All About Love

Well again, good morning. My name is René, another one of the pastors here at Twin Lakes Church, and isn't my wife awesome? Just imagine being married to her. It's the best. Well, before we talk about Jesus this morning, let's talk about golf, shall we? The 17 golfers are very excited about this.

So, um, Bobby Jones, a famous golfer born in 1902. So here's what a prodigy he was. He won his first tournament when he was six years old, I'm not kidding you. He went on to win the US Amateur five times, the US Open four times, and the British Open three times. In 1930, he became the only person ever to this date to win all four majors in one season—the grand slam of golf. In his career, he played 31 major tournaments, and he placed first or second in the majority of them. That's another feat nobody has ever done before.

Oh, by the way, all this was going on while he also got a degree in engineering at Georgia Tech, a degree in English lit at Harvard, and a law degree at Emory. He was so smart that during tournaments, he would bring along flashcards so he could study Latin and calculus during tournaments. The golf world has never seen anybody like him before, and then he did something unimaginable. He retired at age 28. That's right. Everything I just described he did before he turned 28 years old, and he retired to focus on his family and also on his law practice.

He never turned pro. You're saying, well, wait a minute, I thought you said he played these professional tournaments, the British Open, the US Open. That's right. He played professional tournaments as an amateur and never took one single dollar of prize money. In fact, he was against it. And yes, this was weird even 90 years ago. So weird that the famous golf pro Walter Hagen asked him once, "Bobby, why do you even play this game?" And here was his well-known answer: "I play because I love it." That's the only reason.

And then, of course, the follow-up was, "Come here, so good, the best golfer in the world, and you're just playing because you love it, not even for prize money?" He said, "Because if you love it, then that naturally helps improve everything else about your game. Start with love, and all the rest follows." Let me just say that again: start with love, and all the rest follows. Would you say that with me? Start with love, and all the rest follows.

In the Bible verse we look at today, somebody else said something similar about something way more important. Grab your message notes that look like this and seven verses. Jesus loved is our series leading up to Easter. What were Jesus Christ's favorite Bible verses? We're going to get a peek into the psyche, the mind, the heart of Jesus Christ by looking at these. I just loved preparing for this series.

But speaking of the Bible, what even is it all about anyway? You know, I run into many, many new people here. Already this weekend, I've run into three people who've walked in the doors and told me, "I have literally never been to a church before." And if that's you, man, there are so many people right now who are just checking out church. You are not the only one; you're welcome. But you might look at the Bible and go, "It's so thick, where do I even start? I mean, what's the big idea? What's the point of this?" Right? And I get it. It can be so daunting, so confusing. You got the Israelites and the Hittites and the Canaanites and the electrolytes and the cellulites and all of those people. So confusing.

So what is it all about? Well, as you heard, next weekend, we're going to help you with that with our Bible conference. But how would Jesus answer this question? Like, Jesus, give me like a social media length, 280-character summary. If I forgot everything else about the Bible, what is the one thing that you, Jesus, want to make sure I get? Jesus, can you say that in a sentence for me?

Well, believe it or not, somebody did ask him essentially that question in today's scripture. Here's the setup for this. This is great. Adrian started this series last weekend and did a great job. But in those first, the first verse that we talked about in this series, Jesus is giving a sermon, as you might recall from last weekend, up in his hometown of Nazareth. Nazareth was way up north in a rural farming area, and it was a tiny little village.

Well, for three years, Jesus's ministry has been picking up momentum, and now he is down in Jerusalem, in the most beautiful, the most important city of his nation. This is where the politics are headquartered, where the religion is headquartered, and he's down there. The religious authorities headquartered there are very jealous and afraid of him, and they want to silence this rural hick from up here in Nowheresville.

And so the Bible says they have this little meeting, and they decide, you know, this Rube may impress the simple folk, but let's embarrass him with our intellect. We're going to get a crowd together, and we're going to fire tough questions one after another at him, and he's going to be overwhelmed. We're going to discredit him in front of everybody. So that's their plan. They've got a list of questions to ask him that are going to stump him, and the crowds gather around, and they ask him all these tricks, and Jesus answers back with genius answers one after another.

