Demand #32 – Love Your Neighbor as Yourself, for this is the Law and the Prophets
“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
—Matt. 22:36-40
So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.
—Matt. 7:12
I suspect that we should meditate on Matthew 22:36-40 and discuss it for much longer than we are likely to spend here today. Jesus says here are two commands and everything hangs on them. Everything! If you want a summary of Scripture, both OT and NT, this is it. This is what the Law would have created in your heart if it could have been embraced in the way it should have been.
The “second” commandment—“You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt. 22:39)—is focused on you desiring your neighbor’s good just as you desires your own good. This command stands next to the greatest command and then Jesus says everything in Scripture hangs on these two commands so we really do need to absorb this command and make it part of our life..
An Overwhelming and Staggering Command
Obedience will require a supernatural work of God to overcome my petty selfishness. The Son of God has told us that this command with regard to how we interact with others is crucial. A young lawyer asked Jesus what was the greatest and Jesus gave these two in response. Jesus said that the second was like it. Both these commands take us far outside our comfort zone if we apply them or allow God to direct us outside our selfishness. Jesus points at these two commands which really simply crucify the flesh and says that all Scripture hangs on these.
On These Two Commandments Hang the Whole Law and the Prophets
So you can dwell on the meaning of how everything hangs on these but we have one verse to govern our relationship to God and then a second command that describes and outflow of that first relationship in how we live with those around us. In Matthew 7:12 we see this second command again and it is referred to as the Golden Rule that follows Jesus’ statement on God giving good things and therefore or “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.” With the focus here on other people.
Does Jesus Sum Up the Old Testament Without God?
This is not meant by Jesus to sum up our responsibility to God. The context makes it clear here that we are talking about how we related to other people. So folks do veer off into error with an idea that Jesus was a great moral teacher and nothing more. Of course that is a position of someone who doesn’t want to admit their need for atonement and requires an active ignoring of Scripture. Never mind the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4, 5 ..) that was repeated twice daily at morning and evening “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might …
Frankly the idea of Jesus being a great moral teacher and nothing more is a little like someone telling me that Dick Fosbury would be a great high jump instructor because he told me to clear 7 feet in the high jump. I know he did but I can’t in my strength and it only points out how my flesh weighs me down.
Loving God Becomes Visible in Loving Others
Our love of God is to become visible as we love others. If you love God then it will find and expression in your life. Especially in the Golden Rule we are showing what God has done in our hearts. The Old Testament Law was, ideally, a description of how we would look in loving others. Honoring your mother and father for example or not committing adultery show that we have God’s love for other people and we are living out the Golden Rule.
Loving God is invisible but it necessarily is exhibited in this love for others. We never rightly love others without it being driven by a love for God and for His glory.
How Do the Law and Prophets Hang on Love?
All of history hangs on God’s acts of redemption and we owe God all of our love and passion either as creator but even more as redeemer. The ritual laws pointed forward to the love and sacrifice of Jesus. The moral law is leads to an expression of love for God and man (rightly understood but not in the flesh). Scripture is all about love from cover to cover.
The Window into Heaven
Piper says, “I believe it would not be too much to say that all of creation and all the work of redemption, including the work of Christ as our suffering, dying, and rising Redeemer, and all of history, hang on these two great purposes: that humans love God with all their heart, and that from the overflow of that love we love each other.” We clearly have not fully seen what God wants to do in our hearts. But we certainly have seen that we need to pray that our “love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, (Php 1:9).
Demand #33 – Love Your Neighbor with the Same Commitment You Have to Your Own Well-Being
… as yourself .
—Matt. 5:8
The Root of Sin: The Desire to Be Happy Apart from God
This “as yourself” aspect really cuts to the heart of the matter. We have a sinful desire to be happy apart from God and without regard to the happiness of others in God. We want some “me time” apart from God and apart from God’s call to service in our lives. We are actually prideful enough that we think we can be happy without God. We get corrupted by being unwilling to see God as our fountain of joy and by being unwilling to see people as designed by God to share with us in that joy. As Christians, our pursuit of happiness is always subject to God with our realization that that is the only place that true joy will be found. As American’s we don’t approach it that way.
