of every top 40 song.
It is the main narrative plot of every movie that we watch over and over and over again. We love love. In the words of Olivia Dean, a great new artist, soulful woman, says love is never wasted when it's shared. She's got a great word about love. But it's surprising to me that Jesus, in giving the greatest command he ever gave to his followers, has today become the greatest critique against his followers.
That's a challenge we must all face because the world today does not need louder Christians. It needs loving ones. It needs people who actually know how to love. And so God has a word for all of us today on this ultimate aim. And this this word has the potential I think to to redirect what you have been aiming at as you think about the kind of person you are becoming.
And so with that in mind, wanna invite you to stand if you are willing and able for the reading of God's word. And for those of you who are joining us online, whatever you might find yourself to be doing now, would you just pause as we all have by standing, take a deep breath, and just allow the very words of God to be spoken over and into your life. Matthew 22, and then I'll pray for us. But when the pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees with his reply, they met together to question him again. One of them, an expert in religious law, tried to trap him with this question.
Teacher, which is the most important commandment in the law of Moses? Jesus replied, you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. A second is equally important. Love your neighbor as yourself.
The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments. This is God's word. Let's pray together. Heavenly father, in this moment that we have gathered together, we pause in prayer to realize that you have gathered with us too. And so we ask now God in the words of Jesus that you would give us eyes to see and ears to hear so that we might become all that you desire us to be in him.
We pray these things in Christ's name. Amen. Amen. You guys may be seated. Now we once again find ourselves in a text, in a story with Jesus in the final week of his life.
It's what we call holy week and passion week. The final week before he's going to the cross. Now, I don't know about you, but if I knew that my life was going to end at the end of the week, I would not be spending my time debating religious leaders. But that's precisely what we see Jesus doing, and I say that as someone who is a religious practitioner. Like, I do this for a living.
Right? But nevertheless, Jesus finds himself in another debate with the religious leaders trying to, be trapped. They're trying to overthrow him, capture him, and really dismiss him altogether, even kill him. And in one of their final traps, they present this question. What is the greatest thing that we can be doing?
And beneath that trap really is this question. What does God ultimately want from us? What is the Bible all about? And Jesus does not hesitate to give them a very clear defining center. So he said one word, love.
To love God and to love your neighbor as yourself. The greatest command, the greatest aim of your life and my life is to love, is to love God and to love people. Which brings me, I think, to the simplest and most honest thing that I want to ask all of us today, and really to have you just hold in front of your own life as we go through this passage together and it's this question, am I becoming a person of love? Am I becoming a person of love? Not in theory, like it sounds good and it makes sense to you.
Not in belief. I'm a Christian because we believe in loving God and loving people. But in your actual ordinary, exciting, and mundane life. Or in the week of mine as I turned 40, am I becoming a person of love? For all of my energy as a Christian, for all my time spent as a Christian, is it helping me to aim my life in the direction of becoming more loving?
To help us answer that question, let's work through this text just kinda line by line together and see how God might speak to all of us. So beginning there in verse 34, notice what it says, but when the pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees with his reply, they met together to question him again. Now let's pause there. Bear in mind, the Pharisees and the Sadducees do not like each other, but they are meeting together. Why?
Because if they can agree on anything, it's that Jesus got to go. And so this scene that we kind of plunge ourselves into is like a round for round Bible Kung Fu match, right, with people peppering Jesus with these questions. And we're told that they meet together and one of them, verse 35, look at this, says, an expert in religious law tried to trap him with this question. Now an expert in religious law, you've to bear in mind, is like a lawyer for the old testament. Now strange to hear because in our world today we're, you know, we have a separation between church and state.
In their day and age, they had no separation for that. So he was a lawyer in the old testament, and they're playing a match of bible kung fu. And quite frankly, Jesus is about to slap all of them with verse 36. Notice what he says there. I'm sorry.
In verse 37, Jesus replied, you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest command. Amen. Now notice Jesus, in his answer, is quoting from the old testament. You might have in your bibles a double quotation, which means this is a a key note for us that he's quoting another passage.
