Favorite Verses of the Bible

CHAPTER & VERSE
FAVORITE VERSES OF THE BIBLE
LOVE IN ACTION SUNDAY
DR. JIM DIXON
MAY 5, 2011
ACTS 1:8

Garth Brooks is a country and western singer who has received many awards, many accolades. I know that many of you love his music. Garth Brooks, years ago, established a foundation called Touch’em All. Garth Brooks loves baseball and he uses baseball imagery in the establishment of this foundation. And of course the reference is to baseball, where in order to score you have to touch them all. In baseball, when somebody hits a home run, oftentimes you hear the announcers say, “That’s outta here, touch’em all!” And they have to touch first, second, third, and home base. In the Garth Brooks foundation, their effort is to help all the kids and that no kid would be left behind.

Bo Mitchell, who’s one of the founders of this church, was the head of the Garth Brooks foundation. Bo has told me many times the wonderful things that that ministry accomplishes in the lives of kids. Of course, the name of the Garth Brooks foundation has been changed, partly because in the foundation’s activities—they’ve moved beyond baseball to certain hockey events—but also because of the tragedy of pedophilia in our country. In a culture that has the tragedy of pedophilia, some people felt like a ministry to kids called Touch’em All might be questionable, and so they changed the name. But of course you can understand that as a church there’s a sense in which we do want to touch them all. With regard to the gospel and with regard to the nations of the earth, we seek to take the message of Jesus to Jerusalem, to all Judea, to Samaria, and to the uttermost parts of the world. We seek to touch them all, every tribe, tongue, people, and nation. We seek to touch them all.

Now you may have heard of Matt Holiday. Matt Holiday’s a baseball player. He plays for the Saint Lewis Cardinals and is an outstanding outfielder, a tremendous batter, and a wonderful Christian. Matt Holiday loves Jesus Christ and really seeks to serve Christ in his lifetime. Matt Holiday recently signed a multi-year contract for over $100 million (so he’s able to get by day by day). He used to play for the Colorado Rockies, and you remember just a few years ago in that critical final game of the season when Matt Holiday was sliding into home plate and he was ruled safe at home. And that launched us into the playoffs and a tremendous ride. And of course, the controversy was, did he really touch home? Did he really?

I’ve watched that video many, many times. I still don’t know whether Matt Holiday touched home base. I do know this: if you don’t touch home base, you don’t score. And I know that it is the will of God for us as a church that we not only touch all the bases, but that we touch home. So we seek to take the gospel to the earth, but we don’t want to forget Jerusalem. “You shall be My witnesses,” Jesus said, “when the power of the Holy Spirit has come upon you. You shall be My witnesses in Jerusalem, beginning in Jerusalem, and through all Judea and Samaria, to the uttermost parts of the earth.” So we want to make sure that we touch home. We want to make sure that we’re reaching our Jerusalem. And so as a staff here at the church this year, our ministry focus is that we would touch home. We want to make sure that we’re reaching our Jerusalem, that we’re reaching our community and south side Denver with the love and the message of Jesus Christ. In order to do this, we must do two things. And these are our two thoughts this morning.
First of all, we must witness with love. Christ makes this very clear. If we’re going to take His message to the nations, if we’re going to take His message to our Jerusalem, we must do it with love. Now you’ve all read Luke chapter 10. There we have the story of the Good Samaritan. And the Good Samaritan was told, if you look at the context of that parable, in the context of the subject of love. Jesus was talking to a lawyer. This lawyer was trained in the Jewish law, trained in the divine law, trained in Torah. And Jesus, in talking to the lawyer, was asked this question: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” That’s what the lawyer posed to Jesus.

What must I do to inherit “zoe aionion?” These Greek words refer not only to life in a quantitative sense—everlasting life, life beyond this life, life beyond death—but also in a qualitative sense. Zoe aionion refers to life blessed by God. So, what must I do to receive eternal life—life that never ends and life that is blessed by God? Jesus said to the lawyer, “Well, you’re the lawyer. You know the law. What do you think? How do you read it?” The lawyer then quoted the Shema from Deuteronomy chapter six. The word “shema” in Hebrew means “hear.” So in Deuteronomy chapter six we see the words, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one God, and 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 of course, the Jewish people bound those words to their forehead on phylacteries and to their heart—to their arm by their heart—and on phylacteries on their doorposts. “Hear, O Israel.” The Shema. “You shall love the Lord your God.” And then the lawyer quoted to Jesus Leviticus 19:18: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Jesus complimented the lawyer and said, “You have answered well.” And then the lawyer said, “But who is my neighbor? Who am I really supposed to love? What does it mean to love my neighbor?” And in response to that, Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan. And you know the story. Jesus tells us that a Jewish man was on the Jerusalem Jericho Road, which goes through the Judean wilderness and is very dangerous. And this man, as he was on that road, fell among robbers and thieves who stripped him and beat him and robbed him and left him half dead by the side of the road.

