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The Good News of Jesus

11/01/2009 - What's the Bottom Line?, Mark 12:28-34

Last week, I mentioned that our hot water heater cracked and flooded our finished basement while Jennifer and I were at work and the kids were at school. It was a nightmare that I don't wish on anybody, but apparently it's happened to quite a few of you as well. Well since then it seems like we've become kind of like consultants to neighbors, friends and family when it comes to basement flooding prevention.

People want to glean lessons and learn from our soggy experience. And so they've been asking us questions like, "How old did you say your water was? And what brand was it? And who put in your new one? Did they do a good job? Can you give us their name and phone number?"

So there's been a spike in the economy this week, at least in the plumbing industry. A lot of new water heaters are being installed in our area. And because of the volume of calls Jennifer and I established a hot line and have started to charge a fee for our consulting work. So if you have any questions about the status of your water heater we'll be glad to answer them. We accept cash, checks, Visa, Master Card and American Express!

Thankfully we have homeowners insurance that didn't cover the cost of replacing the water heater, but does cover the damage that was done to our basement. So on Monday we received a twelve page document listing all the items that are covered. And it had diagrams and abbreviations and very small print and things like quantities and unit costs and retail cost value and depreciation and actual cash value. It was quite an extensive document and to be honest I found it a bit confusing.

So instead of trying to figure out all the details I went right to the back page and the very last number on the document because that was the bottom line. That was the amount that was on the check that was in the letter to help us restore our basement back to its pre-loss condition. That's the number that was most important to me.

Now since then I've gone back through that document a number of times to try and figure out how the company arrived at that figure. But the most important thing to me was the bottom line because those are the resources that we'll have to work with.

This morning we're going to look at an episode in Jesus' life where he's asked the question, "What's the bottom line when it comes to pleasing God? What's the most important thing we can do?" That's a great question. If you have a Bible turn with me to Mark 12:28-34 as we continue our series called The Good News of Jesus ... As Told by Mark.

Now before we look at the passage remember we're in the last week of Jesus' life, his final days before the crucifixion. Jesus will be dead by sunset on Friday. This is Holy Week. This is Passion Week and today it's Tuesday, the day of questions. Jesus is in the Temple courts in Jerusalem and all day he's been grilled by the opposition.

First, there are those who question his authority to say the things he's saying and do the things he's doing. Then the Pharisees and the Herodians, two polarized political groups who don't agree on much of anything, team up to question Jesus about taxes and their relationship to the Roman government. Next the Sadducees try to make a fool out of Jesus with a ridiculous question about marriage in the resurrection. After which Jesus says to them, "You are badly mistaken!" So all day people are coming at Jesus trying to trap him and trick him up and capture a quote that might get him arrested and even executed.

Then out of the shadows steps a man with a sincere question, an honest question, a genuine question. He's not trying to trap Jesus or bust on him. He just wants to know what's the bottom line? What's the most important thing when it comes to pleasing God? That's a question that all of us should want to know the answer to because the answer to that question will define how we live our lives? What is God looking for in your life and in my life?

Look at Mark 12:28, One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, "Of all the commandments, which is the most important?"

Now this man was a teacher of the law, also called a scribe. In a culture where a lot of people couldn't write, it was his job to write. He would copy down the Scriptures by hand. He would draw up business contracts and marriage contracts according to the laws of Israel. So he was an educated man, an expert in the Jewish law and held in high esteem.

He was familiar with all the commandments that God had given his people and there were a lot of them. Most of us know about the Ten Commandments that Moses received on Mount Sinai, the core of God's moral law. But they were only ten of a total of 613 Jewish commandments that are recorded in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible.

There were the moral laws and the ceremonial laws and the dietary laws that governed what God's people could eat and not eat and touch and not touch and how they lived their lives and went about their work and treated the poor and handled disease and settled their differences and observed their holidays and made their sacrifices and worshipped God and on and on. And besides the 613 commandments there were volumes and volumes of commentary on what each law meant. It was legalese taken to obscene levels.

