The Greatest Commandment

The Greatest Commandment

Shelby G. Floyd

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?'"

What would you say if I were to ask you what you consider to be the most important thing that you could do in your relationship with God? Would you say, "Well I think the most important thing that I can do is be here on the Lord's Day, the first day of each week and take the Lord's Supper to remember the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ," as we have just done. Or maybe you might say, "The most important thing that I think I can do is to be a good parent, to raise my children up in the way that they ought to go," and that would be a good answer. Or you might say, "The most important thing I think that I can do is to try to reach out and bring somebody else into the Kingdom of God."

God has asked us to do a lot of different things, and they are all important, but sometimes we feel like—what is the most important? It is like the young man that came to Jesus one time and said, "What must I do to inherit eternal life." Jesus said, "You know the commandments," and he asked which ones. Jesus repeated some to him and he said "All of these I have kept since I was a boy?" Jesus said, "Go sell everything what you have and give to poor, and you will have great treasure in heaven. Then come follow me." That was the one thing he needed to do, but he refused to do so and he walked away sadly.

While Jesus was involved in his personal ministry a Scribe came up to him. The Scribes were very learned Jewish people who had studied the law. They were sometimes also called Doctors of the Law, and these Scribes had counted up 613 precepts of the law or commandments of the law and they had further subdivided those 613 precepts, 365 of them were negative and 248 of them were positive precepts. Can you imagine trying to go through the New Testament and count up all of things that the Lord Jesus Christ and his apostles has asked us to do? I cannot imagine trying to keep track of 613 different laws. These Scribes and these Rabbis were all the time debating as to which one was the most important. We have 613 of them, is the most important one a positive commandment or a negative commandment? Which one is the most important? They would debate and they would argue over which one was the most important.

THE SHEMA: HEAR

This Scribe came to Jesus after he had answered the Sadducees in such an excellent way. The Pharisees got together and they sent this young man up to ask Jesus a loaded question. He came up to the Lord, and said, "Which commandment is the most important of all, which is the greatest command of all?" The Lord pointed him back to the giving of the Law as found in Deuteronomy 5 and 6. Let us take a look at that, it was called the Shema. This particular section of the Hebrew Bible is called the Shema. It is found in Deuteronomy 6:4-9, "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.” It is called the Shema. Why do they call it the Shema? Because the first word there in the Hebrew is Shema:

“Shema, Yisrael! Adoni Elohenu, Adonai, echad.”

In Hebrew, the first word is Shema. We all can read the words when they are put into English spelling, and the first word is “Shema.”

I can't speak Hebrew and I am not a Jew, but that is what they called the Shema, that particular section, because the first word is Hear. You know it is important that we need to learn to hear and listen. Jesus told the disciples one thing, "Take heed how you hear, take heed who you hear and take heed what you hear." We need to learn to not be naive and just believe everything. We need to listen carefully especially when it comes to hearing what God has to say to us. There are several points I want us to notice here. Hear is an important thing, because faith comes by hearing God's word (Romans10:17). The Lord teaches that God is the sovereign creator of the universe. He is the Lord, King of Kings and Lord of Lords. It also teaches us that God is one. In contrast to the many gods that were believed by people in that day and time, there is really only one God and one Lord. Jesus here is identifying himself with that one God, because Jesus is God. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men." (John 1:1-4.). We found out that the Word was with God and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. We saw his glory—the glory that belongs to the only Son of the Father—and he was full of grace and truth (John 1:14.). So Jesus identifies himself here with the one God. Another thing we notice is that God is to be a personal God. The Lord, our God is one Lord. He is to be our God and so the question that the young man asked him was, "What is the greatest commandment?" Jesus pointed him back to this section of their Bible in Deuteronomy 6:4-6. The greatest commandment he said "Is to love the Lord your God, with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind and all your strength.” Jesus then quoted another place of the Hebrew Bible in Leviticus 19:18 which read; "Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD.” Now there it is, you want to know what the greatest commandment is, the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and all your strength. It is called the first and the great commandment in Matthew 22:38.

God wants each one of us to form a love relationship with them—with God the Father, with Jesus the Son, and with the Holy Spirit. Why should we not love God whole-heartedly? Think about all that he has done for us. We sang that song today about, Our Love for Jesus. Why should we not love God? He created this beautiful world for us, and he put everything here that we could possibly ever need or desire. He gives us the beautiful seasons, food, clothing, shelter, a wonderful economy where we have the most wealth of anybody in the world. Why should we not love a God like that? God loves us. I want to say to you that God always takes the initiative. The Bible says, "We love Him because he first loved us.” We didn't love Him first. The Bible says "there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God.” (Romans 3:11.). “There is none righteous, no, not one” (Romans 3:10). That doesn't mean that there is not any one that doesn't love the Lord, but it simply means that nobody takes the initiative to love God first. God always takes the initiative. We need to realize that God is at work in our world. When we see God at work in our world, then we want to be involved in that work. We want to be involved with his people. We want to be a part of that because we want to love God with all of our heart, with all of our soul, with all of our mind and with all of our strength.

