The Only Way to Love God Is to Love Others | Dr. David Jeremiah: Fully Engaged With God (Deut. 6)

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This whole discussion of love has nothing really to do with emotion until it first of all has something to do with obedience. The introduction to loving God, Jesus said, "Here is the greatest commandment. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself."

Because that illustrates how much you love God. There is a real sense, men and women, in that we cannot love God unless we love others. And Jesus himself said on one occasion, if you do it unto one of the least of these, my brethren, what's the rest of it, class?

You have done it unto me. How we treat others usually is a pretty good illustration of how we treat God. ((music playing)) Passionate, courageous, bold, ((music playing)) resolute. All around us, people live fully engaged. We witness in real time as athletes push the boundaries of their physical ability. Entrepreneurs drive industry forward ((music playing)) and creatives explore the potentials of art and performance.

((music playing)) Ours is a life best lived fully engaged. But what if we did the same with our faith? ((music playing)) What if we took our faith to more than we thought it could be? ((music playing)) If we as believers lived fully engaged, ((music playing)) be undeniably dedicated, utterly committed, even you might be ((music playing)) surprised by who you can be through the power of God.

((music playing)) You are unlimited when you are fully engaged. ((music playing)) Football ((music playing)) coaches yell, "Put your shoulder into it." Construction foreman say, "Put your back into it." Chemistry teachers beg, "Put your brain into it." But guess what Jesus said? He said, "Put your heart, your soul, your strength, and your mind into it."

What was he talking about? Well, he was talking about loving God, about knowing God and pursuing God. He was talking about being fully engaged ((music playing)) with God. That's the title of my message today. Fully engaged with God. Whether it's football, hard labor, or school work, life returns ((music playing)) our investment.

And the same goes for our relationship with God. When we seek God with our whole life, every part of our life benefits, our ((music playing)) joy, our wisdom, our decisionmaking, and our direction in life. Everything is impacted when we are fully engaged with God. ((music playing)) So, please join me for today's edition of Turning Point.

((music playing)) What does it really mean to be fully engaged with God? How do we even talk with him? How do we love God? How do we engage with God? I mean, God is spirit. I'm flesh and blood. I can't give him a hug. What do I do to love God?

And how can I express that love to him as I worship him? That's what I want to talk with you about today in these moments that we have. Actually, the story begins in the Old Testament, primarily in the book of Deuteronomy, but even earlier than that. Let me set the stage.

As you know, the children of Israel were in bondage in Egypt for 400 years. And when they came out of Egypt, it was called the Exodus. And we have a book in our Bible called Exodus. And it's a story of the people of Israel coming out of Egypt, their Exodus.

When they came out of Egypt, they were going to be away from any central place. They needed some information about how to worship. So, the book of Leviticus is ours to tell us how they were instructed to worship the Lord. All the ceremonies, all the feast days, all of the ins and outs of the tabernacle in the book of Leviticus.

Then you get to the book of numbers and it's a sad story because the children of Israel have come to the place where they're about to enter into the promised land, but they send spies into the land to check it out. And 10 of the spies come back and say, "We are not able to go in and take this land."

And in their disbelief of God, the whole nation was punished. You remember what the punishment was? No one in that generation would be allowed to go into the promised land. Everybody in the generation that refused to obey God had to die. And the only people out of that generation who entered the promised land were Joshua and Caleb.

So in the book of Numbers, what you have is you have an obituary column on steroids, everybody dying. Then you come to the book of Deuteronomy. I love that book. It means the second time on the brink of the promised land, Moses reminds the people of Israel of the ten commandments.

And then he pauses to focus on the most important commandment that God ever gave in the introduction to loving God is found in Deuteronomy 6:4 and5 in a passage called the Shama or the Sheima. Deuteronomy 6:4 and5 says, "Here, 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 strength." Now, before we dig into this and how it teaches us to be fully engaged with God, there are three things we should note about this little passage. First of all, the priority of God.

The purpose of the shama was to impress upon the people of Israel the privilege and the sheer grace of their relationship with God. They were to love God because God had first of all shown his love to them. It's in the very same way that we read in the New Testament in this is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins.

We love him because he loved us. The priority of God. The second point has a very interesting word. The particularity of God. Here we read, "The Lord our God, the Lord is one." What in the world does that mean? Here are some of the ways it is translated in other paraphrases and versions.

