Could Jesus Find a Disciple part 4 Following Christ in the Modern Era (Love Your Neighbor)

Matthew 22: 37-40 states that when Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment was, he said, "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. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

Today we are going to look at what it means to love your neighbor as yourself. This sounds easy, but it is actually one of the hardest thing to do. We are to love our fellow man? Really? I know that there are some people I cannot stand. But at the heart of the distaste we have, the righteous anger we feel and the hate we may harbor is the mantra I have oft heard, "Love the sinner, hate the sin!" Unfortunately, that is not found in the Bible.

However, what is found in the Bible is Romans 13:8-10, "Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet, and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law."

Just like yesterday, the theme today is love. Paul tells us that love fulfills the law. So, what exactly does it mean to love your neighbor as yourself? To most it means to follow the "Golden Rule." Treat others the way you want to be treated. I say that is not enough. I would challenge you to do more. We should not treat people the way we would want to be treated, but instead treat others better than we would want to be treated!

Furthermore, a lot of us may not be at a place where we feel that we should be treated with respect or love. Loving ourselves may seem impossible today, as we have not forgiven ourselves for our past choices YET. If we were to treat people the way we want to be treated, most people would leave our company depressed and angry. For those of us that applies to, I have another suggestion. Treat others better than we would want our children to be treated (If you have them, if not pretend).

As a substance abuse counselor, I work with many clients who have trouble loving themselves. That said, they have intense love for their children. They will stay in an abusive relationship, but when I ask what they would do if their daughter was in the same relationship, I get the same answer. "I would hurt the abuser and get my daughter out of that relationship because she deserves better than that." They do not deserve better, but their children do. Even though they are addicted to drugs, they would never want their children to use them. Once again, their children are better than that but they feel that they need or sometimes that they deserve it.

So, I am going to try to sum this up in a way we can all understand. Would you want your son's wife to cheat on him? No, then we do not sleep with someone else's mate! Would you want people to use your daughter as a one night stand? No, then we should avoid one night stands! Would you want someone to rob your children? No, then we should not steal from others! How would you feel if someone killed your  child? Bad, so we do not kill others.

It sounds very easy at face value, but it is not. We tend to look at some people as less than us, or some whose sins are worse than others. Not all sins are equal, but other than blaspheming the Holy Spirit they are all forgivable (Matthew 12:31, Mark 3:29 and Luke 12:10).

We seem to forget what the Bible shows us. Take Paul for example. He was a man who wrote 40% of the New Testament, and we would probably all agree that he is in heaven. Yet, before he had his conversion on the road to Damascus, his mission in life was to stamp out Christianity and have Christians tortured and put to death. He was a party in the death of innocents based on nothing more than their belief in Christ. Even he was well aware that his past sin was great. Paul was a man who was very cognizant of his level of sin.

In 1 Timothy 1:15,16 Paul goes so far as to say, "Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst. But for that very reason I was shown mercy so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display his immense patience as an example for those who would believe in him and receive eternal life."

Here we see that all is forgiven through belief in Christ and as we read above, through love of God and our fellow man. All sin can be overcome. Therefore, it is not on me to judge someone. We all want God's grace, but it is one of those things that can only be kept by giving it away. If I show grace to others, then I am worthy of it. Grace is often defined as either divine influence or unmerited favor. This means that it is given where it is not asked for and/or wanted. We use grace not to feel better than others, but to insure they are on even ground with us. We should never try to elevate our status above that of those around us. We should never look down on others because we have lived more pious lives. That is the danger of legalism.

Legalism generally causes Christians to feel pride, or that they are in competition with other people. Trust me, we are not trying to "out perfect" each other. We would all fall short. None of us are worthy of God's grace, yet it is given to us. Take for example the attitude of some churches when it comes to homosexuality. We used to look at divorce in the church like many churches look at homosexuality today. Even today there are churches that shun peope who drink socially, even if it is only a glass of wine or a couple of beers a week. Is that fair? What does that tell the person who feels looked down on in church from the moment they walk through the door? It is not on us to change others, but the job of the Holy Spirit!