And instead of discrediting him to the crowds, the crowds are now going, "Hey, this Jesus guy is smarter than those guys," and those guys are like, "Oh." And one of them goes, "I got this. I got a fail-safe question. It's guaranteed to start this big brouhaha, big argument, and people won't remember his clever answers because it's just going to devolve into this argument." Kind of like these questions that you could ask at a party or something, like who was the greatest Niner quarterback, Joe Montana or Steve Young? And oh, now there's a half-hour argument. Or the question that's tearing our nation apart right now—you know what I'm talking about—is pineapple an acceptable pizza topping? There are these questions that are guaranteed to cause arguments.

So this guy's got one up his sleeve. Here's what happens. Now one of the scribes had come up and heard the debate, noticing how well Jesus answered them. Remember, their plan is to silence Jesus in the view of the crowd. He asked him, "Which commandment is the most important of all?" And everyone turns and looks at Jesus because they know there are about 4,000 ways for Jesus to get this answer wrong.

Here's why. When he says, "What commandment is the most important?" he's not asking about the Ten Commandments, the commandments that Moses got on tablets of stone from Mount Sinai. He's not talking, "Jesus, which one of ten do you choose as like your favorite?" He's saying, "Which one of thousands of commands would you pick as the most important one?" Here's why. The religious leaders of that day had identified not just ten but six hundred and thirteen commandments in the Bible. And then to keep each one perfectly, they added all kinds of extra rules.

Like just take one of those six hundred and thirteen commands: "Keep the Sabbath holy, rest on the seventh day." So they added to this 39 subcommands, like exactly what work is prohibited on the Sabbath. And under those 39, there were 1,500 explanatory commands. Like for this command, the Sabbath, swatting a fly is forbidden on the Sabbath Saturday. Combing hair is forbidden. Carrying anything heavier than a fig is forbidden. Women cannot look in a mirror on the Sabbath lest they be tempted to pluck a hair because all of that would qualify as work on the Sabbath. And those are just four of 1,500 explanatory commands under one of the 39 subcommands under one of the six hundred and thirteen commandments. Somebody added them up and said that there were at least 4,192 total rules that this man is talking about.

So Jesus, which one is the most important? Pick one. How is Jesus going to answer this question? Because no matter what comes out of his mouth, an argument's going to erupt among all these rabbis. It's a diversion tactic, so everyone's waiting. What's he going to say? Jesus replied, "This is the most important." Everyone's leaning in now. "Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength." This answer is sheer genius because Jesus is quoting a verse. It was one of his favorite Bible verses, maybe his favorite: Deuteronomy 6:5.

And here's the setting for this verse. It comes from a time when Moses is very old. He's led the Israelites out of 400 years of slavery through the wilderness. They're right on the border of the promised land, and yet he knows he's not going to live to get into the promised land. He knows he's dying, and he knows he has one last speech left in him. And he really wants to remind them what God has done for them and for them to keep God's laws. And so here is how Moses begins his famous final speech: "Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength." This became so famous in Jewish history that it was the sort of the preamble to the Shema—that's how you pronounce this—that was the national prayer of the Jewish people that was prayed twice a day, once in the morning, once in the evening, and still prayed to this day. Every Jewish person would have known these words by heart. This is the beginning of that prayer.

But just like we saw last weekend, Jesus stops quoting this famous verse, this famous prayer, right in the middle because the rest of the prayer and the rest of the text originally in Deuteronomy start skimming into all sorts of minute details about the law, the religious law. Jesus skips over all of that and goes way over toward the end of the book of Leviticus, and he says, "And the second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself." Here he's quoting Leviticus 20:18, and then he says, "There is no other commandment greater than these." In fact, in the gospel of Matthew, he adds this line. He says, "All the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments." What Jesus was saying is this: this is what it's all about—love God, love people, and all the rest follows.