What Does “As Yourself” Mean?
Jesus assumes that we love ourselves in the sense of taking care of our needs and He calls on us to begin to demonstrate that kind of love to others. So to want food, comfort, clothing, safety, friendships, and meaningful work both secular and in the Church are good things that you would naturally work for in others as you work for them in your life.
Your Self-seeking Becomes the Measure of Your Self-giving
You would then seek the things you seek for yourself with the same enthusiasm and creativity you seek them for yourself. You should be looking for a sort of balance in the resources you spend seeking your own good and the resources you spend seeking the good of others. It is likely to cost you something and so we feel threatened because God claims His throne in our life.
How the First Commandment Sustains the Second
But God claiming His throne is what enables you to address the second command. We really must have the order correct. Being selfish is happiness suicide because it always sours what God would have otherwise blessed in the life of a Christian.
Piper says, ““Love God with all your heart” means: Find in God a satisfaction so profound that it fills up all your heart. “Love God with all your soul” means: Find in God a meaning so rich and so deep that it fills up all the aching corners of your soul. “Love God with all your mind” means: Find in God the riches of knowledge and insight and wisdom that guide and satisfy all that the human mind was meant to be.”
God makes us each unique but in each case we find our fulfillment in Him. You start with the first command and then allow that love to direct your ministry outwards into the world. First in your life you must be satisfied with God and your passion and joy.
Self-love, Fulfilled in God-love, Becomes the Measure of Neighbor-love
So if we, by God’s Grace redirect self-love to God and then God directs us to the world …
• If you want to see God’s bounty and liberality in then display generosity.
• If you want God’s compassion through the consolations in sorrow, then show more of God’s compassion through the consolations you extend to others in sorrow.
• If you want more of God’s wisdom in stressful relationships, then seek to extend more of God’s wisdom to others in their stressful relationships.
• If you delight in God’s goodness in relaxed times of leisure, then extend that goodness by helping others have relaxed, healthy times of leisure.
• If you want to see more of God’s grace manifested in your life, then stretch out that grace into the lives of others.
• If you want more of the riches of God’s personal friendship through thick and thin, then extend that friendship to the lonely through thick and thin.
Demand #34 – Love Your Neighbor as Yourself and as Jesus Loved Us
But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
—Luke 10:29
Whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.
—Matt. 7:12
A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.
—John 13:34-35
Living a life of love, expressing God’s love, is not simple. We saw the various ways in which we have competing demands for limited resources but God doesn’t leave us alone in the process. It is God who enables us to live in the manner He has called us to live.
Radical Command and Radical Provision
Piper indicates that we have both a radical command to love met by God’s radical provision. You’ll need to see God as your provider and enabler or you’ll just stop. Stopping is a good thing if you’re doing this in your flesh. You really need love in the way God enables you. If you stop leaning on God alone then He’ll get your attention again with burn out and frustration in His Grace because we are His children. Then you can repent and see Him as your provider and praise Him for His mercy and patience with you.
God’s command to love others as He has loved us is opposed in our lives by pride. The fight of selfishness and pride is often centered on:
1) Our unwillingness to admit that God is the only fountain of true and lasting joy, and
2) Our unwillingness to see other people as designed by God to receive our joy in him.
So Jesus commands that we love God with all we are and others as He loved us and our sin nature fights in our heads, our hearts, and our bodies.
We take things God has given us for good and make them bad by substituting them as if they were sources of true and lasting joy. We even disobey Him in sin and act as if it would give us true and lasting joy. We ignore all the testimony to the contrary and act like women, material possessions, power, and prestige will give true and lasting joy. We fall for the same lies that worked 10 thousand years ago.
