You turn please to Matthew chapter 22, and
while you're doing that, find and perhaps put
a piece of paper or your finger or
the ribbon in your Bible in Ephesians chapter
4.
We shall be there shortly.
Last evening we began a series of messages
on this portion, Matthew 22, 34 to 40.
The great commandment, or the first and second
commandments, I think you can really see them
as one, and we'll endeavor to do that
tonight.
Last night we considered the 37th verse, thou
shalt love the Lord thy God with all
thy heart, with all thy soul, and with
all thy mind.
This is the first and great commandment.
I'm just going to review briefly, for you
that were not with us, the Lord Jesus
said of these two commandments, or on these
two commandments, hang all the law and the
prophets.
By that I would see that he was
saying that unless we understand the direct implications
and the proper inferences from these two commandments,
we do not adequately understand the law or
the prophets.
We saw that the word love, as it's
used in the New Testament, and particularly here,
does not have to do with emotions, sensibilities,
or feelings.
Rather, it has to do with the purpose,
the volitional choice.
We established the definition of sin, that in
its essence, sin is the supreme choice of
the life to please oneself, to gratify oneself,
to satisfy oneself.
That in its essence, sin is the supreme
choice of the life to please oneself, to
gratify oneself, to satisfy oneself.
It is selfishness.
We saw that the word love really has,
really has as its definition in a biblical
context, the seeking or the purpose to seek
the highest good and blessedness and joy, satisfaction
and fulfillment of another.
Therefore, to love oneself is a commitment or
a choice that one makes to seek their
own pleasure and joy and satisfaction, the gratification
of their appetites and the fulfillment of their
ambitions, without due and proper regard for God
and his will and intention and purpose, and
without due and proper regard for the rights
of others.
The essence of sin, the crime of sin,
is that at the age of accountability, we
committed ourselves to this as a ruling principle
of our lives, to please ourselves.
Now, we may not have done it in
any formal declaration of war against God, but
it was done in effect.
It was done subtly.
It was done with purpose.
It was done consistently.
All have sinned.
All have repeated the choice made by Father
Adam and Mother Eve when reaching that age
of accountability, saying, this is how I will
live.
I will do what I want to do.
I will please me.
I will decide how to be happy.
I will decide what I'm going to do
with my time and my life and my
body.
I'm going to be boss.
Now, the text says, thou shalt love the
Lord thy God.
That is, thou shalt seek the highest good
and blessedness and happiness and joy and satisfaction
of God.
Everything in the law is for the purpose
of revealing that we have committed this crime
because the law is said to be the
schoolmaster to bring us to Christ.
It just checks all the examinations we've filled
in, all of our attitudes and actions and
words and deeds, and it proves that we
have indeed become criminals before God with this
crime of sin.
Therefore, this is not the natural attitude of
man.
To love God, therefore, is not that which
people do automatically.
If it's done, then there has to be
a turning from, a change from, a renunciation
of, another policy and another principle and another
reason for being.
Thus it is that Christ said, except you
repent, you will perish.
Now, repentance in the scripture means a change
of mind in terms of attitude, in terms
of purpose, in terms of intention.
From that supreme choice, I'm going to do
what I want to do to something different.
Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?
So it implies repentance, and more than that,
it implies faith, faith in the finished work
of Christ, faith in the person of Christ,
because the God with whom we have to
do is the God who became flesh and
dwelt among us.
So to love the Lord thy God with
all thy heart and mind and soul means
that at any point in time we renounced
ourselves, our right to rule.
We said this, with this we are through.
We renounced the God whose minions and servants
we were, the God of this world, and
committed ourselves to Jesus Christ, receiving him as
Lord and as Savior, believing on him.
And in so doing, there then is the
evidence that we have, we must have, of
genuineness in this.
And so we move on to the next
verse.
This is the first and the great commandment,
and the second is like unto it, thou
shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.
Now remember our definition of love.
Love is the choice or the commitment of
the will, the purpose.
We've already spoken of one aspect, where the
purpose to please God, to satisfy God, to
seek his blessedness and his joy and his
happiness, his fulfillment, as far as we're concerned.
Now, he said, the only evidence that you
can present to yourself and to others that
you have truly come to the point where
you have repented and believed, where you have
been passed from death to life, is in
that the effect of this change is going
to be felt by your neighbors.
How are you going to prove to God
that you love him?
Well, you say, I can do it because
I know my heart.
Well, well and good, and God knows your
heart.
But God is also concerned that others should
be able to tell that this change has
taken place.
