Month: May 2024

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Love God. Love Others. Love You

“What shall I do to inherit eternal life?”

“Who is my neighbor?”

These questions came from an expert in the Law of Moses.  He had been having a conversation with Jesus. In the account that we read in Luke 10, this man put forth these questions in order to tempt or test the Savior.

To the first question about gaining eternal life, Jesus responded with a question of His own: “What do you read in the Law?”

The response of the lawyer, taken from Leviticus 19:18 and Deuteronomy 6:5, was this:  “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.”

Jesus was in agreement with his answer. He told the man to do these things and get the kingdom life. All the ordinances, some 613 of them in the writings attributed to Moses, were concentrated in these two commands.

In the gospels of Mark and Matthew, the Lord categorized these two instructions as the greatest of all the commandments. The apostle Paul affirmed this opinion in his letter to the Romans, telling his readers that all of the Law rests on love:  “…  You shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness, you shall not covet, and if there is any other commandment, all are  summed up in this saying, namely, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no harm to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law” (Romans 13:9-10).

Ah, but this most religious man sought an out, a work-around. That is the point of his follow-up question:  “Who is my neighbor?”

Isn’t that so like us?  We demand clarification in order to escape a matter of simple obedience.

The answer of Jesus was direct. Love. Love. Love.

Love your Lord and in so loving Him — heart, soul, strength, and mind — you discover true love for yourself.

Dive into this commitment to Him, purpose to seek first His Kingdom, and you see who you are and what you were made for – to glorify God and enjoy Him. The Westminster Catechism, a Puritan-influenced teaching guide for Christian living, begins this way:  “Man’s chief and highest end is to glorify God and fully to enjoy Him forever.”

You love God. You love you. You love others.

Once you’ve learned to love yourself as God loves you, only then will you understand the way to loving your neighbor.

A Story of Love

This lawyer made an attempt to stir up a theological debate. He wanted to drag Jesus into the weeds of analysis.

The nature of the religion expressed among the Jewish people at that time was lost in the debates of details, especially in the area of the Sabbath. Simply, the scholars and teachers of the Law, spent a whole lot of work trying to define what it really means not to work, to rest.

The most respected rabbis of the ages taught and wrote thousands of opinions on the matter. Leviticus states in a number of places that Sabbath means just this:  no labor was to be done either by man or beast.

These knowledgeable ones directed their hearts, souls, strengths, and minds into empty pursuits. A product of the educational dynamic of his day, it should not surprise us that this lawyer wanted to enter into a learned discussion on neighborliness.

The Savior refused to enter the realm of abstraction. Jesus had thanked the Father for the ones who followed Him with simple faith:  “… I thank You Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that You have hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and have revealed them unto babes; even so, Father, for so it seemed good in Your sight” (Luke 10:21).

“Who is my neighbor?”

There would be no doctrinal dissertation coming from the Son regarding the question. Instead, He addressed the matter as the Lord always seems to address most high things.

He told a story.

And this story is one the whole world has come to know very well as the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Reference is made to these words practically every time someone makes news by doing an honorable thing in helping someone in need.

You know how Jesus told it. A man was on his way from Jerusalem to Jericho when he got ambushed by thieves. He was left naked and half-dead by the side of the road. Two religiously minded men – a priest and a Levite, men with whom the lawyer would have been well acquainted – passed by, saw the man in need, but chose to cross the street and leave him lying there.

“A certain Samaritan” saw the man and had compassion. He dressed his wounds with oil and wine; he transported the man to an inn, cared for him, and also made arrangements for his further treatment. The finishing touch was this question posed to the lawyer and to all who heard:  “Which now of these three do you think was a neighbor unto the one who fell among the thieves?”

The lawyer was caught. Jesus had flipped the script on him. He had to admit that the Samaritan who showed mercy was the real hero in the story.

“Go and do likewise,” Jesus said to him. In essence, the lawyer was told this:

Be like the Samaritan.

Sounds like a great slogan to slap on a T-shirt or bumper sticker doesn’t it?

