Loving God and Others (Part 2, The Disciple's Life)

[This was shared during this evening's Lenten devotional worship with the people of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Deuteronomy 10:12
Matthew 22:37-39
Tonight, as we talk about the disciple’s life, we turn to love.

While love is a commonly used word, from a Biblical perspective, I don’t think that we moderns have a good handle on what love is.

An online dictionary defines the noun love as “an intense feeling of deep affection.” It defines the verb love as “[to] feel a deep romantic or sexual attachment to (someone),” as in, “I love so-and-so.”

Now, I’m not knocking anyone’s intense feeling of deep affection. Nor am I condemning, in the right circumstances, feelings of "deep romantic or sexual attachment.” What I am saying is that when, for example, in Deuteronomy, God commanded His ancient people the Israelites to love Him, or that when Jesus says in Matthew, that the greatest commandment is to love God and to love our neighbor, He is not telling us “feel affection for God and neighbor.” God does not command affection; God commands love.

Now that I’ve thoroughly confused you, let me try to unpack all of this. Jesus tells us in Matthew’s gospel: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” (Matthew 22:37-39) Jesus here quotes Deuteronomy 6:5, a portion of Moses’ farewell sermon that pious Jews know as the shema, and Leviticus 19:18, what scholars call “the holiness code,” an explanation of God’s moral code, binding for all time, expressed briefly in the Ten Commandments.

Here, we see Jesus commanding us to love God and our neighbor, with all our hearts, and we panic or rail at the impossibility of it all.

Someone might say, “If you knew my boss, you would know how impossible she is to love.”

Or, “My ex was horrible in the custody proceedings. I can’t summon any warmth for him.”

In statements like these and countless others, we show that we’ve soaked up more of this world’s understanding of love than we have of God’s understanding of love.

When the Bible speaks metaphorically of our hearts, it isn’t talking about the seat of our feelings. It speaks of the seat of our wills, of our wants and desires, the place from which our yen for things like security, happiness, food, drink, and companionship comes.

If that all seems innocent, remember that the heart is also the seat of our sinful desires, things like our desire to get what we want when we want it, to make other people do what we want them to do, to have what we want no matter if it hurts us or hurts others.

And, no matter how much we desire to follow Christ, as long as you and I live this life, our human hearts will be polluted by selfish desires. Jeremiah 17:9 asks, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?”

His words echo my own after I’ve caught myself doing something I shouldn’t have. “Why did I do that?” I ask myself.

The answer is that my heart has inherited from Adam and Eve a desire to “be like God,” to be my own god, to call my own shots, to be the master of my own universe.

And yet, Jesus commands us to love God and love neighbor. What is a person who seeks to live as a Jesus disciple to do?

Here are several suggestions.

First of all, remind yourself daily that you cannot save yourself from your heart’s inborn penchant for selfishness and sin. If you and I could do anything to save ourselves from sin, Jesus Christ would not have had to die on the cross for us. Jesus resisted the temptation to act selfishly and sinfully, leading a sinless life to be the perfect sacrifice for our sins.

Second, also remind yourself daily that only Jesus can fill in the chasm that exists between you and me, on the one side, and God in His perfect holiness on the other. Even if this very night, you and I could find a way to always perfectly love God and our neighbors for the rest of our lives, our love would not erase the deficiencies in our love that have existed up until tonight. We must rely on Jesus to bridge the gap between who we are and who God has meant us to be. We must rely on God’s grace given in Christ.

But here’s a third thing. Just because we are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone--and we are--doesn’t mean that Jesus’ great commandment goes away. We still are called to love God and love neighbor.

Out of simple gratitude for His saving an unlovable sinner like me, I will want to seek to fulfill this great command.

When I was in elementary school, my father and grandfather spent hours with, drilling me on the multiplication table. I kept at it not because I thought they would throttle me if I didn’t memorize the table or because I wanted to know the multiplication table, but because I saw how hard they were working with me on it our of sheer fatherly love. (I couldn’t have cared less about learning the multiplication table!) But these two men who cared for me wanted me to learn it and because of them, I did. God’s love, which has saved us from sin and death, should also motivate us to try to keep all of His commands and to seek His help when we fail to keep them.

So, how can you love someone you may find hard to love?

