3.2.2002amlbc
Loving God
Mark12:29-31, Deut 6:4-9
Intro
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”
Familiar words? Hopefully!
Hear them again – “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”
For those of us who have been around the church for a while I’m guessing we will have heard those words many times.
But what do they mean? – to love God? If I asked you now if you love God – what would you say? How do you gauge something like that?
What does love for God look like – feel like – how does it show itself? What does it look like if we don’t love God? Why do we sometimes find it hard to love God?
You would think that we should we able to answer those questions fairly easily – but I’m not sure that that’s the case.
When Jesus spoke those words he had been asked by a Pharisee what the most important commandment was – Jesus says ‘its to love God with everything in you’ – and the second is like it – ‘to love your neighbour as yourself.’ The Pharisee says well done Rabbi – gives him a pat on the back!
This morning I want us to think for a while about what it means to love God – what Jesus called the most important commandment, then next week we’ll look at the second half of that command – to love one another and then the following week at LBC together we’ll be looking at another loving the world like God does. We’ll look at the other command Jesus left us with to go and make disciples of all nations and how that works out for us here at LBC.
Loving God, loving one another and loving the world. It’s a short description of what God wants his church to do and what he hopes for us as individuals. That we will love him, that we will love another and that we will love the people who don’t know him.
Our vision says we “personally help unchurched people become passionate followers of Jesus Christ.” I’m guessing that its fair to think that passionate followers will be serious God lovers.
So – Do you love God?…
Is that a more challenging question than it first appears? It has been for me over the last few months.
I’ve known for the last three months or so what I was going to be speaking on today and for the next two weeks which has given time to reflect on it – and quite honestly it has been a disturbing question for me. Do I love God?
I hope today to ask you some of the same difficult questions that I feel God has been asking me over the last month or so. Questions that have disturbed me – questions that have shown up my blind spots and failures, but questions that as I seek to answer them and as we seek to answer them, will I believe light the path to a newer, freer, richer more authentic relationship with God.
The Eating thing
Let me share with you a fairly personal issue that I’m working through that has caused me to ask this question about loving God.
Last year – in fact for a number of years now I have been aware that I have been struggling with an addiction. As soon as I say the word it arouses concern in us – and rightly so because addictive behaviour is unhealthy and destructive. And if you’re like me you probably wonder what is it – drugs, pornography, alcohol, gambling – what’s he into?
If I told you that the addiction I struggle with is eating you probably breathe a sigh of relief – you might even say look at me and say ‘hey its no big deal’ because it doesn’t show in any visible way – I’m not fat and I’m reasonably fit. But in that there is a deception.
And maybe its not an all consuming desire at the moment – but I’m aware and I have been aware for some time that my relationship with food (if you can call it that!) is unhealthy. I have felt for some time that I am not in control of my eating – egs – can’t walk past a bakery, dreaming about food – and yet it seems normal – food is something I love – something that makes me feel good – when I’m down I eat – in fact when I’m ‘up’ I eat. I eat most of the time – when I’m not eating I’m thinking about when I will be eating – my favourite words are ‘all you can eat’ – I tend to take them quite literally. I just love to eat – I don’t eat because I’m hungry – I eat because I enjoy the sensual pleasure of taste. Eating makes me feel good and some foods make me feel better than others. I rarely get stuck on cabbage or weet bix, but I can put away some cheesecake and some pizza.
Eating is something I love to do. And I want to say in ‘parenthesis’ that God is good because he has allowed us to enjoy taste. We could so easily have been created with fuel tanks rather than taste buds – God has given us the gift of pleasure thru taste. He’s made so many things enjoyable rather than just functional. Sex could have been a handshake – but he made it something a bit better than that. God has given us pleasures to enjoy – even at the risk of us enjoying them more than him. Which is were I felt I was getting to.
Late last year I started to realise this was a problem – and it was highlighted when I felt God challenging me this year to practice the spiritual discipline of fasting. I had only ever fasted once before – I told people the only thing I gained from it was a greater appreciation of food. I was fairly resistant to the idea – which actually started alarm bells ringing again. I realised that I loved food too much to go a day or two without it.