Now, Jesus tells us that two Jewish men came down the road and passed this wounded Jew. They were both religious. One was a priest and the other was a Levite, so these were deeply religious Jews. For some reason, both the priest and the Levite ignored the wounded Jew and just left him by the side of the road and continued on. We’re not told why. Many suggestions have been made. First of all, some have suggested that they went on by because they were in a hurry. They were bound for some ecclesiastical religious function and in too much of a hurry to stop and love somebody. Secondly, some have said, well, maybe they didn’t stop because they were worried about the Jewish purification laws about being contaminated by touching a dead body. They might’ve thought this wounded Jew was a dead Jewish man that had already died and they did not want to defile themselves by touching a dead body and have to go through Jewish purification rituals.

Thirdly, some have said, well, maybe they just didn’t care. Maybe they were religious but not very loving. Maybe they just didn’t care about people. And of course, that’s a possibility. It has also been suggested in a fourth way by those who have perhaps a particularly jaundiced view of the priests and the Levites that maybe they didn’t stop because they saw that this wounded man had already been robbed.

In event any event, we know that Jesus tells us there came on that road a Samaritan. He becomes, as Jesus tells the story, the hero of the story. He sees the wounded Jew and he stops and he ministers to him and anoints him with oil. He bandages him up; he lifts him onto his beast. He takes him to an inn. He spends his money to pay for the care of this man until this man has recovered. He’s the hero of the story.

Now, I promise you, that lawyer and the audience of Jews had to be stunned at this point, absolutely in shock, because the Jewish people hated Samaritans. They called them “Samaritan dogs.” We have it in the literature. They called them half breeds. They hated them. For a variety of reasons, they considered them racially polluted. Of course, this goes back to 722 BC. The Samaritans claimed descent from the Northern Tribes of Manasseh and Ephraim. In 722, the Assyrians under the leadership of Shalmaneser V came and they conquered the Samaritans and they exported many of the Samaritans to Assyria. Then they imported many of their own people, Assyrians. So the Samaritans that remained in Samaria were now in the same neighborhood with imported Assyrians, and they began to intermarry and produce a mixed race.

Now, we have today records from Assyria. We actually have records from Assyrian archives in the time of Shalmaneser V and also the time of Sargon II. We can look at these records and we know that they not only in 722 and in the years following imported Assyrians to Samaria, but they also imported other people groups that they had conquered and just replanted them there. So the Samaritan people that developed in the time of Christ were of many races. The Jews hated them, as their blood had been corrupted in their sights, and called them Samaritan dogs.

And of course, they also hated them because they were of a different religion. These Samaritans had taken the Torah, they had taken the Jewish faith, and they had changed it. They had, in the view of the Jews, corrupted it. So they hated them because they were of a different race and they were of a different religion. So Jesus tells this story, and the audience consists of nothing but Jewish people. And they had to be stunned, because Jesus was saying, here’s what it means to love. It means to love somebody, to love anyone, who is hurting. It means to love and help anyone who’s in need. And it means to love them regardless of their religion. It means to love them regardless of their race.

Now, that is a radical message, one not easily received. I think as evangelical Christians we’ve not done such a good job. As the years have gone by, as evangelical Christians we’ve done a better job of loving people regardless of race. Red, yellow, black and white, all are precious in His sight. But I think that as evangelical Christians, we’ve not done a very good job of loving people regardless of their religion, because our lives have been touched by Christ and we long to share the truth of Christ. It’s been hard for us, I think, at times, as evangelicals to learn what it means to love people of other religions. But this call is upon us. And as He sends us forth into the world with the gospel, He sends us forth with the expectation that we’ll love all who are hurting, that we’ll reach out to all who are in pain, and that we will love people regardless of their race and their religion.

The reason we love is because He first loved us. 1 John chapter four says, “We love because He first loved us. And this is love, not that we love God but that He loved us and gave His Son to be the expiation, the atonement, for our sins.” This is love, that He laid down His life for us. So we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. We ought to love one another.

So we have this call in scripture that we love because He first loved us. Have you been touched by the love of Jesus Christ? Have you felt any of that love? Have you felt any of the depths of it? Have you felt the mercy and the grace of it?