One: Ask God to help you love that person. And the more unlovable you find them, the more you’ll need to pray that prayer. Sometimes, I just say, “Lord, please love them through me. It’s beyond my capacity.”

Second: Pray for that person. Ask God to give them every comfort, joy, and success that you might desire for yourself.

Third: Seek ways to do some kindness to that person or to show openness to them. I promise that God honors earnest efforts to be obedient on the part of grateful disciples of Jesus.

Now, a word of caution. If the person you find it hard to love has abused you--emotionally, physically, or otherwise, you are under no obligation to continue to associate with them.

Love doesn’t compel you to subject yourself to unnecessary danger.

When a woman we knew in Cincinnati was physically abused by her husband, I told her that God’s command to love did not obligate her to stay in that home. I joined with others in helping her to get out. If she were to love her husband, it would have to be from afar.

The New Testament word for forgive is aphiemi, which literally means release. When we forgive others, we set people free from their debt to us for the wrongs they’ve committed against us, just as Jesus forgives us the enormous debt we owe to God for our sins against Him and His children.

But when we forgive, we also set someone else free, ourselves.

God wants to set us free to love as we were made to love. At the heart of our difficulty with loving others is an unwillingness to forgive, an unwillingness to let go of the things we hold others, that make us feel superior to them. And so Jesus teaches His disciples to pray, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

In the power of God’s Holy Spirit, disciples who believe in and follow Jesus, seek to love God and to love neighbor.

More on the disciple's life next week.

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

A walk to the Bronx with Andy Mineo and Lecrae

Andy Mineo and Lecrae are two of my favorite contemporary musical artists. They both rap. They are both Christians.

Here, while recommending a new book, Mineo tells about an incident that he and Lecrae were recently both involved in and then, witnesses to, while walking through a New York City neighborhood.

Please listen to the whole thing. You will be blessed.

And please choose to listen to it at all, even if it gets uncomfortable. He says some very important things.

My views on engaging in sexual intimacy outside of heterosexual marriage are well-known by those who know me. I've made them clear here.

I hope that my belief that Christians are called to love and try to understand all people is equally well known.

Jesus says that we are to love our neighbors, no exceptions.

Jesus says that we're also to speak God's truth. And, in Ephesians, we're told to speak the truth of God in love.

We can do both of those things--love our neighbor and speak the truth, as long as we own our own imperfections and our own need of Jesus forgiveness for our sins.

Anyone who is truly grateful that they have been saved by grace through faith in Christ alone will be powerfully motivated to never look down their nose is on anyone.

Like Luther, we Christians can own the fact that we are all beggars, that we are all in need of grace because we cannot save ourselves.

I love what Andy Mineo has to say here. I love the sensitivity he shows to all kinds of people here, including police officers thrust into difficult situations without knowing the context.

Please listen to what this extraordinary young man has to say. I thank God for him and for Lecrae and the ways in which they are showing the implications of the good news of Jesus Christ to all kinds of people.


[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

The Causes of Addiction May Not Be What We Think

This article from The Huffington Post suggests that we may not know what causes addiction.

Three different colleagues posted links to it on Facebook today and when I read the piece this morning, for me it confirmed a basic truth of the Bible: We are made for relationship with God and with others, made for community. When community is distorted, we look for comfort where we can find it. That often leads to addiction.

One interesting section of the article:

If you get run over today and you break your hip, you will probably be given diamorphine, the medical name for heroin. In the hospital around you, there will be plenty of people also given heroin for long periods, for pain relief. The heroin you will get from the doctor will have a much higher purity and potency than the heroin being used by street-addicts, who have to buy from criminals who adulterate it. So if the old theory of addiction is right -- it's the drugs that cause it; they make your body need them -- then it's obvious what should happen. Loads of people should leave the hospital and try to score smack on the streets to meet their habit.

But here's the strange thing: It virtually never happens. As the Canadian doctor Gabor Mate was the first to explain to me, medical users just stop, despite months of use. The same drug, used for the same length of time, turns street-users into desperate addicts and leaves medical patients unaffected.

If the patient has been discharged into a loving family and to a life that gives options, it appears, she's less likely to be addicted to the drug than a person in whose life there are few close relationships or in which opportunities for happiness are few.