Deuteronomy six. And so with kind of our mind here in 22, Matthew 22, let's turn to Deuteronomy six and let's hear this passage in its original context. Deuteronomy six starting at verse four. Listen what it says there. Listen o Israel, The Lord is our God.
The Lord alone. Listen, o Israel. This is called the Shema. Or in a better translation might be Shema. You know, depending on who you're asking.
Listen up. Hear me. This is a prayer and a command. The Shema. Something that the Israelites would repeat every single day.
Shema means to listen and to really hear. It's a lot like when you're ever, you know, in a conversation, maybe a heated one, and you ever feel like this person isn't hearing you, and so what do you say? You're not hearing me. You are not hearing me. You are not shamaying me.
Right? So this week, if you happen to be in a conversation with a friend or a spouse, I wanna encourage you to say, you are not shamaying me today. Right? You're not hearing me. Because it's about not just kinda audibly hearing words, but understanding what's being said.
Such that that understanding moves you to obedience. And what I want you to miss, or not miss in this passage is you must love the Lord your God. The word there Lord is actually God's name. What's embedded is to listen up and and love God Yahweh. So the command to love is not to kind of give your whole life and devotion to some, you know, abstract unknown God, some force in the universe, but to love Yahweh, the personal God, your God, my God, love your God.
He has a name. Amen. To love him personally. That's right. It reminds me a number of years ago, I was doing pre medal counseling, with an actually old student of mine.
His name was Pierce. And he sat down, he's like, man, I want you to marry us. I was very honored to marry him and his wife He had put me through a lot of junk as a teacher, so I can't wait to give him something back on his wedding day. And we sat down, and in our first session, I'm like, Pearce, tell me why you love Emily. And he's kinda taken aback.
Emily's staring at him like, yeah. Tell the pastor why you love me. And he's like, well, you know, I I love her because she's she's so smart. And I said, well, that's great, Pierce. Yeah.
We all love a smart woman. And I'm like, but there's a lot of smart women. Why do you love her? Now, some of might be thinking, man, Freddie, you're a bit rude. Let me finish the story.
So I pressed him, like, do you love her? He said, well, you know, I I love her because what She's beautiful. She's so attractive. I'm like, okay. But, there's a lot of smart beautiful women in the world.
Like, why do you love her? Now, I'm really pressing him, and she's kinda just staring at him like, dang. Are we going through with this or not? And so, I pressed him again, why do you love her? And he said, well, mister Ramos, you know, he's calling me mister Ramos because she's, you know, she's so funny.
She makes me laugh. I said, Pierce, there are plenty of smart, beautiful, funny women. I married one too, and she's Latina. So sometimes when she makes me laugh, I start crying at the same time because they come with a lot. So I said, why do you love her?
And he's getting so frustrated. Man, I you know, I love Emily. I I I love her. I love her. I I love Emily because it's her.
I love Emily. And I said, now we're getting somewhere friend. You know what you did? You named her. You love Emily.
You love her for who she is, not what she can give you. You gave her her name. Her personhood. That is what Jesus is saying here. That's what Deuteronomy is saying.
You are to love God for who he is. We love God. Why? Because he is lovely. He is worthy of our love.
No one else exists quite like God exists and is. He is worthy of our love. And especially for you new Christians, it's natural to be obedient to God, to follow God, to love God because he's giving you good things. But what happens when those blessings stop? Because we don't just love God because of the gifts he gives us, we love God because of who he is.
His name is Yahweh. We love him for who he is. Deuteronomy goes on, with all your heart. The word there is levav, and it's less like the physical organ inside our chest, and it's more like the control center of your life. Right?
Because I also have a bachelor's degree in nerdom, when I think of control center, I think of like the cockpit in the Millennium Falcon because it is the fastest ship in the galaxy. Right? No aircraft today can outrace the Millennium Falcon. And, it's controlled by this Lavabre, this cockpit, this control center where Han is constantly yelling at Chewy and c three p o and r two d two. Never tell me the odds.