In fact, let's say this out loud together: love God, love people, all the rest follows. I'm going to ask you to repeat that again later in the message, so I want you to memorize this. Here we go: love God, love people, and all the rest is going to follow. And what he says here becomes so foundational. You could say the entire rest of the New Testament is just one long riff on this idea. Kind of like when people think of Christians, they need to be thinking, you know, I don't agree maybe with everything they do, but one thing's for sure: this is who they are. Those are people. You could say what you want about Christians, but these people, foundationally, they love. They love God, and they love people.

Now, do we always love people? No, we do not. We get distracted by religion, by politics, by culture wars, by our own sin, by our own ego, by the busyness of life. But Jesus, when Jesus was asked, "What is the foundational thing for us to know? Jesus, if I forget everything else about the Bible, what's the basic foundation that you do not want me to ever forget? What's it all about?" He was asked that question, and this is what Jesus said. This is what it's about. Say it again: love God, love people, all the rest follows.

This is so important that I'm going to take a week to look at each of these two verses in this series, seven verses Jesus loved. In the few minutes we have left, I'm going to look at this love God. Next weekend, we have a special guest, Dr. Amy O. Ewing, who is an author and professor. She'll be here for the Bible conference. This is a woman who has her PhD from Oxford. She's spoken at the White House, on Capitol Hill, at the UK Parliament, in 40 countries, at hundreds of universities. And she, as the capper to her career, is speaking in Aptos, California. So that's next weekend.

And then the following weekend, I'm going to look at this second verse Jesus quotes about what it means to love people. But this week, let's look at this command to love God, and this is very, very personal for me. I've told some of you from the time I was a teenager until I was a young pastor up at South Lake Tahoe, California, when I was about 30 years old. During that time period, about 15 years of my life, I really struggled with what's known as OCD—obsessive-compulsive disorder. And not like people say, "Oh, I'm so OCD." I mean like genuine OCD, and it was maddening. Like, you'll have an incredible compulsion to say switch the car radio on and off 50 times—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. If you lose track, you've got to start all over again. Or to touch the right and then the left side of your face like exactly 24 times to even yourself out. It sounds just absurd, but I can't describe how this drives you. Something tells you that if you don't do this ritual behavior, something really bad will happen.

It's a long story, but I was finally able to break the grip of my OCD. And if you struggle with this, professional help might be useful for you. But in some ways, it just transferred to my spiritual life. I call it spiritual OCD. The idea was that I had to be perfect in every way in order to please God, or something really bad would happen. Like I would decide that I was led to pray a certain number of minutes every day. I got to pray 24 minutes and 30 seconds today, and I'd set a timer, and I would do that exactly. Or I had to read a certain number of verses, and I would precisely—not one verse more, not one verse less. I would even pray over my clothes each morning to seek God's guidance on the precise shirt that I was to wear that day. "God, I just want to do your will about church today." And if I was not perfectly obeying God's leading as I felt it, I thought, "God's disappointed in me because I'm not getting it right." And obviously, that meant I was always feeling God was disappointed with me and my prayers.

I mean, hundreds of times a day, it was such a burden. It was basically a form of these two prayers: either "Lord, I just want to do your will. I just want to do your will. Show me your will." And I didn't mean like God's will for us to love God and love people. I meant like, "Show me your will about what pants to wear." And then I would say, "Like, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm so stupid because I don't think I got it right. Please forgive. I'm so sorry." So we either show me your will or I'm so sorry.

Now some of you are thinking, "Okay, our pastor is..." But my guess is some of you relate. But then one day, my whole life changed. I was teaching a sermon series on the book of Galatians in the Bible, and I read verses about God's love and grace—verses I had seen many times before—but for some reason that night, something happened. The scales fell from my eyes, and it's like they went off like dynamite in my head, and it felt like I finally understood them. It was like heavy chains just dropped off my shoulders, and I felt like I was full of helium, just lifted, soaring into the sky.