Difficult environments and relationships, not the allure of a drug's buzz, seem to be breeding grounds for addiction.

To me, the article suggests the importance of churches being strong communities in which faith in and relationship with Christ is both taught and lived.

It also suggests to me that some addictions, even those often seen as harmless, such as overeating, may be seen, and I think, should be seen, as symptomatic of a need for deeper relationships with God and others.

Addiction entails filling voids with stuff that can only be filled by community with God and with others. The call of the Church is to share Jesus so that the world can be free of its "stuff" forever!

Read the whole thing.

[UPDATE: Thanks to Stones Cry Out for linking to this post.]

'4 Reasons Christians Must Reject Islamophobia'

It's for the sake of love of God and neighbor and the mission of the Church. Read the whole thing.

Sad Beginning to Holy Week and Passover

How horrible that with Passover just two days away and Holy Week beginning yesterday, a white supremacist killed three people at a Jewish community center in Kansas City.

Jesus summarized Old Testament law when He said that the greatest commandment included loving God completely and loving our neighbors as we love ourselves.

May God teach us to love.

But How Do I Love My Neighbors?

The mission of the Church and of individual Christians can be summed up in three simple phrases:

• Reach Up (Love God, in response for His grace given in Christ)
• Reach Out (Love our neighbors through service and sharing the Good News of new life in Christ)
• Reach In (Love those in our church family and submit to God to grow in our faith in Christ)*

This article by Ed Stetzer gives ten solid, practical ways that individual Christians can reach out to their neighbors in love.

*Members of Living Water Lutheran Church will recognize the similarities of this distilled list to what we're describing as the building blocks of the mission and ministry of the Church and of individual disciples of Jesus:

• Love God
• Love neighbors
• Love fellow disciples
• Share the Gospel
• Grow in Discipleship

These five building blocks are based on three passages of Scripture in which Jesus gives the Church its marching orders: Matthew 22:34-40 (the Great Commandment); Matthew 28:19-20 (the Great Commission); and John 13:34-35 (the New Commandment).

Jesus' Call to Love Your Neighbor as You Love Yourself

On a high school basketball court. This was shared by a colleague, Pastor Scott Ness, on Castle Church Blog.

What's the Difference Between Helping and Enabling?

During adult Sunday School class this past week, someone asked, "What's the difference between helping people and enabling them?"

Christians aren't the only ones for whom this question is important, of course. But it's especially critical for us.

Why? Because Jesus' great commandment, a summation of the two sections of the Ten Commandments in which Jesus cited passages from the Old Testament books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, says that we are to love God completely and love our neighbors as we love ourselves.

The love Jesus commands is not about sentiment. It's a command to actively and practically help others. In His parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus says that a man who provided assistance to a stranger, was the truest neighbor, the one fulfilling the great commandment.

But there are some people who count on Christian compassion to incite Christians to provide assistance that doesn't really help, instead enabling their destructive habits and behaviors. Help is something we're called to provide others; enabling isn't. Compassion may be the primary motive for both helper and enabler, but helping is constructive and enabling is destructive.

How can we tell the difference? Here are a few observations based on my reading of Scripture and my twenty-seven years as a pastor:

• Helping meets a need. Enabling addresses wants.
• Helping lifts people toward maturity. Enabling encourages ongoing immaturity.
• Helping is a bridge to the other person's self-sufficiency. Enabling is an open-ended commitment to co-dependence.
• Helping eliminates the other's distress. Enabling can be as much about eliminating our own distress as that of the other person. Enabling can be a selfish, rather than a selfless, act.
• Helping is always about the other person. Enabling can be about massaging one's own ego or self-righteousness.

To love others means helping them, not enabling them. I've found that examining one's motives based on any of these five points can help us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.

Fourth of July, the Declaration, Rights, Responsibilities

Historian Garry Wills, in his wonderful book on Lincoln at Gettysburg, rightly points out that for the first eighty-nine years of their history, citizens of the United States saw the Constitution, that document which forged the disparate and unruly original states into a single nation, as their birth certificate. Washington and the other Framers saw the Constitution as the document that completed the American Revolution, because liberty without mutual accountability is tyranny and chaos. It was Lincoln at Gettysburg who gave the Declaration of Independence the significance it retains to this day.