A few weeks ago was Palm Sunday, and we talked a little bit about how when Jesus came into Jerusalem that Palm Sunday He came for love. He came for the sake of love, for the cause of love. Then the crowds, as Jesus came down the Mount of Olives towards the Kidron Valley and the Golden Gate, were filled with hate, longing to throw off the shackles of Rome and Roman oppression. And Jesus came for love. And of course, that week, that holy week, that Easter week, He gathered the disciples in the upper room on Passover Thursday night, oftentimes called Maundy Thursday. On that night He girded Himself with a towel and began to wash His disciples’ feet. He said, “You call Me master and Lord, and you are right, for so I am. And if I, then, your master and Lord, have washed your feet, how much more ought you to wash one another’s feet? I’ve given you an example that you should follow in my steps.” He was teaching them to love.

That night He gave them the new commandment, the new “mandatum,” that you shall, “love one another, even as I have loved you.” And then He instituted the Lord’s Supper. “My body broken, My blood shed.” The bread and the cup. It was all about love. The next day He went to the cross and it was all about love, dying for the sin of the world and substitutionary atonement in my place for my sin and your place for your sin. It’s all about love. And of course, death could not hold Him and he rose from the dead in power and glory. It was all about love, because He hates death. He hates the way death has impacted the world. He hates tears and the grief and the sorrow that comes when loved ones die. And so He came to conquer not only sin but death, and He rose for love’s sake. He rose and He appeared to the disciples in the upper room and He said, “As the Father has sent Me, even so now I send you.” So he sends us now into the world in love. He ascended into heaven, where He intercedes for us. It’s all about love. He’ll come again for His church, His bride, and it’s all about love.

We love now because He first loved us. So today, on this Love in Action Sunday, we head out, hopefully with a little bit of the love of Christ, or maybe a lot. And we’re going into the community and it’s an opportunity to show them that the church of Jesus Christ cares. We really love people and we like people. And this is a chance for people to see a little bit of the love of Christ in us. It might change, for some people, their whole image of Christians, their whole image of Cherry Hill’s Community Church, or maybe their image of Jesus Christ Himself. As we go forth today in love in action, of course, we not only go in love. We go in truth. This is always true, and this is what makes the call of Christ so hard. If we only went in love, everybody would like that. But we also go in truth. And Jesus said, “I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves.” Jesus promised, “You’ll be hated by all nations for My name’s sake. You will be dragged before governors and kings.” And He said that not because we would go into the world in compassion, which indeed we’re called to do, but because we would go into the world with truth.

In this world of post modernity, in this world of theological and moral relativism, sometimes a message of truth is not well received, even if we go in love. But remember the truth is Jesus. Jesus said, “Ego eimi hei aletheia.” “I am the truth.” Jesus said, “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, that I might bear witness to the truth. All who are of the truth hear my voice and follow Me. The Bible says the Word became flesh dwelled among us, full of grace and truth, and we beheld His glory.

So we take Jesus to Jerusalem, to our Jerusalem, to all Judea, to Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. We do this in obedience to His command. It will bring, at times, persecution. Have you ever traveled to Jerusalem? Have you ever looked down on the Holy City? A few years ago, we took 200 of you on six buses to Jerusalem. And we looked down from the Mount of Olives and across the Kidron Valley to the Holy City. And it is majestic. But the thought occurs, as you look down on the city of Jerusalem, where are the Christians? I mean, Jesus said, “You shall be My witnesses, beginning in Jerusalem. But where are the Christians? Is it a Christian city? And what went wrong?

Of course, Christians today in Israel are very persecuted. The nation of Israel is a democracy, but some people are more free than others under the laws of the Knesset and under Jewish law. And of course, Jewish people by faith are free to share their faith. But Christians are not. Christians are allowed to worship, but they’re not free to share their faith and they can be prosecuted if they violate that. And of course, Christians who are Palestinians in Israel are also oftentimes persecuted by other Palestinians who are Muslim because Christians are in the minority. And oftentimes today they are driven out of their jobs. They’re denied social status, sometimes even denied marriage. So many Christians in Israel today are between a rock and a hard place, and they’re persecuted from both sides by the Jewish government and to some extent by Muslim Palestinians.

So Christians are leaving Israel in mass. It is simply a fact. The numbers of Christians in Israel are just shrinking day by day, week by week, month by month, as Christians go to other nations of the world. And of course, you can look at Jerusalem even in the first century and the second century and the third century, and something went wrong. And what went wrong? Part of it’s persecution. I mean, from the very beginning, Christians were persecuted. You might think, wait a minute, doesn’t Christianity do great in times and in places where Christians are persecuted? Not necessarily. You know how many Christian churches are in Saudi Arabia today? Zero. You know how many Christians are in North Korea today? Perhaps zero, because of the incredible persecution of Christians in North Korea. You can travel to Northern Sumatra in Indonesia to the region of Banda Aceh, amongst the Acehnese people, and you won’t find a Christian. They slaughtered them on the beaches, and their blood ran into the ocean. Persecution does not necessarily lead to the growth of the church.