And often when two laws were in conflict with each other there were heated debates among the rabbis as to which law was most important, which law took precedence. So this was a very relevant, honest question that I'm sure many people had and still have today. "Of all the commandments, Jesus, which is the most important?"

Look at verse 29, "The most important one," answered Jesus, "is this: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. ³⁰Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' ³¹The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these."

It's interesting to me that Jesus doesn't answer this question with a question which he so often does especially when he senses a set up. But this man's motive is pure. He really wants to know.

So Jesus starts out by reciting the Great Shema from Deuteronomy 6:4, "Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai echad." The word shema means "hear" in Hebrew. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.

That signature statement that there is only one God is the cornerstone of the Jewish faith. In a world that was dominated by separate gods for everything, hundreds if not thousands of them, this was a dramatic revelation. The Great Shema is the prayer that devout Jews pray every morning and every evening to this day. Portions of the Shema are written on tiny scrolls and rolled up and put inside little boxes called mezuzahs that are hung on the door frames of a Jewish home. They're also put in leather boxes called phylacteries that are worn around the arm and over the forehead because in Deuteronomy 6:8-9 God says, Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. ⁹Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.

There is one God. That's the foundation of the Jewish faith and that's the foundation of our faith as well. And yet as Christ followers we believe that our one God exists in three persons, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. He is a triune God.

The Hebrew word for "one," echad, means a plural form of one, a oneness made up of several parts. There's a word in Hebrew that means one all by itself, but that's not the word used here because our God is not all by himself. He exists in a plurality of oneness. That's part of the mystery of God. He exists in community within himself. The Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father and the same for the Holy Spirit. At the center of the universe there's this loving community called God.

Last week, Jennifer and I met with a couple that is getting married soon and we always like to ask them why. And then we told them what we tell every couple that we marry and that is that the goal of marriage is oneness. Genesis 2:24 says, For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife and they will become one flesh. The word for "one flesh" is the word echad. The two will become one to reflect a God who is three in one.

That's why marriage is so sacred because it reflects the unity and the community of our Creator. That's the mystery of marriage. When we get married we don't lose our identity anymore than the Father loses his identity to the Son or the Son to the Holy Spirit. Instead, we create a new identity, an echad.

I love how Rob Bell puts it in his book Sex God, "The marriage between a man and woman is about something much bigger than the relationship itself. It points beyond them to somebody else - to God. The point of marriage isn't marriage. It's a picture. A display. A window that you look through to see something else. A marriage has a mission. Our world isn't echad. It's broken, shattered, fractured, with pieces lying all over the floor. A marriage is designed to counter all of this. Not to add to the brokenness of the world, but to add to the 'oneness' of the world. This man and this woman who have given themselves to each other are supposed to give the world a glimpse of hope and love and unity, a display of what God is like, a bit of echad on earth."

And so we tell couples that we marry that you need a mission in your marriage that goes beyond your marriage, even beyond your children. And the best mission I know of is the mission of Christ and making the love of God known to a broken, shattered, fractured world. And a marriage centered in Christ can do that. In fact, it's meant to do that.

So Jesus says, 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.³⁰Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' ³¹The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these."

The great Saint Augustine liked to say, "Love God and live as you please." Love God and live as you please because if you love God you will live a life that's pleasing to him. I love the simplicity of that statement because sometimes we can make following Christ so complicated. It can be messy sometimes, but it need not be complicated. What's the bottom line? The bottom line is love, love for God and love for people. End of story, Jesus says.

Over the years I've come to pray this prayer for myself, for my wife, and my kids more than any other prayer. I pray that we will love the Lord our God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our mind and with all our strength. And should our kids get married one day I pray that they would marry spouses who love God with all their heart and with their soul and with all their mind and with all their strength. The rest is details.