Though the Declaration lacks the force of law, its significance for our country and for the history of freedom around the world cannot be underestimated.

As a Christian who strives to pay heed to the Bible, I question the entire concept of "unalienable rights" on which the Declaration is predicated. But I do acknowledge that in the civil realm in which theists and secularists live and govern themselves together, it is a useful fiction, the content of which we can collectively decide. (Certainly, our notion of what constitutes a right and who--which has come to include the unpropertied, blacks, women in the intervening centuries--might stake a claim a right, has expanded over the years.)

For me though, it's personally more useful to think in terms of Jesus' "golden rule": Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I think more of my "unalienable responsibilities" to love my neighbor as I love myself, the second part of Jesus' great commandment, than I do of my rights. (The first part of Jesus' great commandment is to love God with all one's heart.)

Of course, not all voluntarily live by this ethic--even we Christians who, on earth, remain saints as well as sinners. That's why government remains what Martin Luther calls "an emergency measure," necessary until the return of Jesus and the final establishment of His kingdom. Government exists to coerce us into consideration of our neighbor when we fail to offer it voluntarily.

Winston Churchill once observed that democracy is the worst form of government...except for every other form of government. He's right, I think, which is why I feel so blessed to live in the cradle of modern democracy, the United States.

Take some time to listen to the hosts, reporters, and contributors of National Public Radio read again this year, the entire text of the Declaration of Independence, here. May God bless the United States of America and may the United States of America always bless God!

Goal-Setting, A Christian Approach, Part 3

In the first two installments of this series, I’ve said that...

(1) Conventional approaches to success and goal-setting, even when resulting in success as usually defined by the world, can leave us empty and unhappy. That’s because the finite, dying trophies of this world cannot scratch the itch for significance we all have.

(2) The place to start in establishing goals for our lives isn’t inside of ourselves because we are as finite and death-bound as those trophies. Rather, we must begin with the eternal God of the universe. The God Who designed us and Who, when we had gone wrong, entered our lives in the Person of Jesus of Nazareth to die and rise for us, has every right to call the shots in our lives. In the model for prayer that Jesus gave us, the Lord’s Prayer or the Our Father, the centrally important petition is one that echoes Jesus’ earnest prayer in the garden of Gethsemane on the night of His arrest: “Your will be done.”

The third point to be made about establishing goals for ourselves, be they the overarching direction we establish for our lives or the baby-goals that we jot down in our day planners each day, may be considered a bit objectionable by some. I would have found what I’m going to say objectionable myself just a few short years ago. But prayer, study, and life experience have convinced me of what I will assert here.

Regular readers of this blog know that one of my favorite books of recent years is The Will of God as a Way of Life by pastor and historian Gerald L. Sittser. It’s had a great impact on my thinking and my life.

As a student in college, Sittser was certain that God had called him to be a doctor. But while in college, he got turned on by theology and ministry. A new certainty supplanted the old one. Now, he was sure God was calling him to be a pastor.

To the extent that such things can be measured, he became a successful pastor.

After several years though, he felt that God was calling him to yet another profession. He was sure that he needed to go to graduate school, earning advanced degrees in History so that he could teach at the college level. This he did. Again, he was successful.

As he looked back over his life, Sittser was sure that God had called him to everything he had done. Included in this certainty was his marriage to Linda and their beautiful family. Friends told them they had the perfect life. They were convinced that in it all, they could see the sovereign hand of God.

But then, tragedy struck. One day when his mother was visiting Gerald and his family, a drunk driver struck the vehicle in which they all were riding. His wife, his mother, and one of his children were killed. Was this the will of a sovereign God for a family that had always sought to do God’s will?

Some Christians, particularly those whose lives have never been touched by tragedy or those who have never helped a friend through a tragedy, might answer thoughtlessly, “Of course.”

But such responses hardly do credit to God, to those whose lives have been snuffed out, or to the ones left behind.

After these multiple tragedies, Sittser still believed in the goodness of God. The willingness of God to share in our sufferings on a cross showed that.

Sittser still believed in the power of God. Jesus’ resurrection and His continuing ability to change people’s lives for the better are evidence of that.

But Sittser also believed that he needed to look exactly at what the will of God means.