The Lord our God, the Lord is one. The Lord our God, the Lord alone. God our God, God the one and only. The Lord our God is one Lord. The Lord is our God. The Lord is one. Now, in order to understand the meaning of this, you have to see it against the backdrop of where the Israelites have come from and where they're going.

For instance, they have just come out of Egypt, a land full of idolatry. And where are they headed? They're headed toward the most wicked polytheistic idolatrous nation that ever had any space on this earth, the Canaanites. And so in these messages that Moses preached to the Jewish people in the book of Deuteronomy as he's preparing them to go into the land, one of the main key things is that they understand they are not to get caught up in this idolatry.

Their Lord is one. They have one God and one God alone. There are not many gods. There are not some gods. There is one God. Our God is Yahweh. Yahweh alone is our God. That's what the Shama was communicating to them and why it was so critical that they repeat that often and never forget they had one God, not many.

And then there was the purpose of God. The purpose of God is found in the last part of the verse. You shall love the Lord your God. Now, on the surface, that sounds very simple and not very hard to understand, but it's profound. First of all, how can you command somebody to love?

Love is not something you do by virtue of a command, at least not the way we think of it. In our culture today, love is an emotion. Love is a feeling. Love is something right in here when you're near the person that's special to you. Love is more something you feel than anything that you do.

I have a little note in the Jeremiah study Bible that says, "How can love be commanded?" And it cannot be understood apart from the fact that the love as it is described in the Old and New Testament is far different than anything we know about love, at least normally.

You see, biblical love is not merely an emotion. It's not just a pleasant disposition towards somebody else, but it is a commitment that is demonstrated by your action. John 14:15, "If you love me, keep my commandments." John 14:21, "He who has my commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves me."

Wow. John 14:23 Jesus answered and said to him, "If anyone loves me, he will keep my word." 1 John 5:3, "And this is the love of God that we keep his commandments, and his commandments are not burdensome." The introduction to loving God is simply a reminder to us that as important it is that we express our love to God verbally, that isn't really the essence of loving God.

How many of you know you can go out into the world and live like the rest of the world without any knowledge or reference to God all week? Come to church on Sunday and stand up and sing how much you love God. But how empty is that? Our words should be expressed absolutely but not without content.

And the content of loving God is obedience. So now we come to the interpretation of loving God. That's the introduction to it. When you get to the New Testament, an amazing thing happens. The Lord Jesus gives a little sermon on this text. One day a lawyer comes to Jesus and he says, "Lord Jesus, what's the greatest commandment in the Bible?"

And the Lord Jesus just grabbed hold of the question. He said, "The greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind." And the second is like unto it, you should love your neighbor as yourself. When Jesus was asked about the one greatest commandment, he answered by giving them two.

To the shama, he added the command to love your neighbor as yourself. And he lists two commandments, but he only lists one command, and that is the command to love. And by making love of your neighbor part of loving God, he's simply saying, "If you love me, keep my commandments because I've commanded you to love one another.

So when you love one another, what are you doing? You're loving one another and you're loving me." But the key issue in our message today is that this whole discussion of love has nothing really to do with emotion until it first of all has something to do with obedience. >> [snorts] >> The introduction to loving God.

Jesus said, "Here is the greatest commandment. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself." Because that illustrates how much you love God. There is a real sense, men and women, in that we cannot love God unless we love others.

And Jesus himself said on one occasion, if you do it unto one of the least of these, my brethren, what's the rest of it, class? You have done it unto me. How we treat others usually is a pretty good illustration of how we treat God. The fully engaged part of this message is caught up in one little word in Deuteronomy 6:5, and it's the word all.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, fully engaged. You shall love the Lord your God with all your soul. Fully engaged. You shall love the Lord your God with all your strength. Fully engaged. Notice in this text, there are three things we're told that are a part of our loving God.

Loving God with all of our heart. The heart in the New Testament and in the Old Testament wasn't necessarily what we think of as the heart. The heart represented the center of command in your life where decisions were made, where plans are hatched. It is the control center of the inner being.

It controls your feelings, your emotions, your desires, and your passions. And so, what we're told to do here is to love our God with all of our thoughts, and with all of our choices, and with all of our decisions. Love the Lord your God with all your heart.

