A. I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving, and that each of us will strive to be thankful people all the time, not just on Thanksgiving Day.
B. As you know, our lives are fraught with many questions, and many answers.
1. Some of the questions and answers are silly and frivolous, others are profound and essential.
C. Here are some questions and answers on the silly side:
1. Someone asked, “Why are there so many Smiths in the phone book?” The friend answered: “Because they all have phones.”
2. Question: What do you call a boomerang that doesn’t work? Answer: A stick.
3. Question: What do you call four bull fighters in quicksand? Answer: Quatro sinko.
4. Question: What kind of coffee was served on the Titanic? Answer: Sanka.
5. Question: What lies at the bottom of the ocean and twitches? Answer: A nervous wreck.
D. As we go through life, we come to realize that both the questions and the answers are important.
1. I heard about a former student who visited his old school, 20 years after his graduation, and met an old Science professor of his.
2. The professor happened to be grading exam papers, and the student was surprised to notice that the questions were exactly the same as they were two decades ago.
3. He asked the professor about the possibility of the leakage of the exam paper such that the students would know the questions in advance.
4. The professor smiled wryly and answered, “Don’t worry about that, although the questions are the same, I change the answers every year.”
E. The good news I have for us today is that although the questions may change from year to year, and generation to generation, the answer remains the same.
1. The answer to so many of the questions that we have in our Christian lives is LOVE.
2. Love is the answer, but sometimes we make things far too complex.
F. There is a story told of a tourist who stopped at an old service station out in the country.
1. Sitting in the sun outside the story was an old man holding a piece of rope.
2. The tourist asked, “Excuse me, sir, what’s the rope for?”
3. The old man replied, “It’s a weather gauge.”
4. Puzzled the tourist asked, “How can a simple piece of rope tell the weather?”
5. “Simple, sonny,” said the old man, “When it swings back and forth, it means the wind is blowing, and when it’s wet it means it’s raining.”
G. See, some things really are simpler than we sometimes make them.
1. During the time of Jesus, the teachers of the Law of Moses had identified a total of 613 commandments in the Old Testament covenant.
2. They concluded that 248 of them were positive commands to be obeying, and 365 of them were prohibitions to be avoiding.
3. One of the favorite pastimes of the Jewish religious leaders was debating among themselves about the commands trying to discern which were the most important ones, or even the most important one.
H. In Mark 12:28 and following, we find a teacher of the Law trying to pull Jesus into this controversy by asking him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”
1. “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”
2. “Well said, teacher,” the man replied. “You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”
3. When Jesus saw that we had answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”
I. Jesus’ answer to the question began with what the Hebrews called the Shema.
1. Shema is the Hebrew word for “hear,” the first word of the passage Jesus quoted.
2. The Shema is found in Deuteronomy 6, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (Deuteronomy 6:4-5).
3. Every pious Jew started and ended his day by saying the Shema.
4. Since the Shema was so highly revered by the Jews, the first part of Jesus’ answer probably didn’t surprise many people.
5. But what Jesus added was astounding. He added the phrase, “Love your neighbor as yourself” which comes from Leviticus 19:18.
6. Why did Jesus give two answers when he was asked for the most important one?
7. The reason, I believe, is that there is such a connection between the two that they are inseparable.
8. It is only in showing love for others that we show our love for God.
9. If we can understand that connection, we will be at the very heart of the ethic that God desires for his people.
J. Jesus’ answer has three clear implications.
1. The beginning point is not our love for God, but God’s love for us.
a. Scripture never starts with our response to God, but with God’s invitation to us.
b. Notice that the Shema starts with “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.”
c. God should be loved because he made a covenant of love with his people.
d. He chose us when we did not deserve to be chosen.
e. The only way to explain God’s choosing is grace.
f. God is our God because he loves us, chose us, and forgave us.