Love God with All Your Heart

Let's look at each one of those. Love the Lord with all of your heart. The word heart in the Greek is kardia. We use that word today in talking about somebody having a cardiac arrest or something like that. The Bible heart is not this little pump here in your chest that is pumping blood through all of your arteries and your blood vessels. The Bible kardia is used figuratively to stand for the seat of your personality, the seat of your emotions, the seat of willpower, and the seat of your conscience. The heart is the center of the human person. It is the center. That is the reason God wants us to love Him whole-heartedly. He wants us to love Him with our entire being. So the Bible says, "If we love God, we will keep his commandments.” The Bible says, "God first loved us and we ought to love Him and also to love one another.” So the greatest commandment is to love God with all your heart and Jesus breaks it down here and shows us what the heart is.

Love God with All Your Soul

Love the Lord your God with all your soul. Your soul is your personality. The word soul translates the word psuche, from which we get our word psyche. Your psyche is your personality, and God wants us to love him with all of our personality. If we love God with all our personality, we are going to have a better personality. Have you noticed when you are around people, some have a bad personality and you don't want to be around them, and some have a good personality. I would rather like to think that a person who has a good positive personality that it is because they love the Lord with all their soul—personality, with their psyche as well as their heart.

Love God with All Your Mind

Then he says, "Love the Lord your God with all of your mind.” Your mind is that part of your being that thinks, reasons, draws conclusions, and makes decisions. Your mind involves your conscience and your willpower. God has made us unique in that we have the power of choice that we can differentiate between good and bad. He wants us to love Him by making good choices. So many times, people do not love the Lord, their God, with their entire mind and they end up making bad choices. We have to reap the consequences of our choices. We need to be like Joshua of old, when he said, "Choose you this day whom you will serve, as for me and my house we will serve the Lord.” So we have to make that choice, and our choice this morning is to love the Lord with all of our mind.

Love God with All Your Strength

Then he says, "Love the Lord your God with all your strength.” It is wonderful to be strong physically. My wife and I are walking 30 minutes every day. We walk two miles in 30 minutes. The reason I am doing that is because I want to try to keep my body strong so I can serve the Lord as long as he allows me to live on this earth. I want to give God my strength. In order to give God all of my strength I have got to stay strong and keep my body in shape, because it is the vehicle that I use while I am on this earth. Take care of your body, and take care of your strength and give God all of your strength. That is basically what Paul was saying to the Christians at the church in Rome. He is telling them to give God not only their mind, and their soul, and their heart, but to give him their strength:

“Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritualact of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.” (Romans 12:1-2).

So give God your strength, your body, a living sacrifice. He did not ask you to die for Him. He asked you to live for Him and give Him all of your strength.

LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF

In the next place, Jesus said the second commandment is like the first commandment. Not only did He tell us what the most important commandment is, He tells us what the next one is, number 1 and number 2. Love your neighbor as yourself. You know once in a while we will see people who do not love themselves. I asked a member this morning, have you had a good week. He said "Well it has been pretty good, but he said we had a man that came to the hospital last night and he smelled so bad.” He wanted to be admitted, to the hospital and he wanted to take a shower and that was not their procedure. The member went on to tell that they found him someplace in a ditch with a rope around his neck. He was an ex-Marine. His dad had died not too long ago and left him some money, and somebody robbed him and took everything he had and that was his story. He tried to commit suicide. Life was no longer worth living in his view. He did not love himself. A lot of times people do not love themselves. But most of us love ourselves, don’t we? We take care of ourselves. We make sure we have got everything we desire that we can possibly afford—clothing, food, shelter, and entertainment, all of those things. We love ourselves. So you couldn't love somebody else like yourself, if you didn't love yourself. So it is a given, it is a fact, it is an axiom, that we all love ourselves. So it ought to be pretty easy for us to understand how we can love others as ourselves. It just means, when we see people struggling, and there are always some people who are struggling, as we just mentioned. There is a difference between struggling and just giving up. Sometimes people just give up and go back into the world and are not even trying to serve the Lord and loving the Lord with all their mind, their soul, and their strength. We all struggle at times, but to love our neighbor as ourselves simply means that when we see somebody going over a bump in the road, a detour, a hard place, we need to reach out and touch their lives and try to help them. That is what we would want somebody to do for us. I know in my life, I have had people who have reached out and helped me over a difficult time in my life. When I would thank them, they would always say "Just pass it on. One of these days, you will be in a position to help somebody else and just pass it on." Isn't that what we are here for, to help each other over the difficult places in life? You might say, "Well can you illustrate that for me?"

