SINGLE SERMON SERIES
LOVING GOD
DR. JIM DIXON
MATTHEW 22:37
JULY 21, 1991
“You shall love the Lord your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. This is the first and the greatest commandment.” We couldn’t deal with a more important subject than this because the Bible says very clearly that those who do not love God are anathema and are destined to be cursed. Those who do love God will be blessed forever. God wants to ask each one of us this morning one question, “Do you love me? Do you love me with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and with all your strength? Do you love me?”
The Bible gives two tests by which love for God may be seen. The first test is this, if we love God, we will obey His commandments. “I the Lord your God, am a jealous God. I visit the iniquities of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but I show steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and who obey my commandments.” Love and obedience are linked in the Bible. The Apostle John says, “By this, we know we love the Father because we keep His commandments.” Our Lord Jesus Christ said, “If you love me, you will obey my commandments.” It is very clear that to love God is to obey God and to love Christ is to obey Christ.
If you’ve been in a boiler room, you know it’s not possible to see how much water the boiler contains. Most boilers have a glass tube gauge attached to them. As the water rests in the tube, so the water rests in the boiler. If the glass tube is half full, then the water in the boiler is half full. If the gauge is empty, then the boiler is empty. We have many things in life where gauges help us. In our automobiles we can tell by a gauge whether we have gas in the tank. The dipstick in the engine enables you to know whether or not you have oil in your car. We’re trying to get Heather to check her dipstick regularly. She often goes by the red-light method, too late. We need gauges to discover the truth and the reality of things. God has given a gauge to each of us with respect to understanding the depth of our love for him. It is the gauge of obedience. We know the love we have for him by the obedience we give to him. “If you love me, you’ll obey me.”
In the Korean War, American soldiers were stationed in Korea, Japan, and the Pacific Islands. When they left base on leave, there were many temptations. Most of the American soldiers didn’t go look for temptation, but sometimes temptation came looking for them. In every port, town, and village there were women who would gladly go to bed with an American soldier. Some of the soldiers went to bed with the women. Those American soldiers who invited women to stay with them were oftentimes called broken arrows. The men who did not sleep with the women and who were faithful to their wives back home were called straight arrows. Some of them actually carried miniature straight arrows on their person as a reminder.
When you marry you make a vow to your wife, or husband. You vow that you’ll be faithful to love them. I did a wedding in the sanctuary here yesterday, and it was really neat. You could see the bride and groom really loved each other with a very special love, and they loved the Lord. When they said their vows to each other, they had tears in their eyes. You could see they really meant what they were saying before God and before many witnesses. They vowed to be faithful to each other until death did them part. That’s the vow we make in marriage.
Now, I hope you understand if you’re a Christian, if you take the name of Christ and you say you believe in Him, there’s a sense in which you’re married to Him. The Bible says the church of Christ is the bride of Christ. The vow we make to him is a vow of obedience. Last Sunday, after the third service, we had baptisms by immersion over at the Downing House. We had forty men, women and children who were baptized. As Bob and I did the baptisms we asked everyone to be baptized two questions, “Who is your Lord and Savior? and “Do you promise to the best of your ability to be his disciple, to show forth his love and to obey his word?” They all said, “We promise.”
When you first embraced Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, you took him as Lord, and you said that you would strive for obedience. It doesn’t mean we obey perfectly because we don’t, but you strive for obedience. To love him is to obey him. We live in a scary world, a fallen nation and world where many Christians do not take obedience very seriously.
Perhaps you’ve heard of John Forney. John Forney was an American manufacturer of cheap jewelry. Around the year 1890, John Forney began to produce Forney rings. Forney rings were brass rings that were made to look exactly like gold rings, but of course, they were not genuine gold. They were brass. street peddlers marketed these Forney rings in cities and towns all over America. These rings became famous and pretty soon all cosmetic jewelry was called cheap jewelry. The jewelry was an imitation and not genuine. It was made to look like gold, but not gold. This kind of jewelry was called forney.
In American culture the word forney was given a broader scope referring to anything that was fraudulent and ingenuine. Etymologists tell us the English word phony is derived from forney. I think you would agree that there’s a lot of people in this country who claim to love Jesus Christ, but that love is a forney. Their love is not genuine. For each and every one of us, there’s a certain amount of forney in our love for Christ. We do not love him perfectly, and it’s reflected in our lack of obedience. We all have a certain amount of phoniness in our Christian walk. There are many people in the Christian community who practice what some have called selective obedience. They read the Bible and decide what they’re going to obey and ignore the rest. I like to call that being obedient when it is convenient. Don’t let that be true of you. Every command of God requires your perfect submission. And if you see any area of your life that’s out of his will, the charge to you as a Christian is clear, repent and turn back to him.