I felt though that God was saying this so I decided to bite the bullet and do it. But I wanted to understand a bit more about fasting so on the way to Port Lincoln last week I was read John Piper’s book ‘Hungry For God’ and in the preface I had a ‘lights on’ moment. I saw what was happening in my life – not just with food.
As I read the intro I knew I was onto something – the first sentence says ‘Beware of books on fasting’ I like this guy already! So many fasting books seem to promise that God will change the world if I go without food and pray. Maybe he will, but it seemed that in some of these fasting became a bit of divine arm twisting – almost attempts to manipulate God.
Then I read a caption at the start of the chapter ‘The weakness of our hunger for God is not because he is unsavoury, but because we “keep ourselves stuffed with other things”’ That rung some bells.
A little further down that page he explained what he meant.
He wrote “If you don’t feel strong desires for the manifestation of the glory of God, it is not because you have drunk deeply and are satisfied. It is because you have nibbled so long at the table of the world. Your soul is stuffed with small things and there is no room for the great. God did not create you for this. There is an appetite for God. And it can be awakened. I invite you to turn from the dulling effects of food and the dangers of idolatry and to say with some simple fast “This much O God I want YOU”
I thought ‘he’s talking about me’ – that’s what I feel. That’s what I’ve felt for a while now. Too ‘full’ at times to really desire God. Too full and yet never full. And food was just one way I kept ‘full’. I began to reflect on how much of my time was spent in pleasure seeking.
Thorny Soil
Early in his book Piper alluded to the parable of the soils and mentioned how pleasure was one of the aspects of the thorny soil – an obsession with pleasure that detracted from God.
I reflected back to a sermon I preached a few weeks back and I began to see that in the Parable of the soils I was looking more and more like the thorny soil. The difference was that now I could see it – now I could see and feel what was happening.
Mark says “The seed that fell among thorns stands for those who hear, but as they go on their way they are choked by life’s worries, riches and pleasures, and they do not mature.”
Thorns had taken root and grown up – in the form of pleasures – desires – legitimate in themselves had grown to be more than they should have been. And in satisfying them I was feeding on a kind of ‘soul junk food’ – ‘soul candy’. I was filling a gap but never satisfying the appetite.
The Pleasure problem
We live in a pleasure focused world – and I want to say again that pleasure is good – but when it becomes our focus it starts to become an idol – another God.
An American sociologist, has said the "Western world is in trouble because we’ve reversed Aquinas’s seven deadly sins and made them virtues. Now gluttony, lust, greed and so on are on TV every night brainwashing us. We’ve turned covetousness into an institution and we call it the advertising business. We’ve chopped down the tree of the Ten Commandments and now hunger for the fruit it used to bear."
And many of us as Christians have subtly become converts to hedonism – simple pleasure seeking – sensuality and indulgence – for no other reason than that it feels good and it brings satisfaction immediately. But some of you who are already gelling with what I’m saying this morning will identify when I say ‘but it doesn’t fill you up – in fact it seems to leave you emptier than when you started’
Hear the words of Solomon from the book of Ecclesiastes. He says "I denied myself nothing my eyes desired. I refused my heart no pleasure’ In other words - I did everything I felt like. And yet he goes on and says that when it was all said and done - and he could look back on it - it was "meaningless", he says it was like "chasing after the wind". In other words it didn’t work. It didn’t satisfy me in my soul – It left me frustrated – cheated. He had settled for soul junk food – for enjoying the gifts rather than the giver.
And when we do that our appetite for God grows dim – we get content with pleasure rather than the joy that comes from God himself. Maybe its been a while since you’ve felt a hunger for God – a desire for him rather than any quick fix. Maybe you wish you had that hunger.
So what to do?…
The danger of asceticism
Do we reject all that has God has given so we can just pursue God himself? There is a danger in that. We can become ascetics who abstain from all pleasure – masochists even who find more pleasure in the pain of abstaining from pleasure – is that what God would want? – who created all things for us to enjoy?