All of his life, Sittser had assumed that the will of God was about the future. If things he thought were God’s will turned out okay, he assumed this to be God’s affirmation of his having made the right guess about God’s will for his life. I suspect that most Christians take a similar view. It’s the view I held until a few years ago.

But as Sittser looked at the Bible’s understanding of the will of God, particularly as evidenced in the writings of Paul in the New Testament, he made a discovery. In the Bible, the phrase is never used of the future, only of the present.

In other words, the will of God is not some mystery shrouding our futures which we must, through agonizing prayer and discernment, seek out.

Instead, the will of God is about how we live in the present moment. And how we are to live in the present moment is crystal clear. As Sittser writes:

...the New Testament offers no hint that Paul agonized about the will of God as it pertained to the future. He gave himself to the present because he was eager to use what little time he had to do what he already knew God wanted him to do.

If we sense any agony in the heroes of Scripture, it is not in discovering the will of God but in doing it....

The only time we have to know and do God’s will is this present moment.

So, what exactly is the will of God for our lives in the present moments in which each of us live our lives? Even a perfunctory reading of the Bible will give us the answer to that question. It would include these imperatives from Jesus:

“I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in Me, even though they die, will live and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die...” [John 11:25-26]

...”’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind’...’You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” [Matthew 22:37-40]

“This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you...” [John 15:12]

“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” [Matthew 28:19-20]

“Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation.” [Mark 16:15]

“...strive first for the kingdom of God and His righteousness...” [Matthew 6:33]

All these passages make clear what God’s will is and for any given moment of our lives, give us more than ample inspiration for our goal-setting.

They indicate that God isn’t terribly concerned about what profession we enter. Chefs, plumbers, teachers, carpenters, computer programmers, housewives, preachers, and others all have the same mission. So long as the profession is honorable, God’s will is the same for all of us and each of us is equally capable of pursuing it. God calls all to follow Jesus.

The imperatives also indicate that God may not be terribly concerned about who we marry, so long as we submit our marriages to His lordship.

God may not care what we volunteer to do in the Church or in the community, so long as we express His love in whatever we do.

God may not care how many children we have or how we spend our quiet evenings at home either., so long as He is at the center of our lives

God may not care where we live, so long as we seek to live for His purposes.

To all followers of Jesus, God addresses the words found in the New Testament:

...you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of Him Who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light. [First Peter 2:9-10]

As Sittser points out, Jesus doesn’t say that we need to go through a process of discernment to uncover what God wants us to do with our vocations, avocations, relationships, or futures. He writes:

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus exhorts us not to be anxious about tomorrow but to concentrate on what we must do today...[He says] nothing about how to discern God’s will for our lives...Jesus demands instead that we establish right priorities and put first things first...Jesus only requires that we make sure our heart is good, our motives are pure, and our basic direction is right, pointing toward the “true north” of the kingdom of God. We can, in good conscience, choose from among any number of reasonable alternatives and continue to do the will of God.

I agree with Sittser.

This insight complicates, simplifies, and grants freedom to us as we set goals for ourselves.

(1) It complicates because doing the will of God can sometimes bring trouble, challenge, and difficulty to our lives. It necessarily means “dying to ourselves” and our old selfish ambitions so that our new God-selves can rise. [Romans 6:1-8] The martyred Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that “when Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die.”

We can no longer dodge the will of God as a “someday I’ll” proposition. We know the will of God and we know that it’s something that we can and should do right now.

Doing the will of God isn't always easy. It got Jesus into trouble. Why should those who claim to follow Him be any different?

(2) It simplifies things because the will of God is clear to us. It helps us to know what to say Yes to and to what we should say No.

(3) It grants us freedom because we can plan and live each day in the certainty that if our intention is to follow Christ and do God’s will, our life is being lived God’s way!

In The Purpose Driven Life, Rick Warren identifies five purposes for every one of us:

• to worship God with our whole lives
• to fellowship with other Jesus-Followers
• to grow spiritually, learning to love God and neighbor more each day
• to serve others in Jesus' Name
• to be messengers for God, telling others about the free new life that comes from Jesus Christ

Those five purposes, based on Jesus’ Great Commission and His Great Commandment, are right on the money, I think. They can form a sound bases for our goal-setting. [More to come]

[Read the first two installments of this series:

Part 1
Part 2]