The Right Question

The lawyer had been asking the wrong question all along.  The real question is this one, and we must ask it of ourselves, “Am I a neighbor?”

The words spoken during this encounter exposed how wrong our hearts can be. And when the heart is disordered the effects are felt all over us.

Samaritans were ostracized by those who counted themselves true Israelites. These groups were literally neighbors — people living side-by-side under the auspices of the Roman Empire. There was racial and social animus throughout the region. Such prejudice in the heart leads to infected souls, hindered strength, and dark, cloudy thinking.

This lawyer likely possessed an amazing mind. He surely exercised much strength in studying the pages of the Scriptures. He took pride in his knowledge, and it shaped his identity.

What of his heart? What was inside of it? Was it really given to the worship of the Lord and toward bringing glory to Him?

These are questions all of us have to wrestle with. There’s a whole atmosphere in our world that assaults our attempts to live for God.

Am I a neighbor? A holy neighbor like the Samaritan? I want to be like the man in Jesus’ story. I can’t make myself like the Samaritan, however, with good thoughts and deeds.

What I need is love from the Lord. I have to let God love me and recognize the simple fact of the matter. That is, He loves me today and every day.

If His love captivates my heart, then I will see as He sees. Anyone around me then becomes my neighbor.

And I may not like some of the neighbors I know and see. Still, there is a love from above that can flow through me and out of me. I can help the wounded and show God’s compassion, because I have been loved and cared for by Him.

Love God. Love you. Love others.

Go and do this.

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Great Harvest, Few Laborers

Jesus refused to allow His followers to sit idle, even after they’d stumbled. There was work to do, and He commissioned them to do it. He sent out more than 70 disciples as we read at the opening portion of Luke 10.

This was done even after what we read in Luke 9. The Savior chided His chosen band for their faithlessness and their perversity as it related to the boy under demonic siege. He rebuked them for misguided attempts to demonstrate their privileges and authority regarding an outsider proclaiming Jesus’ Name and for their agitated call for a discourteous town to burn.

And yet these people were the Son’s main messengers. They delivered His invitation to life eternal and worked wonders as He empowered them.

This is what He had to work with. Did He need these guys? As the Lord Almighty, Maker of the heavens and the earth, He needed nothing. Right? This seems like a logical conclusion at which to arrive.

Yet I am convinced it’s the wrong conclusion.

There’s something deeper and wider at work, a mystery that brings us to both wonder and bewilderment. People had to be included in the work.

The Lord positioned Himself to be in need, in need of us, as strange as that sounds.

He did so because of the essence and necessity of love and loving. Minus the freedom of choice and the ability to respond, relationships exist under the forces of command and control. These things form all other rules of engagement related to religion.

Yahweh had something else in mind. He desired lives devoted to fellowship and exchange. Give and take was to characterize the expression of His life set loose in people.

The Lord instilled this reality in His realm through the nature of reproduction. Species were made diverse — two dimensions, the male and the female, were crafted to come together so that there would be more, more, more. In the lower forms of life, this procreation is made to happen via instinct. This was by design, and because such operations continue according to that design, there exists an ever-present testimony to the hand of God at work in our world.

Free to Agree or Disagree

The Lord gifted those beings situated higher in His created order with something more. That is, the ability to think, to reason, and to respond. The response mechanism rooted in real liberty included the capacity for refusal.

Yes, I have to say that God made space for agreement and also for disagreement.

These higher ones possess a liberty given according to the Creator’s good pleasure. Simply put, God wanted angels and humans to choose Him. Rather than pressurize them into conformity, He designed these created ones with a sense of self, and a spirit as part of their essence.

Among the angelic host, there was freedom. Lucifer occupied an amazing and most powerful position as an anointed cherub welcomed at the mountain of the Most High. He chose to seek an enhancement of his position. He become “I” centered as iniquity brewed within him. He stirred a rebellion that garnered a third of the host to his side. He could and he did enter into an attitude of anti-love. And he led others in it. He refused to live in contentment and fell like lightning from heaven as the father of lies and became a most murderous power.