We also fail to see the real importance of other people in our lives. God wants us to see them as individuals He has brought into our lives to receive what He has given to us. We selfishly tend to related to others on the basis of what they can do for us or on the basis of trading one thing for another. We need to reexamine the model we use to relate to others. We generally view the process as human “A” exchanging with human “B” with God as referee if needed. God wants a radically different model. God wants human “A” to take what God has given and pass it on to human “B” without requiring repayment. Think about it. Think about what a radical change in model that is. We are so ingrained in the other model that what happens if someone at work or in your neighborhood gives you a gift? You feel obligated to return a gift don’t you. Because you are working under the “wrong” model of giving and think the referee may not approve of your lack of returning a gift or the giver may not be happy without receiving a gift. Either way it misses the point that people are in our lives to be loved and blessed with those things God has loved and blessed us with. God isn’t calling us to “random acts of kindness” but they may on occasion appear that way to others. God is calling us to lasting relationships so most often we’ll be ministering to those who are in our lives in a substantial way. However, we can’t restrict who God will call us to give to.
Warning: Don’t Narrow the Meaning of “Neighbor”
You can’t play games with the definition of neighbor. Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan to make sure we wouldn’t start down that road.
Luke 10:25-37
And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.”
But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. Likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’ Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” And Jesus said to him, “You go, and do likewise.” ESV.
When Jesus answered a question He would take it back to the heart of the matter. The command for the Lawyer, seeking to justify himself, was a problem because he needed a clear answer to who was his neighbor to be justified. Jesus turned the whole discussion from a discussion of who qualifies to be a neighbor to a discussion of what kind of person am I to those “neighbors” that God puts in my path.
You can question the Lawyer’s motive in asking the question but you can see the logic of the question. However, the command is a problem for us because we want to know who we don’t need to think about as neighbors. We want to draw a small circle and Jesus made it clear that God gets to draw the circle tells us that we need a compassionate heart.
The Death of Jesus: Purchase and Pattern
A new heart is what Jesus died for. Ezekiel 36:26, “I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you.” And Jesus said at the Last Supper, “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood” (Luke 22:20).
The work of the Cross doesn’t stop with our justification (although if it did it would still be glorious beyond our ability to express it) but it also results in a new heart that can follow and obey God as we make Him Lord of our lives and follow His model of love.
John 13:34-35
Jesus said, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another”
So what is new about that? Well it is the “just as I have loved you” part. He makes the connection between love and death. He says in John 15:13, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lays down his life for his friends”. I’ve probably shared before about the time I was teaching a bunch of 3rd graders about this verse. I asked them if they would lay down their lives for parents or family members and they all so sweetly said they would. Then I asked if they would do the dishes every day and make their brother or sister’s bed every day and they all turned on me like a pack of animals. A pack of cute little animals but original sin is a real thing. They immediately said that it wasn’t the same thing. The sad truth is that it is the same thing. God calls us to give up our lives or die a piece at a time living with eternity in mind and not clinging to a life we can’t keep anyway.
Not only has Jesus modeled this perfect love but He says that it is to be a mark of identification to show that world that we are His disciples.
Jesus Loved Us Perfectly in Loving Himself Perfectly
When Jesus died for us He didn’t fail to love Himself. This is something that Piper tries to make clear for us in this chapter. Jesus (within the Trinity) was perfectly happy in His fellowship with the Father and in being one with the Father. Never think, as is sometimes taught, that God was lonely and made or redeemed man to fulfill that need. He is, and has always been, perfect and entire and He doesn’t need anything. Christ’s work on the Cross was an expression of purposeful love. Out of Christ’s abundant and even infinite joy he made a way for us to find our joy in the Father too. In Christ’s pursuit of His joy in God the Father he purchased us and made the way for us to find out joy in God.
Our joy in God shows God’s glory to the world. Our joy is purchased by the Blood of Christ as He displayed His joy in God’s glory. As we yield to God’s rule in our lives then our happiness begins to stem from God’s move through us to bless others with Himself. Jesus is our example of finding happiness in God, in the eternal, and not in temporary stuff.
As you approach Christmas this year, when you see a Nativity Scene, think about this Gift and the joy that motivated it. Jesus did it for the joy that was set before Him (Hebrews 12:2). Even at His birth His crucifixion was indicated as he was laid in a manger. It was where the food for the sheep was put. So we think communion when you see Jesus in the manger. His body and His blood given for us because of the joy that was set before Him. I pray that God will work through each of you and that you’ll find your joy in Him.
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