And then he says, "With all your soul." What does that mean? Well, the word soul is a word for who we are as a person, including body and spirit and all that. Have you ever heard somebody say, "Well, that poor soul. That poor soul." What they mean is that poor person.

So, your soul is the life that you live. It is used to express the self with all of its emotion, desire, the personal characteristics that make you who you are. When you die, your soul goes to heaven. Love the Lord your God with everything that's inside of you.

Love the Lord God with everything that's part of you. And then he says, with all of your strength. Oh, what does that mean? This is not simply a term for people who work out, although it could include that. Literally, the Hebrew word for strength is this. It's the word very muchness.

Love the Lord with all your very muchness. Now, in the shama, there's only three categories, but if you've read carefully, you know that when Jesus got a hold of this passage, he added a fourth one. He says, "You're to love the Lord your God with all of your mind."

That's not in the Deuteronomy passage, but it's in the passages in the New Testament. And I think that was put in there maybe even for such a time as this. The word of God tells us that we're to love the Lord our God with all of our minds.

How many of you know we could stand a little more dedication to the thinking process among evangelicals today? We need some people to think with their minds, give their minds to God. So here we are with the implications of loving God. We're to love him with all of our heart and our soul and our strength, our very muchness and our mind.

We look at that and we say, "Wow, has anybody ever done that?" Well, you know, the Lord Jesus did that when he was here on this earth. He did always those things that pleased the father. He came to live completely under the complete control of the father. He never sinned.

He walked perfectly on this earth. So the Lord Jesus Christ is a great example, but I don't want to put him on the table and leave him there alone because we aren't Jesus Christ and we're not in his category. Was there anybody else who loved the Lord like this?

I just want to give you a couple examples that have touched my heart. First of all, I don't know. I don't know what this woman's name is. She has this unfortunate title in the Bible. She's called the woman of illreute. And the Bible tells us in Luke 7 that she showed up one day at a meal where Jesus was in attendance in a Pharisees home.

And she breaks open a flask of real expensive ointment that she brings in the door with her. And weeping over Jesus' feet, she pours that oil all down on his feet. And she wipes his feet with her hair, anointing them with oil. Let me just add this little dimension to how to love God.

The secret to loving God much is contemplating the immeasurable debt Jesus paid for you and how vast in his mercy and grace you are living. One of the things we should always do when we come to communion and I try to encourage you and instruct you to do this.

It's to remember what Jesus Christ has done for us. It's a really good thing to remember from whence we have come. So there's this woman of illreute. And then I couldn't finish the story on love without talking to you about my favorite person in the Bible, a man by the name of Peter.

I love Peter because he makes me feel better. Peter was always he messed things up a lot, didn't he? In John chapter 21, there's this marvelous passage where the Lord Jesus comes up on the shore and begins to talk to Peter and and the Lord really is reassigning him and recommissioning him.

But there's this little interchange that goes on between the Lord and Peter. I want you to listen carefully to this. I see this for the first time in a totally different light. So when they had eaten breakfast, Jesus said to Peter,"Simon, son of Jonah, do you love me more than these?"

And he said to him, "Yes, Lord, you know that I love you." And he said to him, "Feed my lambs." And he said to him again a second time, "Simon, son of Jonah, do you love me?" And he said to him, "Lord, you know that I love you."

And he said to him, "Tend my sheep." And he said to him the third time, "Simon, son of Jonah, do you love me?" And Peter was grieved because he said to him the third time, "Do you love me?" And he said to him, "Lord, you know all things.

You know that I love you." And Jesus said to him, "Feed my sheep." Now, without going into a lot of detail, let me just tell you the key to this whole story is the words that Jesus used and the word that Peter used. Jesus asked Simon Peter, "Do you agape?"

That's the Greek word for love. Do you agape me? That means, "Do you love me fully? Are you fully engaged with me?" And Peter answered with the word fileto. Lord, you know that I'm fond of you. And the Lord said, Peter, let me ask you a question again.

Do you agape me? Do you really love me? And Peter said, Lord, you know that I'm fond of you. And I always wondered, why would Peter do that? Why would he not accept the word that Jesus used? And finally today, I realized it. He had violated the whole content of agape love because he had not done the things he was told to do.