Liberty is what love is all about. God is love, and love cannot flow if it is not exercised in freedom. Without freedom, there’s no exchange going on at all. Without freedom, all initiation is unidirectional and all reaction is preexistent and programmatic. It is domination, not relationship.

Can there be true joy in this manner of arrangement? Not really.

And so when it comes to the communication pattern for the spread of the Gospel, Jesus uses those who choose to draw near to Him.

Could He have had it any other way? I think not. Love is the issue and love involves the Lover and His beloved. Split that latter word into two — be loved. The Lord made it a point to use those who allowed themselves to “be loved.”

Still in the Work

As we have seen reading through Luke, this reality made for some messy moments. Yes, there were high points for sure, but the beauty of the Bible is that it tells the straight, unvarnished stories of a number of people.

We get words about David on how by faith and in the Name of the Lord, he slung a stone that put the giant on his face. We also get words about how this very same hero took a rooftop walk and wound up stealing a man’s wife for himself with a disastrous fall into sin.

“The harvest truly is great.” Jesus declared this. Nothing can change that. There are always going to be those in need of the Gospel.

“The laborers are few.” This is the other reality. God works with what He’s got.

These weak and often selfish followers were His workforce. They agreed with the Truth of His Person. He knew this and understood perfectly. Their faith lacked luster for sure, the evidence of this is there for us to read. The maturity process was going to be a bumpy one — both for the truly human Son and for His followers.

These disciples experienced defeat, but the Lord would not bench them. The harvest remained. The reapers were needed. Despite their still developing capacities, Jesus got them back on the field.

Go and tell the cities and towns that the Son has come, they were instructed. Announce the Peace with God that is now available. Some will receive this Peace, others will not.

Those sent out were to make themselves at home with those who received the Message. Eat and drink, share the table with such as these. Believers become family at once, do they not? Heal the sick. Announce the arrival of the Kingdom of God.

The Lord’s Day Shall Come

Not all doors will open, Jesus warned. Rejection was nothing new to Him. They were not to take this personally. Rather, the disciples were told to move along from those who refused to listen. Wipe away the dust of such places. Their day of judgment will come just as it came to Sodom.

Sodom did get a witness, albeit a rather weak one in Lot, the nephew of Abraham. Let’s not forget that Lot and his family were related to the one called the father of faith and the friend of the Most High.

Lot may have struggled to project his faith to the townspeople, and to his family. Still,  the fires from heaven fell upon the immoral scoffers of Sodom as Lot and his daughters and wife were pulled clear of the devastation.

Sure, the Genesis account does reveal Lot’s spirituality as something less than fervent. However, Peter writes of this man as a righteous one who was “vexed” over the wickedness that he saw around him (see 2 Peter 2:7-8). Lot’s flickering faith was alive enough so that he recognized heaven’s messengers when they came to visit the city and rescue him.

Peter understood better than most the trials of our faith. He faltered more than a few times. He denied the Lord, and even punctuated the last denial with a curse. This disciple was the perfect writer to speak of Lot under the terms of the finished work of Christ. He understood the faithfulness of the love of God and according to this love he spoke of Lot.

Jesus told His laborers just enough about the judgment to come. He told them things to embolden them and to comfort them.

Those who turn their backs on the Message shall face God. The Day of the Lord will come — it will arrive suddenly as an amazing interruption to a world that snoozes passively under the blanket of the wicked one.

The harvest is here and now. We are the laborers Jesus seeks to use in the fields. Maybe we don’t have much going for us on the surface. But we have Him. He loves us and we love Him. We choose with purpose to hear Him and let others see Him at work through us.

Psalm 37:4 gives us the secret: “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.”

Seek contentment. And the best way to find contentment is to fill our minds with the thoughts from God’s Word and our hearts with the love that the Holy Spirit gives.

Rejoice in the Lord, and again we say rejoice.