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Sunday 08/25/24
Title: The weight of the Command
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The weight of the Command
Before we begin today I am asking you to make the decision to leave all your pretense to one side. To make the decision with me, right now to say within yourself,
“I am human. I have weaknesses. My temporary spiritual highs do not define me. My unwavering devotion and unflagging obedience does and I know, deep in my heart, how far from that mark I truly am.”
As we said last week this is not a bad confession, it is an honest one.
We live out most of our days with a soul attitude which is, I submit to you, radically different than it will be the moment we see Him.
We live under the delusion that this moment will be the happiest we’ve ever known, but I don’t think so.
In all truth I believe it will be our lowest point ever.
In that moment we will know with 100% clarity what our honest level of devotion to Him has truly been.
It means nothing that God will wipe away every tear, if only a rare few of us will weep on that day.
The reason I want you to take off the “nothing but victory” mask we tend to wear – often without even knowing it – is because if you approach what I am saying in these opening moments with such a mask in place it will shield you from the impact that an awareness of your weakness needs to have upon you.
All week I have felt this message coming. You know the one that follows up the “love the Lord your God with all you are” message, knowing that for this command to mean anything to us at all we have to live it.
Now you’d think that would make for the easiest message ever preached.
I mean it’s not a hard sell. Nearly everyone who even passovely acknowledges that there is a God, also possesses on some basic level, an awareness that to respect, honor and love Him kinda comes with the territory of being His creation.
That would make sense because the same Spirit Who convinces the heart that God exists, also moves that same soul in the direction of being reconciled to Him and that begins with fearing Him and loving Him.
Solomon well said that to fear the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, understanding and wisdom.
I mean I haven’t taken anything like a pole, but I’d imagine that if you don’t deny God’s existence then there must exist upon that same heart some awareness that such a profound act as creating us, demands a response.
Last week we introduced that demanded response when Jesus answered the scribe’s question regarding the greatest and most important command of all which Jesus said was, “you WILL love the Lord your God with literally all that you are!“
You know it’s all well and good to say the things we say, to sing the songs of praise that we do, but if we ever come down from our largely self-induced spiritual highs long enough to stare that command in the face and judge ourselves by it… well, I think if we are honest it is undoing.
It’s overwhelming.
It’s downright daunting!
As I’ve contemplated on this, kinda piecemeal in the back of my consciousness this week I have found it hard to bring into focus. It has been as if my mind, will and emotions were avoiding something that made me feel unsettled… ill at ease with myself.
I eventually forced myself to focus on the command and found that all I had to say to God was – how?
If I’m going to be honest, I don’t do anything in my life with all of my heart – not really. Quite honestly the very prospect seems exhausting.
How do you maintain that level of response to anything?
Think about it…
- All your mind
- All your intellect
- All your thinking
- All your desires
- All your energies
- All your capacity
- All your passion
- All your affections
- All your pursuits and impulses
This morning we have no room in here for self-delusion.
I am inviting you to feel and to embrace the impossibleness of this most obvious of demands of a creature to their Creator. I mean its not like this command is somehow going beyond the pale. This command is nothing more than what a sober intellect would instinctively know to be the only proper response to God our Maker. But along with that awareness comes another sharp awareness of our complete inability to give our all.
Now this is not just limited to this command. In truth, all of them should leave us with the same ominous sense of implacable dread due to our awareness of our inabilities.
Now PLEASE. Even as I said when I began this morning, I don’t want your religious responses.
Unneeded and undesired our your high moments of victorious impenetrability. Such unreasonable self-exalted thinking will only cloud the weight of this.
God intends for us to not deny this, but to actually live in the awareness of it. It is in fact a denial of the need for grace to claim this is even doable, much less easily approachable.
God full well knows the necessity of the command.
He also knows our complete incapability of truly honoring Him in it.
So just own it, without religious platitudes and empty words. There is no sin in honesty!
It took at least two separate events this week to bring me to the obvious answer to this, but I believe that was by intention. If it had at first seemed obvious it would also immediately have seen preachable and doable – and that is precisely what God did NOT want me to experience.
You might say, “That doesn’t sound like God to me” and you know a week ago, regarding this same topic, I might have said the same thing, but thank God I am still in school and know that I don’t know all things.
Sometimes the awareness of God is felt most profoundly when He removes an awareness of His presence.
Sometimes questions teach us more than answers ever could.
Sometimes sickness facilitates the very wellsprings of health our souls and bodies long for, and sometimes we experience victory only in a penetrating awareness of our our inability or even in defeat.
The first of these two events I have already introduced as the week I have already somewhat described to you.
The second one was in a teaching I did this week to a group of men.