It’s true that in China, in the midst of decades of communist persecution, there’s an underground church that has thrived and persecution has diminished in China. But of course, persecution doesn’t necessarily cause the church to prosper. Many times it eradicates the faith. What happened in Jerusalem is persecution. And in that first century, many of the Christians were persecuted by Jews. That’s kind of an irony, because so many Jews have been persecuted tragically throughout history, from the Spanish Inquisition to the Holocaust of Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler, with the gassing and incineration of 6 million Jews.

But in the first century, there was this persecution of Christians by Jews in Jerusalem. And that’s why in the Book of Acts you read about the Apostle Paul who, prior to his conversion, was charged by the Sanhedrin, the highest Jewish council, to apprehend and incarcerate Christians. And that’s why Paul went up to Damascus, to bind Christians in chains and to drag them to Jerusalem for trial, for flogging, for scourging, for incarceration, and sometimes for execution. And this was sanctioned, and indeed, legislated, by the Jewish leaders. And of course, both Jews and Christians were persecuted then by the Romans—the Jews because they brought the truth of God and the law and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the Torah. For this, they were often persecuted. And of course, as Christians, we brought the fullness of God in Christ, the Messiah, and so Jews and Christians then were persecuted together.

So in 70 AD in the city of Jerusalem, you had the Roman legions under Titus come. One legion, the 10th Legion, came from Jericho right into the west of Jerusalem, down the Mount of Olives. Then the 12th Legion came from the sea, from Caesarea Maritima, and also approached Jerusalem from the west. From the north there came the fifth and the 15th legions. And each legion had 60 centurions, and each centurion each centurion had 100 soldiers, a total of 6,000 soldiers in each legion. Four legions in 70 AD, 24,000 Roman soldiers, came against the Jews and Christians in Jerusalem and they slaughtered them. The Christians fled to Pella, across the Jordan River, in what is now the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The Jews made their last stand at Masada. You know the story. It was butchery. They destroyed the temple mount and took the temple to the ground. Christians and Jews fled in persecution.

The real problem was in 135. By 135 AD, many of the Christians and Jews had come back to Jerusalem. But then Hadrian, the Roman emperor, came. He saw the Christians and the Jews and did not like them. He did not like their attitude. He did not like their religion. He felt like they could be insurrectionists. And so he sent Julius Severus, and in 135 AD Julius Severus came to Rome with vast Roman legions. In this time, they destroyed the whole city of Jerusalem, tore it to the ground, rebuilt it, and renamed it. They called it Aelia Capitolina. Did you know that? Did you know that the Romans renamed Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina? And again, the Christians fled across the Jordan.

The Jews fled to many nations. The Great Commission was thwarted. Of course, in the time of Constantine the Great, in 312 AD, you have the emperor of Rome at least nominally embracing Christ and instituting Christianity. You see Christianity becoming the official state religion. You see it implemented top-down. That’s in the fourth century in Jerusalem. And so you see holy places begin to be built in Jerusalem. The city of Jerusalem become kind of a Christian city. But it wasn’t witnessing in love or truth. It was top-down legislative Christianity. I’m sure there were episodes of love and truth. And of course that Christianity didn’t last long in Jerusalem, because in the seventh century there came Muhammed and there came the rise of Islam. And it was always a militant movement. Christian cities and holy places were conquered. Jerusalem was conquered.

So you can look at Jerusalem today and say, what happened? You can look at Acts 1:8, “You shall be My witnesses in Jerusalem,” beginning in Jerusalem. What happened? Persecution. And I don’t know whether you can say we’re being persecuted today. Certainly in many parts of the world Christians are. In the Muslim nations, many Christians are tragically persecuted, and some of them are incarcerated and some of them are executed. Many of them are banished. And of course, this is happening in some of the nations of the former Soviet Union. There’s much persecution of Christians around the world documented by Freedom House and Amnesty International and many other organizations.