Some feel that if they know the plan
of salvation and can recite it, that they've
given all the evidence that they need, that
they're born of God.
Others say that if they can testify to
an experience that they've had at some time
in the past, this satisfies them.
But the word is just a little different.
The Lord knoweth them that are his.
Let every one that nameth the name of
Christ depart from iniquity.
Now, how is this going to be done?
What's going to be the evidence that you
love God with all your heart, with all
your mind, with all your soul?
What's going to be the evidence that you
seek the highest good, and blessedness, and well
-being, and satisfaction, and fulfillment of your neighbor,
even as you do for yourself?
A few moments ago I said the essence
of sin is self-love.
Now I'm turning around and talking to you
about a proper self-love.
There's an irresponsible and iniquitous self-love that
we've called sin.
Then there is a proper kind of self
-love, because thou shalt love thy neighbor as
thyself.
But what's the word love again?
Let's define it.
To seek the highest good, and blessedness, and
happiness, and well-being, and satisfaction, and fulfillment
of yourself, consistent with seeking the highest good,
and blessedness, and happiness of God.
So there is a self-love.
In other words, God does want you to
be concerned about you.
You are important to him, and it's very,
very necessary for you to understand the thin
line, if you please, between an improper self
-love and a proper self-love.
For instance, you ought to want for you
such, uh, such blessings as freedom to walk
the streets without fear of attack and bodily
harm.
You ought to want for you the right
to work where you choose to work, and
to keep the proceeds from your work, so
that you would have for your need, and
the needs of others, and for the perfect
work of God.
You ought to want an opportunity to develop
your, your potential, to train yourself so that
you could use your time to the maximum
reward and the greatest good of others.
You ought to want for yourself an opportunity
to obtain food, and clothing, and shelter by
your own efforts, so that you can live
with dignity and with poise.
You ought to want for yourself enforcement of
contracts, so that when you make a promise
to someone, they, they are protected against you.
There's going to be someone to enforce that
contract, and when you give your word, people
can feel secure that you're not going to
defraud them.
By the same token, you ought to want
that that same enforcement applies to you, and
when someone gives their word to you, that
society in general, realizing that so much of
our, our commerce and our life depends upon
promises that people make, that these promises will
be enforced, and we will be protected from
each other.
You ought to want an opportunity to hear
the gospel, and to commit yourself to Jesus
Christ, and then to propagate that same gospel,
and that faith in Christ, without interference from
the law.
These are blessings that we take for granted,
but you ought to want them.
You have a perfect right to want them.
There's only one thing, when you have written
down that full long list of things that
you have a right to want, to ensure
your happiness, and your joy, and your fulfillment,
and your blessedness, there's just one thing.
You've got to write my name right next
to the whole list.
Do you understand?
You've got to write your neighbor's name, not
just mine, but anything you want for you,
you must want for him.
This is what he's saying.
Certainly it's right for you to want things
for yourself.
But everything you want for you, you have
an obligation to want for your neighbor.
So that's going to make it a matter
of some concern as to how long that
list becomes.
If you really believe that everything you want
for you, you have to want for me,
if I really believe that everything I want
for me, I have to want for you,
then we're now coming to a place where
there is a new dimension in society, a
new dynamic in human relationships.
And this was that irresistible power of the
gospel that Gibbons in his decline and fall
of the Roman Empire said shook that empire
until it crumbled and cracked.
It couldn't withstand this kind of an introduction
of life, that where one had partaken of
the divine nature, they wanted for everyone what
they had a right to want for themselves.
Now, if we understand that, then we've got
another problem.
Who's our neighbor?
Well, you say, the people whose land adjoin
mine.
Well, that's interesting.
I was down in—my brother is a miller,
has a flour mill down in South Carolina,
and I went out one day to talk
with an old farmer.
He said, you know, my daddy, he weren't
greedy, none at all.
He just wanted all the land that was
right next to his.
Well, that gets to be a pretty big
piece if you keep at it long enough.
Who's your neighbor?
Well, I guess you could say it's the
one whose land is right next to yours,
but I don't think that's an adequate definition.
I think that we've got a whole new,
whole new thing for us.
You know, when that television set came along,
it kind of snuck up on us, and
it was a long time before we realized
what Marshall McLuhan said in his book, Understanding
Media.
You don't have it and you see it
on a pocketbook rack sometime, especially you preachers,
and you missionaries more particularly.
You better buy it, because Dr. McLuhan says
the media is the message.
He says the most important thing about television
isn't what you see on it, but the
fact that it's there, that you can see
instantly around the world.