So we should not shun individuals, or we begin to make people feel unwelcome in church. If they do not come to church it makes it more difficult for the Spirit to work on them. We should treat them with love and treat them with civility. Everyone sins just like me! I go to a church where probably 99.9% (I once heard that 100% is statistically impossible) of the members are guilty of gluttony, envy, lust or apathy at one point or another each week. I still love them and talk to them.

What if your child where to tell you that he was gay? Would you hate him and disown him, or would you still love him? Would you want people cussing him, asking him not to come back to their church or talking about him behind his back? Of course not, we would still want him to be treated with respect and to go to church. Based on this we should treat others in the same manner. If I would not want you to gossip about me or a member of my family, I should not gossip about anyone else, period!!

When did love mean that we told people that they were not welcome back to our church, as I have heard that some churches have done with homosexuals. Like I said, the same way that we treat homosexuals in some churches now is how the divorced were treated in churches only 50 years ago. Look around your church and think of how many of your fellow attendees are divorced and would have not been welcome in many churches several decades ago. Do you vilify them, or make them feel unwelcome because they have been divorced. Of course you don't! Everyone should have the right to come to church, because everyone is deserving of God's grace.

When we look at others we should try to see them through the eyes of our creator. AA has a saying that I have always liked. It says that you are working a good program when everyone else sees a bum and you see a prospect. Everyone that you lay your eyes on was created by God, and as the saying goes, "God don't make no junk!" Jesus did not spend his time loving the legalistic pharisees and sadducces, but instead the sinners and those that the pious believer looked down upon and would not even speak to. I don't know about you, but I know I am no better than Christ. In fact, I would do well to try and follow in His footsteps.

In closing, we are not asked to be disciples today the same way that we were called to follow Him 2,000 years ago. We are not called to leave our jobs and family instantly for Christ. We are called to follow Christ where we are and in all that we do. We are called to put the interest of God first and foremost in our lives, and to treat others better than we would want others to treat our children! If we live our life this way we are living as a Christian. If not, then we may have a surprise coming when we pass on to the afterlife. Narrow is the road to salvation!

Could Jesus Find a Disciple part 3 Following Christ in the Modern Era (Loving God)

Matthew 22: 37-40 states that when Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment was, he said, "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. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”


Today we are going to look at what it means to love God as we are commanded to. Tomorrow we will look at what it means to love your neighbor as yourself. These are two hard to explain and even harder to complete concepts, if we make them that way. They are actually pretty simple to break down if we use the Bible as a guide (which is what we will do today and tomorrow). Furthermore, they are not as difficult to accomplish as we would believe. Instead, they are only as difficult to accomplish as we make them.  

What does it mean to love God with all that you have and all that you are? Let us first look at what love does not look like. Phillip Yancey in his book What's so Amazing About Grace uses a newlywed to explain our relationship with God, and it is one of the most powerful and easy to understand examples that I know of.

Imagine a groom talking to his new bride the night of their wedding, "Honey, I love you so much. You mean the world to me and are of the upmost importance to me. But, I have a couple of questions for you. Now that we are married, how far can I go with other women? Can I sleep with them? Kiss them? How about flirt with them, or just stare at them as they walk by? What if I spend the week with other women, as long as I am with you on the weekends? You don't mind a few affairs now and then, do you? I know that it might hurt you, but just think of all the opportunities you'll have to forgive me after I betray you!"

Do you think the groom that just spoke has the slightest concept of what love is? Of course not, yet many of us as soon as we get into a relationship with God begin looking for loopholes. We begin to wonder just what we can get away with. We ask ourselves how little we can get by with doing. Or we tell ourselves that since God's grace is so all-encompassing, we can just go on sinning and it is not a big deal. All of that is what love is not.