Here in America, we are persecuted more subtly. But you look at it in our nation, you look at what might be called the citadels of power in our culture, and I would identify citadels of power as the media, academia, Hollywood, and the entertainment industry. And I’m not demonizing these arenas. I’m not in any sense saying that they are intrinsically evil. They are not. There are many wonderful people in the media, many wonderful people in academia, and many wonderful people in Hollywood and the arts and the entertainments. But there are also many within those arenas who really have hostility towards the claims of Jesus Christ and the authority of holy scripture, so attacks are constantly coming. We send our kids away to college and many of them lose their faith. It’s hard today. There is a kind of persecution that exists.

When we sought to move Colorado Christian University to Highlands Ranch, the opposition was incredible. Many of the accusations that circulated were simply wrong. I’m privileged to serve on the board at Colorado Christian University, and Bill Armstrong is a member of our church and he’s a wonderful president. We felt like, why bother to defend ourselves? We’d rather go somewhere where we’re wanted. But there was such hostility. And you could tell that many people, when we met with the Highlands Ranch Community Association, really just had hostility against Christianity.

And you wonder, did we misbehave? I think so many people out there are walking around hating Christians because some Christian did them wrong. So we want to represent the truth. We know we’re going to be persecuted, but we want to do it in love.

I want to close with a little story about dogs. I do this because this week is National Dog Bite Prevention Week in the United States of America. I don’t know who determines these things, but this is National Dog Bite Prevention Week here in the United States of America. Apparently it’s a real problem. Last year there were 4,669,000 dog bites. That’s pretty significant. The United States Postal Service tells us that just last year they had 5,700 postal workers receive dog bites. So there’s a problem.

Now, I don’t know how many of you have dogs. But Barb and I, in our almost 40 years of marriage, have had more than 20 dogs. But you understand, we had toy poodles and they had two litters, and it doesn’t take you long to get to 20 dogs. We’ve handed them out to missionaries and others of you, and you’ve been very loving and gracious and merciful to take our dogs.

Now the problem for me is I don’t even like dogs. I don’t even like dogs, but we did some of it for the kids and I did some of it for Barb. But I have grown to like a couple of our dogs. And so we have a Yorkie Terrier now, and I really like her. I’ve grown to kinda love her. That’s our second Yorkie Terrier. The first one was a biter. The first one we rescued at Daniels Park. She had been abandoned, and she somehow survived the night in the midst of the wildlife. She just looked frantic when we picked her up.

So we rescued her, but she had issues. We loved her and she loved us, but she attacked everybody else. So it didn’t matter. She attacked every dog she saw. It didn’t matter if it was a Great Dane, she would just go for it. And people would look at her and think, oh, you’re so cute. And she’d wanna take their fingers off. She just had issues. She died while getting her teeth cleaned. We can all sympathize with that. But Barb and I decided we really loved her, and we got another Yorkie Terrier.

This Yorkie we have loves everybody and everything. She just assumes everybody’s her friend. And it’s a wonderful, wonderful little dog. But, you know, some people like dogs and some people don’t. I, for 30 years, was a jogger and I changed my route because of Dobermanns running loose on the Highlands Canal. I was attacked by a Great Dane and by a German Shepherd, and the owners always say the same thing. “Oh, , our dog just loves to run free. We know there’s a leash law. She’s just wanting to be playful. She likes to chew on bones.” She has to go through some flesh to get there. So, I know some people love dogs. Some people don’t love dogs. There’s a whole bunch of people out there who just love dogs and they’re man’s best friend. After all, “dog” is “god” spelled backwards. So we all love dogs.

Then there are other people who just kind of think these are dirty, filthy, little creatures. I don’t want them in my house. I don’t want them licking me. There are different views of dogs. But sometimes the attitudes, the way people feel about dogs, has to do with the experiences they’ve had and the way they feel about certain breeds of dogs. How do you feel about a German Shepherd? How do you feel about a Dobermann Pinscher? How do you feel about a Great Dane? How do you feel about a Yorkie Terrier? It might have a little bit to do with what you’ve experienced through the years.

It’s that way with Christians. The world looks at Christians (and I don’t mean to trivialize this, because there’s a battle going on for the souls of men, women and children, the world over) and some people like Christians and some people don’t. And then they look at certain breeds of Christians, certain types of Christians, such as evangelical Christians. How do they feel? Have they ever been bitten by an evangelical? They look at the Christian world, they look at the evangelical world, and they’re forming opinions. So as we head out today, let’s remember that we represent Jesus Christ. He loves everybody. That’s why He died for us. That’s why He came into the world. And He has called us to take His love to the nations and to our Jerusalem, and to take it with truth. Even though we may be persecuted, this call is upon us. But let’s make sure we behave well and we show people we really like and love them. So we go forth and we pray that God will anoint us by His Holy Spirit and use us for His kingdom’s sake. Let’s close with a word of prayer.