2. A second implication is that we respond to God’s love with devotion.
a. Devotion means to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.
b. It means to be completely, totally, sacrificially devoted to God.
c. That’s what happens when you love someone - you delight to serve them and please them.
d. I love to watch a young couple. It is so sweet to see how they are trying to please each other and act their best.
e. But that’s how we should be acting whether we are celebrating our 25th or 50th anniversary.
f. There is no way to explain God’s love for us, because there is nothing about us that merits such incredible love.
g. So, God’s love stems from his grace, but our love for God stems from our gratitude.
3. The third implication is that our gratitude is expressed in love for others.
a. To love God is to make whatever matters to God matter to us.
b. And what matters to God? People do.
c. Notice how John summarizes these principles in two verses: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” (1 Jn 4:10-11)
d. Did you notice the curve John threw? We expect him to say, “Since God so loved us, we ought to love God.” Right?
e. But he did not say that, he said, “Since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.”
f. It is in loving one another that we express our love for God.
K. But loving others is easier said than done, right?
1. As the Peanuts character Snoopy says, “I love mankind; it’s the people I can’t stand.”
2. A little girl wrote to God and said, “Dear God, I bet it’s very hard for you to love everybody in the whole world. There are only four people in my family and I can never do it.”
3. Of course, when things are going smoothly; when relationships maintain an acceptable balance of give and take, then we can be as loving as the next guy or gal.
4. But what happens when a relationship becomes more give than take?
a. What happens when your neighbor keeps creating problems and has no boundaries?
b. What happens when your mate is continually insensitive?
c. Or your co-worker is trying to work against you?
5. My point is this: If we try to love our neighbors as ourselves by ourselves, we won’t have the desire or the ability to live by that standard.
a. For the fact is, most people don’t deserve that kind of love, and we are incapable of loving like that.
b. The only way we are going to be able consistently to live a life of loving others as ourselves is to be motivated to do so by God’s incredible love for us and to be divinely enabled to love like God loves.
6. That’s why we must begin with our relationship with God, then address our relationship with others.
7. I will usually put you last, until I learn to put God first.
8. These are not complicated concepts to grasp, but they are transformational in our lives.
L. And so, Love is the Answer.
1. How wonderful to know that love is the basic thing that God requires from each of us.
2. Look again at our Scripture reading for today from Romans 13, “Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for he who loves his fellowman has fulfilled the law. The commandments, ‘Do not commit adultery,’ ‘Do not murder,’ ‘Do not steal,’ ‘Do not covet,’ and whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this one rule: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no harm to its neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.” (Romans 13:8-10)
3. What do you think when you see someone to whom you owe money?
a. On the one hand, you might think that you need to avoid that person.
b. But on the other hand, when you see them you are reminded of the fact that you are in debt to them.
4. What I want to encourage us to be thinking is that we have a debt of love that we owe others.
5. It is a debt that will never be repaid.
6. Our highest obligation to everyone will always be our obligation to love them.
7. But the good news about all of this is when we love people as God wants us to love people, then we have fulfilled the law.
8. Every command of God really can be boiled down to this one – “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
9. If we love our neighbor as ourselves, then we will do no harm to him or to her. We will not covet their possessions, nor steal their goods, nor kill them, nor lie about them, nor anything else that might hurt them.
10. That’s why love is the answer.
M. I’m deeply burdened and horrified at how we sometimes fail to love each other.
1. My heart breaks when I see the pain that some family members inflict upon each other – the games people play, the horrible things that are said and done – I know this grieves God.
a. These kinds of things should never happen in Christian families.
2. My heart also breaks when I see how we sometimes fail to love each other in the church.
a. We can be so insensitive and judgmental.
b. We can sometimes be so selfish, and hurtful in our words and behaviors.
c. And none of this should happen in the family of God. Amen.
N. I know that sometimes we feel like the actor who was playing the part of Christ in a Passion Play I heard about.
1. In one performance, as he carried the cross up the hill, someone in the audience began heckling, shouting insults at him.
2. Finally, when the actor had taken all of it he could take, he threw down the cross, walked over to the heckler, right in the middle of the show, and punched him out.