A true relationship, on the other hand, is completely different. You do not do things not out of fear of getting caught, but because you feel remorse as soon as you do them (or even think about doing them). The question you ask yourself is not, "What will make me the happiest and please me," but is instead, "What can I do that will make God happy and please Him?" When how you live your life is an expression of how much you love someone, that is a strong relationship. When you please them not because you feel that you "have" to, but because you want to is the type of love we are talking about here. The reason I do not cheat on my wife is not because I am afraid that she might find out. The reason that I do not cheat on my wife is because I love her and I cannot imagine hurting or betraying her in any way!

God has gone above and beyond loving us. God has blessed us with grace, and that grace is something that we should be grateful and appreciative of. I can act however I want now that I have been reborn, because how I want to behave is to please Christ. I am unworthy of the forgiveness and grace that I have been offered. I was a filthy vessel, yet the Holy Spirit filled me. I can never say thank you enough!

I can, however, show that I do not appreciate what I have been given. I show my appreciation through expressing my love for God.  Not living my life to please God, or finding excuses to do what I know is wrong is how I show I don't appreciate God's grace. If I do not act as if I appreciate God's grace it is a good guess that I am not in relationship with Him. Love on the other hand is expressed by gratitude, and my attitude of gratitude is shown by how I live my life.

My life is lived well when I know that I need God. Only when I can admit my flaws and ask forgiveness for my sins can I receive grace. Grace is a gift, and you cannot obtain a gift that you do not receive. I cannot be forgiven if I feel I have nothing to forgive. I will continue to sin, and denial of that will result in my not receiving grace. That said, intentional sin is not how we follow the way Christ expressed we should live. You do not cheat on your wife to show how much you love her. When you do make mistakes in relationship, you should let the person you are in relationship know. They cannot forgive what is not brought to them.

God always has His arms extended, but sometimes we choose to turn away. We choose to not show our love for God. God's love gives us grace, but our loving God is how we receive grace. The only way that we can receive grace is through repentance of our sins! Loving God with your whole heart, soul and mind is what inspires us to repent of our sins and to live our lives better.

The Bible tells us what love is in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8, "Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails."

Love never fails is one of the strongest statements in the Bible. It is also the end result of our following what Jesus told us to do. WE WILL NOT FAIL!!! Today we examined how to show God we love Him, and tomorrow we will discuss how to love your fellow man in the blog entitled: Could Jesus Find a Disciple part 4 Following Christ in the Modern Era

Songs of Recovery - Let it Fade by Jeremy Camp

February 1st, 2009 was the first day of my walk with Christ. I had the transformation that you can read about in my About Me page at about 2 A.M. on February 1st. Since then it has all been different. I used to go to secular concerts, which were always as much about the alcohol and drugs as they were about the music. That may not be your take on them, but they were in my world.

Due to this, I had not been to a concert in the first couple of months after I got saved, which was weird for me. I attended at least 10 concerts a year at the time, but with no longer drinking and wanting to change my life I had simply stopped going to them. I had some friends from New Life who invited me to a concert with them. It was called the Rock and Worship Roadshow, and it was in April of 2009.

It was a worship concerts with a couple of great acts, among them Mercy Me, Tenth Avenue North and Jeremy Camp . I will discuss the concert in a future blog that will be about the concert and the impact that it had on me. This is how much the entire concert affected me, I could easily write several thousand words on the experience. That said, there was one song that I had never heard before. I did not really know who Jeremy Camp was at the time, but I recognized a song or two from listening to 88.3 The Wind (WKND). He stepped up and played his first few songs. I liked all of the songs he played, but when he began to sing one...........WOW! That is the only word that comes to my mind, wow!! It started with:

Have you been walking on a surface that's uncertain?
Have you helped yourself to everything that's empty?
You can't live this way too long.
There's more than this, more than this.
Have you been standing on your own feet too long?
Have you been looking for a place where you belong?
You can rest, you will find rest.
You can rest, you will find rest.