Last week when Adam and Tasha Hoover were talking about their ministry in France and sharing their five principles I was so glad to hear that their first one was love. They're learning what it means to love God this way and to love their French neighbors as themselves.

Then they put this passage from Mark 12 up on the screen and I started to get nervous because I didn't want them to talk too much about it because I knew I'd be teaching it this week. But I took good notes and I loved what they said about the fact that we will never find ourselves in a situation where we are not called to love. That really hit me.

Jesus does something here that hadn't been done before. The Great Shema ends with loving God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, but Jesus adds the importance of loving our neighbor as well. He fuses the two together. They are two sides of the same coin because when we love our neighbor we are loving God and if we're not loving our neighbor we're not loving God.

In 1 John 4:19-20, another passage they put up on the screen, we read, We love because he first loved us. ²⁰If we say we love God yet hate a brother or sister, we are liars. We can't say we love God and hate a brother or a sister. That's a disconnect. Loving God and loving others is like echad. It's wrapped up together. We are to love God. We are to love our families. We are to love our friends. We are even to love our enemies, Jesus said. Love those who hate you and pray for those who persecute you.

Now what that love looks like and how we express that love depends on the situation. Just the day before, on Monday of Holy Week, Jesus had expressed his love for God by turning over tables and cleansing the Temple and driving out the moneychangers that were ripping off God's people. Sometimes that's how love looks. And he could do that because he's the King of Kings and Lord of Lords and the Temple was his house.

As Christ followers we want others to find the love and the joy and the peace and the purpose that we've found in Jesus We want to be the good news and share the good news and invite others to follow Jesus too. Jesus told us to go and make disciples of all nations. And we do that by loving people with a hope, but not with an agenda. I love that phrase because people can sniff out an agenda right away. I know I can when somebody's trying to sell me something or force their beliefs on me.

We can't make anybody follow Jesus. That was the problem with Crusades and the forced conversions of the Middle Ages. That was never God's way. Instead, we love people with the hope that they will find Christ too and if they reject Jesus we keep on loving them. Like Henri Nouwen wrote in his book In the Name of Jesus, "The mystery of ministry is that we have chosen to make our own limited and very conditional love the gateway for the unlimited and unconditional love of God."

We can only love people in a limited, conditional way because we're human and we fail all the time. But God loves us in an unlimited and unconditional way. And after all, isn't that why we love God in the first place because of his unlimited and unconditional love for us? We love because he first loved us.

"Well said, teacher," the man replied in verse 32. "You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. ³³To 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."³⁴When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, "You are not far from the kingdom of God." And from then on no one dared ask him any more questions.

That's quite a statement standing in the Temple surrounded by thousands of worshipers with their lambs and goats, waiting to make their sacrifices, seeing the smoke ascend to heaven and smelling the aroma of burnt flesh. Relationship is more important than ritual because the bottom line in following Jesus is loving God and loving people.

And I believe that our love for God will be in direct proportion to our understanding of his love for us. If we don't believe that God loves us then we're going to have a very hard time loving God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our mind and with all our strength.

But when we start to understand how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ for us then our love for God and our love for others begins to swell which brings us right to this table, the Lord's Table, the table that Jesus gave us to remind us of his great love for us.

1 John 4:9-10, This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. ¹⁰This is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.

The supreme expression of God's love for you and me is found in the death of Christ on the cross in your and my place, for our sins. The sinless Son of God took the punishment that we deserve so that we can be forgiven and have life. And that's what this table represents. The bread represents his broken body and the cup represents his shed blood. And Jesus asked us to remember his sacrifice in this way until he comes. He wants us to live energized by his love for us.

And that's why this table, the Lord's Table is the table of love. And you're invited to it if you believe that Jesus is the Son of God who loves you and gave his life for you. But first let's sing about his sacrifice and his saving grace that makes me wonder sometimes why he loves even me.

FOR MORE INFORMATION about Valley View Community Church, feel free to contact us at info@valleyviewseek.org or call 610.631.2707.