Piper says “Between the dangers of self denial and self indulgence there is the path of pleasant pain – not the pathological pleasure of a masochist, but the passion of a lover’s quest.” The joyful pain of loving devotion.
Its important we don’t simply run to the pole of denying ourselves pleasure. That has been tried and has failed. Its not God’s intention. Dallas Willard who wrote the book Garth mentioned a few weeks back once said ‘Spirituality misunderstood or pursued is a major source of human misery and rebellion against God’ How true! How many absolutely miserable, grumpy, obnoxious but totally dedicated church goers have we known?!
Loving God is not about rejecting the good things he has given to us. The gifts are good but not when they are taken in place of the giver.
We need to Love God
So what is it then? Is loving God an ‘order’, a duty, a command that we must obey – like a household chore? “Gotta love God today – I’ll do it between 7.00 and 7.30am? You’d hope not.
I want to say this morning that for us to be the people we are intended to be – for us to experience life as God intends we need to love God. Hear that again – ‘we need to love him’. It is part of God’s plan that we love him with everything in us and that we live out of that love. That’s when we are fully alive – that’s when we know life to the full.
The passage of scripture we heard earlier tells us that its what we are meant to do – fully engage our hearts in love for God. The love he speaks of is one of absolute devotion – it’s the kind of love a young engaged couple have for each other. Having just conducted 2 weddings I’ve seen that look. Heart, soul, mind and strength.
It is in loving God that we know him and that we discover the life we had been unconsciously seeking and trying to find thru the trivial.
Someone has written “Only God himself is completely and utterly sufficient to fulfil the will and longing of our souls. Nothing else can. The soul, when it is restored by grace, is made wholly sufficient to comprehend him fully by love. He cannot be comprehended by our intellect or any other person’s -- or any angel’s for that matter. For both we and they are created things... to the intellect, God... is forever unknowable ... to love, he is completely knowable. (The Cloud of Unknowing)
We are made to love God – we desperately need to love God and the struggle for some of us is that our hunger for God has faded – we remember what it felt like but we don’t know how to get it back. Some of us need a ‘hunger for a hunger for God.’
You see ‘not loving God’ raises some interesting questions – disturbing questions. What is our worship here together if we don’t love God? Is it just a ‘feel good singalong?’ Why do we serve if we don’t love God? Is it self promotion with a veneer of God? Why study the Bible? What use is biblical knowledge without love for God? We spoke a few weeks back of different pathways to connect with God and even in that, the danger is that we will worship and love the pathway and not God.
The real danger of not loving God is that we end up practicing religious behaviour without passion or joy – we begin to become more and more like Pharisees.
What does love for God look like?
Do you love God? Do you have a hunger for God?
Maybe you wonder… What does love for God look like? Quickly let me highlight 4 characteristics.
Desire – Let me begin by saying that love has to do with desire – I’ve heard it said that we simply love God by keeping his commands. Well – I reckon the verse I read says ‘If we love God… then we will respond to him by doing what he says’ Keeping the commands is a love response – its not actually loving in and of itself. Its evidence of love.
To test that, ask the question – can you keep the commands and not love God? I think you can.
Desire means wanting greater closeness, deeper connection, communication, oneness – manifestation of God in our lives – longing to be with.
How’s your desire for God?
Psalm 42 begins ‘As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God. {2} My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?’
That can make us feel guilty – because sometimes our desire for God grows dim – we do get satisfied with lesser things. But the absence of desire is not permanent. I don’t know that we can manufacture it, but we can put ourselves in a place where it has a chance to spark into flame again if we choose to.
Pleasing God – is a fair way of loving him – Paul writes in Ephesians find out what please the Lord – like you would with anyone you love. Seek to bring them happiness – seek to do what they want.
A W Tozer, in Love’s Final Test has written ‘If we would turn from fine-spun theological speculations about grace and faith, and humbly read the New Testament with a mind to obey what we see there, we would easily find ourselves, and know for certain the answer to the question that troubled our fathers and should trouble us: ’Do we love the Lord or no?’’