We live in a world where Christians ignore God’s word if they don’t like it. If they don’t like what God has said about premarital sex, they ignore it. If they don’t like what God said about tithing, they ignore it. If they don’t like what God has said to husbands and wives about their roles in marriage, they ignore it. Don’t let it be true of you. Jesus said, “Why do you call me Lord and not do what I tell you to do?” He says, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”
Each of us are in need of grace and mercy. We don’t want to cheapen His grace. Grace and mercy are offered to the repentant. As we repent, we receive his grace and mercy. Repentance requires a turning from what is wrong and striving for what is right in God’s sight. If you love him you are going to want to be conformed to his will. That is the first test. The second test of whether or not we truly love God is that we love people. “You shall love the Lord your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength. This is the first and the greatest commandment. And the second is like unto it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” These two are joined by love for God and love for people.
The Apostle John said, “Anyone who says I love God, but hates his brother is a liar. He doesn’t love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen this commandment we have from him. That he who loves God, ought to love his brother.” I think we all fail that test from time to time. It’s hard to love people. When Louis the ninth of France married Princess Margaret he gave her a ring with these engraved these words, “God, France, Margaret.” He often said, “I have no love outside of that ring.” He came to be called Saint Louis. The town of St. Louis derives its name from him. In a lot of ways, he was a godly man with an admirable reign. However, He was wrong in saying, “I have no love outside of that ring.” If you really love God, you love all people. You don’t just love your wife, and your country. We all have rings that we choose to put our love within, and we don’t love outside that ring. However, if we love God, we love all people. Red, yellow, black, white, the poor, the rich, those who dress well, those who don’t. It’s hard, isn’t it? At times our love for God isn’t enough, not deep enough and we don’t love people enough.
Yesterday I was outside of the house of a friend with many others and I got into a fight with him. I was a jerk. He said some things that hurt me and I said things back. Later he shared the source of his grievance with me. The last few years he and his wife had been through a lot of pain and he didn’t feel like I was there, caring and loving him. I realized I wasn’t there for him. I think the Lord would remind us that it’s only as you love people, that his power is released through you in ministry. And if we don’t love people, we’re never going to minister. It is not enough to say words, rather we need to love people with our actions.
Some of you may have heard of the story of William Booth. One night William could not sleep so he decided to take a walk. He went into the poor side of London under the cover of darkness. As he walked around he saw the impoverished, broken people not living just existing on the streets. It was raining that night and he saw the rain just beating down on those sleeping in the gutters. William Booth came home and said to his wife, “I’ve been to hell.” That experience changed his life and out of that Jesus Christ gave him a vision for the Salvation Army. The Salvation Army seeks to minister the love of Christ, to hurting people all over the world. God wants to change my life and your life. He wants to give us a vision for people. He says, “If you love me, you’ll love people.”
If we really love people and if we really love God we’re going to love people. It’s a choice we can make. The important thing for us to realize is we can choose to love. Wouldn’t it be frustrating if you couldn’t choose to love and if it was just a feeling either had or you didn’t? If you’re sitting here right now and you’re thinking, I don’t think I love God very much and I don’t think I love people very much, if it is just a feeling, you’d be frustrated because you can’t change your feelings. You might just think, what can I do? I don’t love him that much. I don’t love people that much. I guess that’s just the way I am. You would be frustrated and give up. The biblical injunction to love is the word agape is rooted in the will, not in the heart. It’s a choice you can make. You can actually choose to love God, and you can choose to obey him. And you can choose to love people, and you can choose to do the loving thing to people and for people. And that’s what God’s inviting us to do today, that we would be people who choose to love him, obey him, and love people for his kingdom’s sake.
You know how Jesus Christ blasted the Pharisees? Why did he do that? The Pharisees claimed to love God. They claimed to love God and they passed the test of obedience and yet Jesus Christ called them hypocrites from the Greek word hypokrites. And that word hypokrites literally means one who plays a part. And the Greek word hypokrites in the noun form referred to an actor. Originally it was not a negative word. A hypocrite was simply an actor. But as time went by, the word hypocrite began to get a broader scope, so that it referred to somebody who pretended to hold an opinion or pretended to have a feeling that they didn’t really have.