I remember sitting in the crowd and thinking, "Why yes, I have been walking on an uncertain surface and filling my life with empty things." I walked on my own, and I can tell you that is very uncertain. I have first thought wrong. My brain is a scary place to be all by myself, and I was there a lot. And as for helping myself to empty things, everything that I did was an empty act. If I was doing something nice, it was probably for show. I wanted people to think that I was not a bad person, so I did things and made sure that people knew about it.

As for my lifestyle, you get no more empty than numbing with drugs and alcohol and erecting walls to keep everyone out so that you can feel safe and not put your heart out there. He was right, I could not live my life that way too long. I had quite a few friends who were dead from their addictions. It had been me against the world for too long. Living without anyone to depend on but me (and my sister) was frustrating and tiring. I definitely needed some rest.

The cool thing was that I had finally been found by Christ, and I was actually feeling by this time that I did belong in church. For the first year that I went to New Life, I did not feel that I did belong, though. I did not feel judged by others, but I am my own worst critic. I deemed me unworthy. All of that changed February 1st. Now I had a place that I belonged. Then Jeremy came with the chorus:

Let this old life crumble, let it fade.
Let this new life offered be your saving grace.
Let this old life crumble, let it fade, let it fade.

I knew as soon as I heard that chorus that this was exactly what I had done. I had let my old life crumble away when I had accepted Christ into my life. This new life was my saving grace, as now I no longer had to do everything on my own. I now had the Holy Spirit living inside of me. I knew that I would never be alone again, because Christ was always with me. With God walking with me and the Spirit residing in me I would never again be alone.

Now I had the drive to do what was right. I had surrounded myself with positive people. I was letting my old life crumble and fade away. Like 2 Corinthians 5:17 says, "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!" That old life had crumbled when I accepted Christ into my life, and it was fading away more and more each day. His next verse also reminded me of my old life:

Have you been holding on to what this world has offered?
Have you been giving in to all these masquerades?
It will be gone, forever gone.
It will be gone, it will be gone

I had held onto this old world for so long that it had almost killed me. I had lost everything, including my self-respect. I gave into the false belief that numbing would make everything including myself better. If someone wanted to sleep with me, then I was a good person. If I could numb it due to the drugs or alcohol, then it did not exist. If I could beat people up, then they would listen to me so they must respect me. This was all a big masquerade. Perception is reality, but that does not make it true. 

Every time thata I tricked myself, it was fleeting. I would feel better until I sobered up, or until I was alone again. Then I would feel worthless all over again. I would always have to repeat the cycle in order to have the illusion of normality. And it was an illusion! What I considered normal most people would consider insane. That, and it was only temporary. It was gone and I would have to do it again immediately in order to feel better. Whether it was sex, food, drugs, alcohol or violence. My life was a laundry cycle, rinse and repeat! But I had found a new way to live. The new way was truly the chorus of the Jeremy Camp song:

Let this old life crumble, let it fade.
Let this new life offered be your saving grace.
Let this old life crumble, let it fade, let it fade.

This song simply reinforced what I already knew. Life with Christ was the new life that offered me hope. Only by the grace of God was I able to step out of my addiction into a life that was worth while. I was no longer angry, I was no longer full of self-loathing. I actually liked who I was and had faith that I could be a good example and an inspiration. I was no longer running from my calling, I was running towards it. I was built from the ground up, from my infancy up to be a teacher, a motivator and an inspiration. 

Thanks Jeremy! This song reinforced what I already knew. The first thing that I did after your set was go and buy your CD's and a T-Shirt that said Let This Old Life Crumble on the front and Let it Fade on the back. Then I came back, sat down and listened to Mercy Me. Great song, and a great way of telling us that there is so much more than this old life that we are currently living. I found it to be inspirational, and it has always been one of the songs that I listen to that help me realize how much better my life is now than it once was!