Right? All these great scenes come out of the cockpit, the control center. And in the Hebrew scriptures, the levav, your heart is the innermost part of you where your thinking is, where your feeling is, where your desires are. The innermost part of who you are is where the the scriptures are saying that is where you should start to love God from. The innermost most part of who you are.
Where there's this beautiful union between your desires, what you want to do, your feelings, and listen, your thinking, your imagination. And I've been stuck on this all week because to be honest with you, I have not loved God with all my mind as Jesus calls us to. Oftentimes, I find my imagination going to difficult places, and I'm convicted. It's probably why in the season of lent, I gave up, just being on my phone. Cut out a lot of social media because what I do with my boredom is I scroll.
I'm stuck to the screen, and it's starting to deform my imagination for God. And so during the season of Lent, when I've given that up, I've basically been praying every day. Even this morning, God, give me a holy imagination for you. I wanna be bored with God again, not just bored on my phone. Because man, I need an imagination that is captured by God again.
To love him with my mind so that my boredom goes with him and not just my device. It goes with him and it's shaped by who he is. That's what we're after, to love God with all of our heart, of your innermost being. The second word, with all your soul. The word there is, nephesh.
It shows up about, you know, 700 plus times in the old testament, and it is soul. Oftentimes when you hear the word soul, might think of that disembodied immaterial part of you that's just floating, I guess. That's a helpful translation, but a better way to maybe think about soul is your whole person. Because according to scripture, you don't just have a soul, you are a soul. You don't just have a body, you are a body.
So to to say we love God with all of our soul is you don't just love God with the innermost part of your being, but you love him with your whole personhood. All that you are, the essence of who you are, you love God with. With all of your strength, the word there strength, ma'ode, is not so much about your ability to do push ups for God, or at 40 how many burpees can you do for God, But strength is more about, one translator calls it your muchness, your energy. Another person called it influence. You love God with all of your influence.
Literally, text is saying to love God with all of your muchness, all of your influence. It is a way for you to say, God, here is my education. It's my strength. It's my muchness. I give it to you.
Here are my gifts. Here are my relationships. Here is my time. Here is my resources. God, here is my muchness.
I give it all to you. And so this text is less about kind of dividing us up into three components, know, and it's more about saying you are to love God with every ounce of what makes you you. Which tells us and the point becomes very clear. Because as Christians, it's very natural for all of us to compartmentalize our love for God, isn't it? We know how we know all too well how to say, God, I'll love you with my morning routine, but I will not love you with my sexuality.
I'll love you with my present life, but I'm gonna keep my past wounds. I'm gonna hold on to my father wounds. God, I'll love you with my time, but I cannot love you with my money. I'll love you with my fall and spring, but the summer is mine, God. You know, I gotta get away.
It's California. The Shema is an invitation to offer all of yourself, not just as a command, you must do this, but it's a prayer. It's an invitation to commune with God and say, God, here is all of me. I'm reorienting my entire life to trust and yield all of myself under your love. Now, what's so great is that Jesus doesn't just stop there.
The first and the greatest command, he says the second one is equal to it. Two commands. Now, notice they only ask for one, but you just who Jesus don't mess around. He gave them two. Love your neighbor as yourself.
And so in the same way that we turn to Deuteronomy, we're gonna flip real quick to Leviticus 19, which is something you don't always hear from a church pulpit. Let's turn to the book of Leviticus, But let's do that now. Look at look at this passage, and I want us just to take in the whole context of what's happening here so we might understand what's truly going on in this story. Leviticus 19 starting in verse 13. Do not defraud or rob your neighbor.
Do not hold back the wages of a hired worker overnight. Don't curse the deaf or put a stumbling block in front of the blind, but fear your God. I am the Lord. Now, pause there. Notice the connection between how we treat people and fearing God.
There is a direct connection between your capacity to have reverence, awe, and fear for God, and then the way that translates to how you treat people, especially how you treat vulnerable people, people who are in need. He continues there. Back in verse yeah. 15. Do not pervert justice.