A suggestion – Ask God how he wants to grow you – change and shape your character to make you more like Jesus.
Love for others – Next week we’ll look at this one in more depth, but certainly love for God shows itself in love for those around us. John says ‘how can you claim to love God who you can’t see if you can’t be bothered loving people who you can see?’
The author who I was reading on this said “you love God as much as the person you love the least” I decided to stop reading that book! That’s a pretty challenging statement!
Gratitude – another evidence of love for God in our lives will be that we live with a heart of gratitude for what he has done rather than taking him for granted. Love is grateful.
Loving God
Perhaps the question you are asking like I have been is ‘How do we Love God and not the trivial – how do we reorient our lives so that an appetite for god can grow?’
I’m not sure that I know an easy answer to that to be perfectly honest – I do know that simple willpower is not the answer. It doesn’t work.
Friends journals – still struggling with same issues ten years on. My NZ sermon – 2 years ago and I could have written it last month.
Here are my suggestions for re-ordering our lives so that we can love God fully.
Slow down – slow down!
We can’t love someone we don’t take time to simply enjoy. We husbands can’t love our wives well if we never see them – if we’re never home. We can’t love God if life is consumed with activity and stuff – even good stuff.
C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity says “The real problem of the Christian life comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in.
It won’t come in if we simply let the wild animals rule.
Disciplines
We have been talking about spiritual disciplines and we will talk about them more over the year. Not as law but as a means of experiencing God’s grace. The fasting thing for me is not about impressing God with the fact that I can go without food from 10.00pm at night to 6.00am the next morning! Its not about how long I can go.
It’s a way of saying no to a desire that is out of control to say yes to the person who created the gift of food. It’s a way I believe God has asked me to go to encounter him.
I believe that in the experience of fasting from food, from TV, from whatever else has become a distraction, I will meet God in a way that I won’t otherwise. And that meeting will be richer and will grow love.
Practice consciously living each day with God and engaging him in every part of life.
Not just at special times – live with God – talk to him – involve him in life.
Call it a ‘shema’ lifestyle – hear the words Jesus quoted as they were originally spoken.
(Deu 6:4-9 NIV) Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. {5} Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. {6} These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. {7} Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. {8} Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. {9} Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.
The Israelite people were to make loving God a part of life – as much a part of life as breathing.
Practice inviting God into your day when previously you haven’t.
Conclusion
Do you love God? Do you have a hunger for God?
Jesus says ‘love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.
How many of us have lost that appetite for God because we have gorged ourselves on other things? How many of us know the dis-ease that creates in our hearts – the dissatisfaction that won’t go away?
It has been said by one of the old mystics (Julian of Norwich) ‘This is the reason why we have no ease of heart or soul, for we are seeking our rest in trivial things that cannot satisfy, and not seeking to know God, almighty, all-wise, all good. He is true rest. It is his will that we should know him, and his pleasure that we should rest in him. Nothing less will satisfy us. ‘
Augustine said “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you.”
If your heart is restless the maybe that’s why. We need to love God – we were made to love God.
And yet we find that a hard lesson to learn – I find that a hard lesson to learn. But I know that in the last few weeks as I have been listening to God, doing some of the things he’s been asking of me its like he has been stirring that appetite in my heart again. Its like he has been making me hungry again for him as I have chosen to say no to some of the trivial things that have taken his place.
I’m starting to feel a new love for God – and that excites me. I’m starting to feel like I want to be with him more and know him better and tell more people about him.
I can’t give you a recipe for how to do that – but I know it started when I acknowledged that I had been loving the gifts rather than the giver.
And so – my challenge to us this morning – again – do you love God? Its pretty simple really. Do you want to love God? Are you willing to make choices that may rekindle a love for God within you?
What would this church look like if we all loved God? There are a lot of things I want to do this year – a lot of things I’d love to see us do as a church – and we’ll talk about them in a few weeks, but – If at the end of the year the only thing we were able to say was ‘hey we all love God more’ then that would have been a good year.