The Parable of the Good Samaritan

We have another account of this story as it is found in Luke. In Luke 10, Jesus asked a lawyer what the most important commandment was. In Mark 10, our text, the Scribe asked Jesus what the most important commandment was. In Luke 10:25-37, Jesus asked a Scribe and a Lawyer what the most important commandment was. The Lawyer replied, "To love the Lord your God with all your heart, your mind, your soul, and your strength and to love your neighbor as yourself.” (Luke 10:27.). He gave the right answer, he knew the right answer, and Jesus commended him for that answer, but he was not willing to stop there. The Lawyer also wanted to know who his neighbor was. You see we like to chose who we will help and who we won't help. It is like one of our preachers said one time, "Everybody is my friend. I have got friendly friends and unfriendly friends.” We like to help our friendly friends, but we don't like to help our unfriendly friends. So he said, "Who is my neighbor?” That is when Jesus told that beautiful story about the Good Samaritan. He said there was a man, who was on the Jericho road. The Jericho road was known for its cut-throats and robbers. It is like some places in our city, we are afraid to go there at night, afraid we would be robbed, beaten and killed. This was a bad place. They got hold of him and beat him. They robbed him, and left him by the side of the road half dead. There were a couple of religious people, a priest, who had been up to Jerusalem. Jerusalem was up on top of the mountain, and they were coming back from worship, and they saw this poor fellow by the side of the road. He was a Samaritan. He was not one of their people and the Bible says, "The priest passed by on the other side.” Then a little while later a Levite came along. The Levite saw the man, and he passed by on the other side. A little bit later, a Samaritan came by; he was one of the despised people; he saw this man that was beaten and left half-dead, and he went over and ministered to him with some medicines and put oil on his wounds. He put him on his animal and took him to the "Holiday Inn"—whatever they had back then and paid his nights stay. He told the keeper of the inn, that if it cost any more that the next time he came back through he would pay the bill.

THE COMPREHENSIVE NATURE OF THESE TWO COMMANDMENTS

Jesus then looked at this man, this Lawyer, this Scribe, and he said, "I want to ask you another question. Which of these three was the neighbor to the man who was in need?" Again, he gave the right answer, the one that showed mercy to him. So what is the number one and number two commandments in the Bible? Love God supremely. Love God whole-heartedly. Love God with all of you heart, with all of your soul, with all your personality, with all your mind, your rational being and with all your strength. And the second is like unto it, love our neighbor as yourself. Our neighbor is anybody who is in need and that we are in a position to help them some way or another. We are to show them kindness, mercy, compassion and love. When Jesus looked at this Scribe that had asked him this question, I am sure that Jesus was impressed with him. Jesus said, "You are not far from the Kingdom.” Jesus said, "There is no greater commandment than these two commandments that I have just given you, because on these two commandments hangs the whole law like a balance. Love God whole-heartedly, love your neighbor as yourself and that is balance of the whole of law."

Also my friends the whole law of the Gospel hangs on those two commandments today. They are all comprehensive. If we love God supremely and love our neighbor as ourselves, we are going to do everything else that God wants us to do. It is just as simple as that. God said, "You are not far from the Kingdom.”

NOT FAR FROM THE KINGDOM

I am wondering TODAY, if in our audience we have some that are so close to the kingdom of God, but not in the kingdom. Somebody said one time to be close only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades. It is terrible to be close to the Kingdom and yet not be in the Kingdom. I was thinking about the little Boy Scout down in the Smokey Mountains that was lost a few weeks ago. He walked away from the rest of his troop, and when they found him he wasn't very far away. He was close, but he was still lost. It took a long time and a lot of people to find the boy. Wouldn't it be terrible for any of us in this audience to get up before God Almighty and not be in the Kingdom? Wouldn't it be terrible to hear the Lord say, "You were just as close as that, but you never did enter the Kingdom.” Friends, it is our prayer that this young man that the Lord spoke to did make up his mind and enter the Kingdom of God. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't—the Bible does not tell us. You have that opportunity today, to not just be close, but to be in the Kingdom.

How Does One Enter the Kingdom?

How do you get in the Kingdom? Nicodemus, came to Jesus by night and said, "Rabbi, We know you are a teacher come from God, for no man can do the miracles you are doing except God be with him.” Jesus looked at him and said, "Verily, Verily, truly, truly, I say unto you except a man be born again, he can not enter into the kingdom." How can I be born again, when I am old? Can I enter the second time into my mother's womb and be born again? Then Jesus explained it to him. He was having trouble seeing. Jesus said, "Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit he can not enter the Kingdom of God." (John 3:3-5.). We enter the Kingdom of God by faith, repentance, confession and baptism for the remission of sins. It is called “the washing of regeneration.” (Titus 3:5.). When you are generated you start something. When you are regenerated you are started again. God started us when we were born and every little child is pure and innocent and free from sin. We become a dead battery when we become old enough to make decisions we know to be wrong. God regenerates that spiritual battery when we believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, repent of our sins, confess the good name of Jesus Christ and we are immersed in water for the remission of sins. Don't be just close, be all together. Remember, when Paul was preaching to King Agrippa and he said, "Almost you persuade me to be a Christian.” Paul said, "I would to God that you were not almost, but all together such as I am without these chains on my arms.” He wanted the King to obey the gospel, and be not almost, to be not just close, but to be actually in the Kingdom, and then enjoy the salvation that comes through Jesus Christ. It is your call; it is your choice to come forward and obey the gospel of Jesus Christ. *