Do not show partiality to the poor or favoritism to the great. That's interesting. But judge your neighbor fairly. He goes on to say verse 16, do not go about spreading slander among your people. That's another way of saying it don't matter how hot the tea is.
We don't gossip. Don't slander other people. Don't do anything that endangers your neighbor's life. I am the Lord. Again, notice the connection.
You are mine and you now have a responsibility to, because I am your Lord, to treat people a certain way. Verse 17, don't hate a fellow Israelite in your heart. Rebuke your neighbor frankly so that you will not share in their guilt. That's a way of saying in conflict, you and I are to confront people honestly. So there's a lot of, you know, the same teaching out of Matthew's gospel in Matthew 16 to confront people with truth.
Verse 18, do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people. He goes on to say, but love your neighbor as what? Yourself. I am the Lord. Notice all of those verses in the context of a very critical well known Christian phrase, to love your neighbor as yourself.
And notice the context of this command. It's filled with a lot of statements about how we treat people who are deemed, honestly, like lower than us in society. This has a lot to do about the issue of justice for people who don't have the same life that you and I have. But before everyone gets excited about that, it's also about how we treat our enemies. It's about how we deal with forgiveness and conflict.
How we treat people who vote differently than we do. Who act differently than we do. It's how we treat and love those who have hurt us or wounded us. And according to Jesus, we are to love our neighbors as what? As yourself.
This means you are not a doormat or a pushover, but in the same way that you would desire good for your own life, in the same way that you long to have a happy prosperous life, you are to also desire that for your neighbor. Jesus now ends this defining statement, verse 40, there in your passage. The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments. My goodness. Now, what's great here is Jesus being asked what's the greatest was not so much what's the first command ever given.
This is not him kind of ranking. This is him reprioritizing and revealing the interpretive center of all of scripture. The story of the Bible is a story about divine love creating us, saving us, and making us new. It has always been about this. The command is not disconnected.
This comes to us as a story. And so to miss this command is to miss the point of the entire story of scripture. It's heavy. Which is why he says everything hangs on these two things. To love God and to love people.
Now, in light of all of what's just been said, in twenty one minutes, my goodness, how do we bring this teaching to life in our own lives? Real quickly now, as we close, love must become the measure of your spiritual maturity. Make love the measure of how you understand your own growth. A few weeks ago we talked about fruit and not bearing fruit. The answer I didn't give in that sermon was intentional.
The fruit is ultimately what? Love. That's the fruit that we bear. And I say that because it's hard to measure spiritual life, especially against the pharisees, in any kind of game where they don't win. So like say, for example, you're playing a game against the pharisees and it's about reading scripture, they win.
If it's a game about fasting, they win. If it's a game about memorizing the bible, giving, they they they win at every game. Right? It's hard to measure your spiritual life in such a way where the pharisees don't always win. They fasted more than we do.
They prayed more than we did. They gave more than we did. They know far more than we ever will. Many pharisees died and live eternity apart from God with bible verses on their lips. But they were still very unsafe, harsh, critical, judgmental people who oftentimes, in the way that they acted out their faith, pushed people further from God than brought them closer to God.
Which tells all of us, if love is now my new measure, that means everything I do as a Christian is a means to that great end. Why do you read the Bible? To learn, of course, but you read the Bible that you might become a person of love. Why are you showing up here to church that you might, yes, learn, worship, gather, give, serve other people for the greater end of becoming a person of love? It is why you serve, it is why you give, it is why you show up in your workplaces with dignity and respect for others because you are doing every single Christian practice under the sun as a means to this great end of becoming a person of love.
Which means in the best and simple metric of understanding your personal growth today is this. Am I becoming a person of love year over year? Am I growing in love? Do the people who know you the best, can they say that you are a person of love? I love the wisdom of Peace Cazaro here who says this, loving people well is the defining characteristic of a mature christian.
The defining thing. Now, it's critical at this point that we define love. Right? When we talk about becoming a person of love, we define it as Jesus did. Not as we typically do.
Because at any given moment, especially on birthday week, I'm gonna say things like this. I love tres leches cake. Which I do. And I know some of you are judging me like three milks? Like, it's my business y'all.