In fact, he had totally totally betrayed his Lord three different times. Peter knew that there was more to love than the word that you said. So Peter, if you want to really love me, go do what I tell you to do. Feed my sheep. Feed my lambs. Then you'll be teaching others and yourself what it means to love God.

You know, in response to all of this about love, there's an interesting illustration. And that is that only once in the Old Testament is it said about anyone that they loved God. I'll show you where the passage is. It's first Kings 33. And Solomon loved the Lord. Nowhere else in the Old Testament does it say David loved the Lord, Jonathan loved the Lord, Samuel loved the Lord.

It's just not there. It is even more remarkable in light of current trends of praise and worship that the word love never occurs with the first person subject when it has God as the object. No one, not even the psalmist, ever declared that he or she loved Yahweh.

From the words of Moses, we learn that spirituality arises from the heart and it extends through all of life. The people of the Bible understood how awesome a thing it was to say that you loved God because it was much more than words that rhymed with other words and fell into the lyric.

But it represented their life. And I'm not saying that we should never say to the Lord that we love him. But I am saying that when we say to the Lord that we love him, we should think about the content that goes with that. When we sing to the Lord, Lord, I love you, we should realize that when we're saying that, what we're saying is, I love you so much.

I'm going to do what you tell me to do. I'm going to be obedient to you. I'm going to honor you, not just with my lips, but with my life. The words of Moses teach us that spirituality arises from the heart and it extends to all of our life.

And those who claim to be religious tend to be subject to two different issues. First of all, there are some people who treat spirituality as if it were a totally private thing and nobody needs to know anything about what's going on in your heart. It's just me and God and it's none of your business.

And then there are others who don't have anything on the inside at all to talk about and they're all external. They're posing for everyone. And Moses comes along and says, "No, here, O Israel, the Lord your Lord is one God. You're one Lord. You shall love him with all your heart.

Be inwardly loving God. And all your soul be outwardly loving God. And all your strength and your very muchness love God. And with your mind, love God." Most of my life, like most of you, I always realized that I knew God. I love God, and I wanted to I wanted to continue to doing what I'm doing.

And don't you ever have some doubts once in a while? I always, Lord, I I know I don't love you like I should. What does that mean? Well, up until recently, it meant I don't pray as much as I should. I don't witness as much as I should.

You You know the list. all those things. And then over the last few days and weeks, I begin to realize when I do what God calls me to do, I'm loving God. Amen. And so are you. Amen. ((applause)) You may not be loving God as much as you should, but probably you're loving God more than you thought.

And I just want to be here today to tell you whatsoever you do, do it heartily as unto the Lord. Love God with all your heart, soul, and mind. If you're loving him more than you thought, love him more than you've loved him. And it's not just coming to church to sing praise ((music playing)) to his name.

You love God when you live for God. Let's commit ourselves as we enter this new season. This year is going to be a year when I live for God with all of my heart, with all of my soul, with all of my very muchness, and with all of my mind by the grace of God.

Let that be our commitment. And now with one last word for today's ((music playing)) program, here is Dr. Jeremiah. The central part of my message today originated from the book of Deuteronomy with the familiar words on how to love God with all of our heart, soul, strength, and mind. We don't flip a switch on and make that happen overnight.

It takes time and biblical understanding. Becoming fully engaged with God is a process of growth. And to help you along the path to full engagement with God, please allow me ((music playing)) to send you two free gifts from Turning Point. One is a booklet called Your ((music playing)) Greatest Turning Point, and the other is our monthly devotional magazine called Turning Points.

These biblically based resources will help you engage with God through faith in his son, Jesus Christ, on a deeper level each ((music playing)) day. and we'll be glad to send both of these gifts to you free of charge if you will contact us here at TurningPoint today. >> Next time on Turning Point, >> ladies and gentlemen, when Jesus died on the cross, he took all of our sin upon himself and stood in our place.

But that's not the end of the story. In exchange for our sin, he gave to us his righteousness so that we can now stand before God not because of anything we have done, but we are the receivers of the righteousness of God through salvation in Jesus Christ alone. >> Join us next time ((music playing)) for Dr.

Jeremiah's message, Fully Engaged with the Gospel, here on ((music playing)) Turning Point. Heat. Heat. ((music playing))