3. After the play was over, the director told him, “I know that man was a pest, but I can’t condone what you did. Besides, you’re playing the part of Jesus, and Jesus never retaliated. So don’t do anything like that again.”
4. The actor promised he wouldn’t.
5. But the next day the heckler was back and was worse than before.
6. The actor again lost control and punched him out again.
7. The director said, “That’s it. I have to fire you. We just can’t have you behaving this way while playing the part of Jesus.”
8. The actor begged, “Please give me one more chance. I really need this job, and I can handle it if it happens again.”
9. So the director decided to give him another chance.
10. The next day he was carrying the cross again and sure enough, the heckler was there again.
11. You could tell that the actor was really trying to control himself, but it was about to get the best of him. He was clinching his fists and grinding his teeth.
12. Finally, he looked at the heckler and said, “Hey buddy, I’ll meet you out back after the resurrection!”
O. You know, sometimes it is hard for those who profess to be Christians to behave like Christians should.
1. We try to carry our crosses, but if someone crosses us, we lose our composure and then behave in much the same way the rest of the world behaves.
2. I know that some of our problems in loving others, whether they be in our homes or in the church, comes from the fact that we are people who are wounded, unhealthy, and immature, and we don’t always know how to do differently.
3. But the good news is that God can do a marvelous work in our lives to bring the healing and health that we need.
4. And then God can teach us and enable us to love as He loves.
5. Jesus said, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (Jn. 13:34-35)
6. Did you notice that Jesus calls it a command, not a suggestion?
7. And as I’ve said before, what God commands, God enables.
P. God will put His love in our hearts through the Holy Spirit. Romans 5:5 says, “And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.” And the Holy Spirit can produce in us the fruit of the Spirit, which includes love.
1. But we have to repent and believe that God can make that kind of difference in our lives.
2. We have to want to be what God wants us to be, and then we have to make the effort to obey and look to God for strength.
3. When we let God do His work in our lives, then we will be enabled to love with the kind of love that Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 13, “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” (1 Cor. 13:4-7)
4. Isn’t that how you want to love the people in your family?
5. Isn’t that how you want to love the people in our church family, and in your school, workplace, and neighborhood?
6. God can help us to love like that!
7. But that has to be our conscious goal and constant prayer.
O. This week as I was studying for this lesson, I discovered a website of a lady named Catherina Rodrigues.
1. I don’t know much about her, but she says on her website that she is a spiritual teacher and life coach.
2. The thing I found intriguing about her is that she has started a campaign called “Think Love.”
3. She says, “I am committed in my life to being a beacon of Light that radiates and extends the rays of Love. I have been guided to create global awareness around the universal power of UNCONDITIONAL love and the healing energy love creates. The vision is to bring about a shift in global consciousness by having people from all over the world “THINK LOVE” synchronistically and enable those thoughts to reverberate around the globe. The physical manifestation of this resounding consciousness is for people to wear a T-shirt with “THINK LOVE” written on it. A simple but profoundly symbolic act of announcing your individual intention to “THINK LOVE” holds this intention and carries the energy further than one can ever imagine.”
4. Now certainly it all sounds a little “New Age-y” and does have a bit of a financial motivation – you can purchase tee-shirts and hats from her for $20 each and they come in assorted styles and colors.
P. Although the basis of the love she is talking about may be a little off, and some of her financial motivation may be a little self-serving, her simple message is right on.
1. We need to “Think Love” or more importantly, “Act Love.” Maybe that’s the tee shirt we need.
2. Love is the Answer.
3. Not some kind of “touchy feely,” humanistic love, but real, divine, practical, sacrificial love.
Q. I’m praying that every single one of us today will decide that we are going to go home and put this into practice.
1. We are going to start with those who live in our home – our spouse, and our children.
2. Then we are going to look at how to love our extended family, friends, co-workers, neighbors, and even strangers and enemies.
3. What God commands and desires is simple – Love God and Love your neighbor, but that doesn’t make it easy. Are you ready to live a life of love? Love is the Answer.