Let me love trade slices. Okay. But when I say something like that, what am I getting at? I want to take it. I want to consume it.
So much of the conversation about love today is around consumption and taking and not giving. But love as defined in scripture, love defined by Jesus as agape is one of sacrifice, one of giving versus today where love puts the self at the center and God and neighbor as peripherals. But according to the story of the Bible, Jesus lived his life with agape love in which he was not at the center. God and neighbor were. And so how do we then start to measure whether or not we are growing as people of love year over year?
If that's how we understand it. Well, Jesus gives us not just the command, but how. With two simple words as we close today. Obedience and neighbors. First, my love for God is proven by my obedience to him.
Now listen to me carefully. We obey because we are loved as Christians, not in order to be loved as Christians. You gotta you gotta remember that. The gospel comes first, and all of your obedience and devotion to God is first rooted in the fact that he loves you first. In such a way that your decision to trust and follow him is the kind of obedience that, yes, proves love, but it's an obedience, listen, that goes beyond agreement, which I think is a challenge for many of us in our church today.
I talk to a lot of you, and you know the Bible, you trust God, you say you obey God, but what you really mean is that you agree with God. Agreeing with Jesus and obeying Jesus are not the same thing, friends. You will you will encounter tons of people in the gospels who agreed with Jesus but did not obey him. So ask yourself, am I at a place right now where I'm just agreeing Jesus? Actually obeying him.
Learning to trust him in such a way that my whole life is shaped by him. I love the words of Psalm 86. Listen to the way that this prayer, that this song comes together. This is a a Psalm from scripture. 86 says this, teach me your way, Lord.
Teach me your way. Open a song like that, Lord. Teach me your way that I may rely on your faithfulness. That is another way to say that I may walk according to your ways, That my life might be shaped by your goodness towards me. And then listen listen to this next phrase.
Give me an undivided heart that I may fear your name. Some of you need to circle that today and that needs to become your prayer. God, I need an undivided heart again. Because according to Jesus, I don't love you with all my heart, mind, and strength. I don't.
Many of us today, if we're willing to be honest, we have a divided heart, not an undivided heart. And his call is saying, man, teach me your ways, God. I wanna walk according to them and give me an undivided heart. Verse 12, that I will praise you Lord with all my heart. I will glorify your name forever.
Notice how he roots all of this. Verse 13, for great is what? Your love toward me. You have delivered me from the depths, from the realm of the dead. In other words, he roots his desire to be obedient first in the fact that God's got a great love for him.
He's got a great rich love for him. And it's from that place of embracing the great love of God that he's able then to turn and say, teach me your ways. I want to obey you. I want to have an undivided heart. Jesus himself, I think continues the same idea in John 14.
He makes it abundantly clear. Jesus replied, anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. Now when I read that, there's not a lot of room for discussion with Jesus. Love will be proven through obedience. He goes on to say, my father will love them.
We will come to them and make our home with them. Look at this picture of unity and connection. Verse 24, anyone who does not love me will not obey my teaching. These words you hear are not my own. They belong to the father who sent me.
This is the great challenge with Jesus. There are some things in your life with him that are just non negotiable. Love and obedience are one of them. So for any one of us who right now can make the statement that we love God, Jesus says prove it through your obedience. Let me see you prove it.
Obey me. You know, this makes me think, a number of years ago we were out on a walk teaching our kids how not just to walk through the neighborhood, but they wanted to start riding their scooters. Which is always wonderful because five minutes into the walk, I'm both walking the dog and carrying two scooters. But over the course of this journey, they were supposed to ride the scooters on the sidewalk. And they weren't.
They started going on street. Why? Because the street's smoother. They can go faster. There's not as many cracks and bumps.
And so I I find myself telling them, stay on the sidewalk. Please listen to me. Obey me what I said. And they said, daddy, I'm gonna be careful. I'm fine.
I'll be careful. We kept going. I said, get back on the sidewalk. And they said, no, but daddy, I'm being careful. I said, get on the sidewalk.