During the recent World Cup soccer matches, more
people watched those soccer matches at the same
instant than have ever watched any other event
in human history, because it was beamed by
satellite around the world.
It was not just the company gathered in
the large stadiums in Europe.
It was all the other multitudes around the
world that saw it.
The media is the message.
The impact of that, I think, for me
was brought home on Christmas Eve in December
68.
You recall our astronauts were in the capsule
and going around the backside of the moon
for one of the first time, and one
of these men, very thoughtfully, for my sake
at least, had put his television camera up
to the porthole.
They were in just such a posture that
through that little porthole they could see the
dead, dark, vast wasteland of the moon landscape.
And then out beyond it was the horizon
of the moon.
And over that horizon, suspended out there in
the midnight blackness of empty space, was a
little spaceship.
You could see it gleaming there with the
reflected light of the sun.
And we were looking at our spaceship, the
one we call Earth.
And I studied that picture then, and I've
studied it since.
And you know, I can't figure out what's
home and what's foreign on that.
It's just beyond me.
I can't tell where one continent begins and
another leaves off.
And I think that night we saw the
world the way our Heavenly Father sees it,
as just a spaceship with a limited amount
of oxygen, and a limited amount of water,
and a limited amount of space to grow
food, and a limited amount of fuel, and
seemingly an unlimited passenger list.
Doubling the passenger list every thirty-five years.
When Christ said, go into all the world
and preach the gospel to every creature, they
should have run right out and done it,
because that was the easiest time to do
it.
There were only about 150 million people in
the whole world then.
In 650 A.D. it got up around
250 million.
And 1650 A.D. it got up to
500 million.
You see, in those days it took a
thousand years for the passenger list to double.
But in 1650 A.D. things began to
change.
It only took 200 years to go from
500 million to 1 billion, 1,000 million.
Now, that occurred in 1850.
1850 we had 1 billion neighbors.
But then, in 1850, things were really changing.
Colonial governments had put down intertribal warfare, introduced
some measure of health, and from that time
on medical knowledge began to double about every
ten years.
So it only took 80 years to go
from 1 billion to 2 billion.
Nineteen hundred and thirty.
But by 1930 medical knowledge was doubling about
every five years.
And so in 19—took 26 years to add
another billion.
It took until 1850 from the beginning of
time to get the first one.
It only took 26 years to get the
third one.
1930 to 1956.
But by 1956 the world—we found out the
world's population was doubling every 30 to 32
years.
Now, if you want to take that, just
go in with that, will you?
Take 32 to 56, and you come up
around the year 1990 and there'll be 6
billion, and by the year 2000 there'll be
7 to 7 and a half billion, let's
say 7 and a half.
And by the year 230 there's going to
be 15 billion, and let's take it once
more.
Hold on to the seat in front of
you, will you?
By the year 260 there'll be about 30
billion people.
Now, you want to go once more?
I haven't got the nerve.
But the astounding thing is the demographers tell
us there's not much chance of that rate
of population growth deaccelerating until around 260—2060, 2060
years.
So it looks like we're going to have
an awful lot of people on this little
globe, this little passenger plane that we're in,
this spaceship we call Earth, and they're all
neighbors of yours.
That's right, they're all your neighbors.
Now, one of the astounding things that we
have to face is that we've known for
a long time that we had to carry
the gospel to every creature because he told
us.
He said, go and preach the gospel to
every creature.
But you know it gets to be a
little bit sticky and a little bit difficult
when he says, thou shalt love thy neighbor
as thyself, thou shalt seek his blessedness and
happiness and joy and satisfaction and fulfillment and
well-being, even as you do your own.
That whatever you want for you, you've got
to want for your neighbors wherever they are,
your fellow passengers.
Gets to be a problem, doesn't it?
Well, that gives you the scope of the
implications of this.
Now let's go and make it very practical,
shall we?
If we've said to love our neighbor means
that we seek his highest good and blessedness
and well-being, what does it mean not
to love him?
Well, I've asked you to turn to Ephesians
chapter 4, and I'm suggesting we begin our
reading here with verse 17, because it's going
to help us to understand this.
Paul has just given this wonderful testimony that
he's given, that the Lord Jesus has given
evangelists and pastors and teachers for the perfecting
of the saints into the work of the
ministry, until in the work of the ministry
is witnessing.
We're all part of this task group force
of the Lord Jesus to get the out
to all of our neighbors.
And he said that we are to be
built up into an edifice or a building
that Christ is going to occupy.
And then in verse 17, he changes a
little.