I had no idea what I was going to teach when I showed up, which in scenarios like that I often don’t. But the Lord moved a young man to play some praise songs which deposited in my heart both some scriptures and a direction to go in the teaching that was to immediately follow our time of praise. In the middle of that teaching God answered my question, which I had not even truly brought into focus enough to form into a question to ask Him yet.
While teaching these men the Lord led me to Paul’s frustrations in ministry.
God had called him to the Gentiles, yet in every city Paul first went to the Jews who invariably persecuted him, made ministry difficult for him and even drove him out of cities even stoning him.
In the turmoil of this Paul cried out to God regarding this opposition from the enemy seeking to thwart his progress in the spreading of the Gospel.
In the letter to the Corinthians he called it, “a messenger from satan to hinder his progress, lest he be exalted very high” (which some erroneously mistake to mean pride which is something the devil would NEVER seek to steer you away from).
Paul’s weakness was his deep desire to go to the Jews. To win his countrymen to Christ.
This was a weakness the devil was able to exploit.
God DID NOT call Paul to the Jews, He called him to the Gentiles!
In every city at the beginning of his ministry he nevertheless first went to Jews – NOT gentiles.
This, if left unchecked, could have ruined the progress of his ministry efforts.
Paul asked God to make these attacks stop.
God’s reply was that the influence He had already given to Paul was enough for him. Meaning, “Paul, if you would just give yourself to the call I commissioned you to, this problem would largely take care of itself. Go where I sent you!”
But how did this help Paul regarding his passion to pursue what God did not call him to?
Now THAT is the question we need to be asking ourselves regarding the keeping of the first commandment.
We fill our lives with many things other than God. Things which on some level or another supplant Him, so that we are not loving Him with everything and with all we are.
However, God has given us a grace… an influence which will empower us to leave these other loves entirely or keep them in their proper place relative to His position as most important in our lives.
But how do we walk in this grace? By embracing our weakness and awakening to His strength.
Turn with me to 1 John
You know when Jesus reduced this first and most important of commands into a single thought… when He captured it in one penetrating statement, I believe it leaves anyone who is truly awake with a sense of daunting awe.
“By this I know that you love Me, when you have My commandments and habitually keep them.”
These words are the meat and potatoes of the letter of 1 John, but in chapter 4:19 we have a statement which is well known to you.
It says, “We love Him because He first loved us.”
It is a simple verse but it contains MUCH truth.
Love, even the love we are called upon by both conscience and scripture to continually exhibit towards God, originates from Him.
Our love to Him is a response to having been loved BY Him.
Now all people have been loved by God if in no other way than in God loving the entire world He sent His Son. So there MUST be more to loving God than just having been loved BY Him.
Well another key is mentioned just a few verses prior to this one. It is found in chapter 4 verse 14-16.
“(14) And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son as Savior of the world.”
Just as we just said. “God so loved the world that He gave…”
“(15) Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God.”
In order for God’s love which was and is expressed in the giving of Jesus to do us any good we must see it, receive it, believe it and confess it.
Lastly, and one might even say, as a result of this…
(16) And we have known and believed the love that God has for us.”
Only this is a tricky bit.
All who have come to the Father through the Son in faith, have at one point embraced the fact that in Christ the Father has embraced us. We had to know, believe, accept and confess God’s love for us – but this was just the beginning of our journey.
Most Christians will identify with a weakening awareness of this love over time.
Somehow, the mundane of our daily lives and the accumulation of our failures to honor God obscure the reality of His love. God’s love has never wavered even the smallest fraction of one degree, but our awareness of it and belief in it often does.
The key here is to know and believe in the now!
All of the Christian life is lived in the very moment you are experiencing.
It is not contented upon what happened yesterday, nor on the expectations and hopes of tomorrow. It is only in the NOW that we can know God and if in the NOW we do not ardently, penetratingly know and experience His love for us, we remain incapable of returning that love back to Him!
Can you see why the devil does everything he can to either beat you down with the mundaneness of life, the business of life, over awareness of your failures OR a complete ignoring of them? Any and all of these result in the same catastrophe – the idolatry of something or someone eclipsing God in our hearts which makes the keeping of the first command impossible!
The next verse tells us that “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him.”
So abiding in that love is key to the keeping of this command as is relying upon His influence in our hearts to accomplish in us what we cannot accomplish ourselves – which is a primary meaning of what Paul said to the Philippians when he set forth Jesus as our primary example of true human humility.
Php 2:12-16,
“(12) Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; (13) for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure. (14) Do all things without complaining and disputing, (15) that you may become blameless and harmless, children of God without fault in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, (16) holding fast the word of life, so that I may rejoice in the day of Christ that I have not run in vain or labored in vain.”
As Malcom Smith taught me years ago in his book on Spiritual Burnout and I have shared his wisdom with you in the past,
The embracing of our weakness is the necessary trigger to release the grace of God in our lives for transformation!
Blessings!