We kept going. Again, they got off the sidewalk, ride their scooters on the street. I said, get off the street. Get onto the sidewalk. Daddy, I will be careful.
And I said, no. And at one point, I got so frustrated that I yelled at them, I don't want you to be careful. I want you to be obedient. And what I just shouted right now, I think needs repeating for the Christian, doesn't it? Because many of us are careful in our disobedience to God rather than just simply being obedient to him and staying on the sidewalk.
That's what he's called us to do. And perhaps where we are most carefully disobedient when it comes to our obeying God is in our neighborly love. We might check the boxes with a lot of Christian disciplines, and you can do that while ignoring your neighbors, ignoring the people in your life. A few weeks ago, I ran into my neighbor. God bless her man, Charlene.
She's one of my favorite people on our block. And we were catching up. We hadn't seen each other in some time. And in the middle of our conversation, it hit me that for months I've been telling her, Charlene, I'm gonna have you over. I'm gonna have you over.
And I was like so bothered that, dang it. I told her again, Charlene, we're gonna have you over. And she responded by saying, listen, I understand. She's afraid I'll just relax. I know that you are a busy pastor.
And she didn't mean anything by it, but those words struck me. And I started to think, how is the very job that I do to connect people to God keep me myself from connecting with people? It's wild to imagine that the very mission of God can be played out and so loved by many of us that it keeps us from actually drawing close to the people God has placed right in front of us. It's astounding to me. And it was in that conversation that I realized, loving my neighbor means Fredo giving up some pastoral productivity so that I might offer her presents.
And open my front door, and let her come in. It reminds me of the words of Augustine who once famously said, Christians are actually very good at loving. No. Stay with me. He said, our problem isn't that we don't love, but that we often love the right things in the wrong order.
Think about that. He said what we have is disordered loves in a book called Confessions. We're all very good at loving. The problem is you love the right things in the wrong order. So for me, love of God, love of neighbor, it's on like, it's on the list.
It's just number seven and number eight. Right? Because I got other things I gotta get to. Like getting paid, being on time, packing lunches. Right?
All of you have a list of loves in your life right now. And the great challenge for you as you receive this invitation to love God with all of your muchness, to love your neighbor as yourself, is to honestly reflect on the list that you have subtly created. And then to ask, how far down the list is the love for God and the love for neighbor? Because not only is our love proven through obedience. Listen now, love, my love for my neighbor is proven through sacrificially serving them.
Jesus said it very plainly in our passage today. The second is equally as important. In other words, the second commandment proves the first commandment. They exist together. Why is this true?
Because a love that costs nothing proves nothing. You and I cannot claim a deep intimacy with God and at the same time be withholding mercy from the person right in front of us. It's not possible. John says it like this in second John one six, love means doing what God has commanded us and he has commanded us to love one another just as you have heard from the beginning. And this means you and I at some level learning that biblical love will cost you and sacrifice some kind of comfort and convenience.
Because biblical love does not ask me, Fredo, is this convenient? Love asked me, what does the person need from me right now? Which is why you parents, some of you get up at 02:17 in the morning, not because you feel like it, but because your kids need something from you. And you are making the decision out of sacrificing, giving something up to love them and serve them out of your muchness with your imagination in simple small creative ways. So I think it's helpful as we close then to maybe consider what needs to be given up this week.
So that you might create space in your calendar to just maybe be a noticer of someone. That whole conversation with my neighbor, it all started because I couldn't reach for my backpack in the driver's seat. I'm so old now. So I had to get out, open the side door, and when I did that, she popped out. Ordinary moment turned into an opportunity for me to reevaluate my list of loves.
So what are the small things that you can do? It doesn't have to look dramatic. But how are you going to create margin right now in your life? So you might actually become attentive to your neighbor, desiring to love both God and them out of your muchness. Maybe your prayer is like real simple.
God, an act of love, help me just to notice someone today. To notice someone at church. To notice someone in my neighborhood. To notice someone in my workplace. And as you do, the conflict becomes a little bit greater because this command not only challenges us, but it exposes us.