I told my wife, Lori, "It's like I've been seeing the world in black and white, and now I'm seeing it in color. I feel like I'm born again again." And for days afterward, I did not pray, "God, just show me your will about pants," and I did not pray, "I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm so stupid. I'm so sorry." But I was praying constantly. What I was praying over and over was, "I love you. I love you. Oh, I love you so much." I felt soaked in the love of God, and that experience and revelation really changed everything for me. It changed my ministry. It changed my mental health. It changed my marriage. I became much easier to live with. It changed everything.

And listen, my greatest hope in life—I mean, what drives me as a pastor ever since that day—is that somehow, through the people God privileges me to pastor, there would also be the same kind of freedom from the bondage of that kind of guilt and shame and legalism. Because most of you probably don't relate to the OCD part, but let's just make that a stand-in for any other kind of compulsion. In fact, let me ask you, do you often have a nagging sense that you are never doing enough for God? Like God is like secretly disgusted with you? Like when you imagine the voice of God, it's always a voice whispering to you, "That's just not good enough." You need to know what I discovered: God is not an angry slave driver. God is your loving father, and when you know that, then you start loving him back with the core of your being. And Jesus is saying everything else just kind of like trips, just sort of like dominoes out of that so naturally.

And in fact, let's look at the specifics of each line very quickly. Jesus says first, "Love God with all your heart." Now, in our culture, we think of the heart as the seat of our emotions. In the Hebrew understanding, the heart was the seat of your core self, your identity. Jesus is saying, "Make the love of God your core identity, that you are someone loved by God." I love this verse from Deuteronomy 33: "Let the beloved of the Lord rest secure in him, for he shields him all day long. The one the Lord loves rests between his shoulders." Now, what does that mean? Well, the word picture is of a small child being held by his or her loving father, resting between dad's shoulders, and that's you. You're not an employee of God; you're a beloved child.

In fact, say the sentence out loud with me: "I am beloved of God." Can you say that? "I am beloved of God." Say it with some conviction: "I am beloved of God." You know what? Let's try this. I want you to point to yourself. All right, go ahead, point to yourself and say it loud: "I am beloved of God." Now, some of you are like, "That feels really awkward." Like, I'm saying that, but I don't believe it. Like, that can't really be true of me. I get it. But look at what Scripture tells us, like in 1 John 3:1: "See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God." And that is what we are. That's what you are. The most important thing you can know is that God loves you, and the most important thing you can do is love him back. Everything else follows.

This is very emotional for me because this—because people are being set free right now from a complete counterfeit religious understanding that God somehow gauges you on whether or not you're perfect. You're his child; he loves you. So Jesus says you love him back with all your heart and with all your soul. Now, the Hebrew understanding of soul was something like our understanding of the word heart. This was the root of your emotions, your passion, your drive. So Jesus is saying make the love of God your core desire, your core desire, your passion. Like in this verse from Psalm 63, starting in verse 1: "You, God, are my God; earnestly I seek you; I thirst for you; my whole being longs for you, like I'm in a dry and parched land where there is no water." That's how much I long for you because your love is better than life.

To get back to my story, I remember after this revelation of God's love, I went for a stroll just in our neighborhood—not on the forest or the beach or something—and just about everything I saw seemed like it had a little post-it note on it from God saying, "I love you." My whole walk, I felt like I was floating, and I just kept looking at stuff going, "Wow. Thank you, God. Thank you for that. Thank you. Thank you. I love you, too." I was experiencing the love of God as this complete acceptance, this waterfall of unending love flowing lavishly from a God that transcended my understanding. And here's the thing: right now, today, God's love is reaching out to you, too, on every side.