And that’s what Jesus said was true of the Pharisees. They were hypocrites, pretenders, didn’t really love God, and they didn’t love people. They wanted to exalt themselves over people. They wanted to prove themselves better than people. And even their obedience to the scriptures was not really rooted in the desire to honor God, but in self pride. And they didn’t care about people. They looked down on sinners, not realizing that they themselves were not without sin and Christ said, hypocrites. The charge to us is to make sure we’re not hypocrites. That if we would say we’re Christians, and we would say we believe in Christ as Lord and Savior and we love him, that we would choose to love people.
On August 4th, 1914, a British luxury liner called the Carmania left New York City. It was bound for Liverpool with 800 passengers. In the night the luxury liner was visited by a British cruiser who flashed a message of war to the Carmania. The ship was darkened and radio silenced the remainder of the trip to Liverpool. Great Britain had just entered World War I. On August 7th, this luxury liner was converted into a war ship and taken over by the British Navy. They put guns on board that were able to fire heavy artillery over 900 yards. One week later, the Carmania left Liverpool as a warship prepared to battle.
On September 2nd, the ship arrived in the West Indies, where it was given war supplies. On September 11th, it was given orders to seek out enemy vessels sailing in the mid-Atlantic, to the region of Trinidad Island. It was 9:30 AM on September 14th when the Carmania sighted Trinidad Island. At 11:04 AM they cited the first enemy vessel. They must have felt like they entered the Twilight Zone because the enemy vessel sighted was a ship that flew the British flag with Carmania written on the side that looked exactly like the Carmania. However, it wasn’t the Carmania because they were on it. The enemy vessel they faced was a German ship and a luxury liner called the Cap Trafalgar. However, the Germans disguised it as the British luxury liner, hoping that they could get close enough to British vessels to destroy them. The German officers on the Cap Trafalgar couldn’t have imagined that they’d run into the real Carmania.
At the end of the battle, the British sank the German ship. The truly amazing thing is that the British also disguised the Carmania to look like the Germany luxury liner, Cap Trafalgar. It was also disguised when it went into Liverpool that week, and it was transformed into a war vessel. Incredibly, these two ships disguised as each other met in the midst of the Atlantic. It’s a crazy world.
The Bible says there is a war on planet earth. The kingdom of Jesus Christ is at war with the kingdom of darkness. The Bible tells us that the nations of this earth and the kingdoms of this earth are under the sway of Satan. We have been called into battle as Christians. If we love Christ, and if we love people we are called into a battle where people are dying and under the oppression of sin. We’ve been called to set the people free and yet it’s hard to tell the players. Sometimes it’s hard to know who’s on which team, who really loves Christ and who is just feigning love for Christ. It’s hard to tell. If we really love Christ, we’re going to obey him and we’re going to love people. These are the tests by which we gauge our love for Christ: do we obey him and do we love people?
Yesterday my friend called me a hypocrite. I wanted to defend myself and fire back. If you feel hurt, you want to hurt back, and yet, the Lord would have us take an inward look and say, “Is there any truth to that?” I must say, I know in my heart I can do better to love God, love people, and obey. Maybe you’re sitting there and you feel just like me. You don’t love God as much as you would like to and you don’t love people like you’re called. You’re not obeying completely the word of God and you’re not striving for obedience. If that’s true of you, God would invite you with me today to make a renewed commitment.
We have many opportunities to choose to love people. We have a Sunday school with a lot of little people and not enough Sunday school teachers. I think in a church like this, we should have a waiting list for Sunday school teachers, where people are just lined up, waiting to teach Sunday school. People that are choosing to love by showing children the love of Christ and sharing with them the truth of the scriptures.
If you would choose to love, we invite you to call us this week and say, “I want to help. Sign me up to teach Sunday school. Train me, equip me and place me.” In your bulletin today, you will see announcements about Manna Ministries. Through Manna Ministries, we feed, clothe, and minister to hundreds of people every month; and yet, we don’t have enough money to meet all the needs. You can choose to love the poor and hurting through Manna Ministries as you give. We have a vision God set before us as a church that includes a new facility. The facility’s not our goal but rather a means to facilitate ministry to people that we might love. You can choose to support this vision and to love people through the Church of Christ. As we draw to a close, I sense God’s invitation to love him and to commit ourselves anew to him by expressing that commitment in the choices we make. Let’s close with a word of prayer.