To be honest, this command crushes all of us today. As I'm driving over here, I'm realizing that I am delivering a message about a word that I myself still fail to live. I bring this word to you not out of a place of accomplishing it, but out of a place of trying to understand how to do it as well. Because who among us passes loving God with all of our muchness, loving neighbor as ourselves. Who can pass that?
Who actually can be perfectly obedient to that? Our hope today, our good news today is that Jesus, the one who gave this command perfectly obeyed this command too. On the cross, Jesus perfectly loved and was obedient to God unto death, and he loved his neighbor by giving his life up through death. Friends, this is the gospel. Jesus loved his neighbor.
He loved you. He loved me. He touched the untouchable. Jesus forgave the unforgivable. He showed mercy to the unmerciful.
He was a neighbor and embraced the very people who rejected him. At the cross, both vertical love to God and horizontal excuse me, horizontal love to God and vertical love to neighbor became so evident through the good news of Jesus. And so the invitation for us right now as we close is not you trying to strive and muster up all the energy you can to be better at loving. It is first for you to learn to receive love because you cannot give away what you have not first received. The apostle, John, the one who called himself the one whom Jesus loved, wrote rich beautiful letters to the church.
We call him first, second, and third John. All theology is on love. And he simply says there in first John four, we love because what? He first loved us. You give from a place of reception.
So that by the spirit of God working in your life, you become the kind of person who just doesn't hear the command to love. But that you now have the capacity to do it. And perhaps the greatest miracle that any of us will ever see in our lives is that you will become a loving person to people who are hard to love. Maybe the greatest thing you will ever see in your life is you learning to love the one who hurts you the most in your life. To to love the one who you despise on the internet.
The big work of God, the thing that you've been praying about, maybe it's as simple as you becoming the person who has capacity to now love. And so friends, this week I turned 40. And I realized I'm gonna sit down at a table awkwardly as we all do on our birthdays, and sit there for thirty seconds and hear the birthday song. And just stand there. The song is about forty five seconds too long.
Right? And I've been thinking it, and it just struck me literally on my way to church today. Perhaps the reason why people like me get all squirmish during the birthday song is because deep down inside it's hard for us to receive affection from people who know us well. It's not just awkward to make eye contact. I mean, that's true too.
And you might just not like to be around people even on your birthday. I get all that. But perhaps at a deeper level, the great challenge of our lives is believing that we are lovable. And so I'm gonna turn 40, Sit at a table with people who love me. And through a terrible corny song, blowing out a candle, be reminded that what?
This is all a simple demonstration and a small example of God's love for me. The questions for me are turning. It's no longer am I accomplishing everything. It's am I becoming a loving person. And beneath that, what I had been really plagued by, even as my, took my walk this week was, man, at 40 it is harder for me to believe the gospel than it was at 21.
Why is that? Not because I've drifted from God, but because I've become more aware of who I am as a person. Why is it that as a pastor who can preach the gospel decently for thirty five minutes, struggle to believe the gospel on his own prayer walk? Perhaps receiving love is the great challenge in front of all of us today. Receiving the divine eternal unfailing unbreakable love of God for you right now.
Receive it so that you might become it. Let's pray together. God, ask now that you would open our hearts in a way that only you can so that we might be receptive to receive your love for us. And in so doing you might make us people who love. People who love you with our muchness, with our energy, with our imaginations, and in turn who can love our neighbors well.
Do this work in us we pray now in Jesus name. Amen. I want to take a quick second and say thank you to all of you who spent time today wherever you might be watching from. We are glad that you joined us for service today here at Sandals Church. And I wanna encourage you wherever you might be from, the love of God is for you.
And we would love to be a part of your journey. We'd love for you to reach out to us. Tell us more about who you are. You can do that by going to sandalschurch.com/help. It gives us a chance to hear your story and connect with you.
But also, I want to encourage you that if anything we do here at Sandals Church through our messages, this vision of authenticity, if it is helping you follow Jesus, then I want to invite you to pray right now about how you can support the work that God is doing into our church. To do that, you can go to sandalschurch.com/support. Grace and peace.