When you drove here to church, he was reaching out to you in all of creation, in the spring showers and in those new blossoms on the cherry trees and in everything you love, in the air you breathe and the food you eat and the shelter you enjoy. All of those come from the hand of a loving God. And then you think about the fact that Jesus Christ sacrificed his life for us. Man, when you see God's love everywhere, then you love him back with all your heart and with all your soul. And then Jesus says, "And with all your mind." And here he's talking about your core focus—what you pay attention to, what you notice, what you see. Are your eyes open to seeing the love of God?

I love Ephesians 3, starting in verse 17, where Paul prays that the Ephesians, rooted and grounded in love, would have power to comprehend the length and width and height and depth of the love of Christ. Why? Why does he want them to comprehend it mentally? The goal of that is to experience this love that surpasses knowledge, that you may just be filled up to all the fullness of God. It's easy to forget that that's the goal of our faith is to know God's love.

I was having a meeting one time with a guy in my office, and he was describing to me about his disappointment with Christianity, and I was taking notes on him. He kept saying things like, "I tried Christianity, and it doesn't work. I don't know how to do it. It's too hard," and this sort of thing. And so when he was done speaking, I said, "You know, I want you to look at these notes I've been taking." I turned them around, and I said, "This is what you've been saying. What's the most common word here?" And he paused for a while and said, "Huh, it." And I said, "Maybe that's your trouble. Because Christianity isn't 'it.' It's a 'Him.' Let me ask you, are you distracted from Him by it? Are you distracted from Him by all the stuff that can possibly surround Christianity and distract you—the controversies, the debates—or are you focused on Jesus Christ?"

And then finally, Jesus says to love God with all your strength. It's interesting because this is the only piece of this verse that's an outward expression. Loving God with your heart, soul, mind—those are all internal. But my love for God shouldn't just be internal; it was meant to be displayed, expressed, lived out. And so is love for God really my core endeavor? Is all the rest of my life a living response to the love of God? When I love God this way, that's when I'm going to change.

You know, in college, I had a roommate who was one of the most crude people I have ever known. This was a guy—and you know we have these kinds of roommates in college. We are these kinds of people in college. Let's be honest. But this guy could not stop deliberately making disgusting bodily noises long after anybody thought it was funny just to amuse himself. It was like, "Dude, come on." He always wore clothes right out of his dirty laundry pile. I never saw him do laundry. He showered once a week, whether he needed to or not. He never wore deodorant because he told me—and this is a general quote—he was "avoiding the narrow definition of acceptable odors foisted upon us by society's pharmaceutical companies." You know, so he stunk, and it was like disgusting. I argued for him to change. I pleaded. I even mocked him to no effect.

Then almost overnight, he changed. I woke up one day; he was washing all his clothes. Then he was ironing all his clothes. Then he was speaking with eloquence, and he smelled fantastic. The reason? He fell in love. Suddenly he was delighted to change because of his new girlfriend. Do you see? Something like that happens once you understand God's love. Then you're going to change, not because somebody nagged you and not because of a list of rules. You become changed by love.

So Jesus, what's the most important rule? We love to talk about the rules. So what's the most important rule? And Jesus says, "How about we don't start with a rule? How about we start with love? Because once you get this, once you love God back with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength because he loved you first, then everything else follows." What was it again? Love God, love people, all the rest follows. Like Bobby Jones said, "You start with love, and that improves everything else." So let me give you a little suggestion for how to live your life this week.

This week, throughout each day, try praying this simple prayer: "I love you." And try not even adding anything else. Just stop with that: "I love you." Just for a week. Don't even add anything. Just, "I love you." You're sitting at your desk in the middle of the day: "I love you." You wake up in the middle of the night: "I love you." You're driving: "I love you." Don't close your eyes, though. Try this first, and the rest will follow.

Let's pray. God, we love you. Can you simply just say back to him, "I love you, too?" Lord, thank you for your unfailing love. And as we prepare our hearts for communion now, we come into your presence aware of our human frailties and sin, yet also overwhelmed in a good way by your love for us. May we be known as people who love God and love people, and may we grow grounded in that truth. In your name, we pray. Amen.