Would you turn, please, to Matthew chapter 22.
We're going to read again this portion that
has been the anchor of our thinking so
far these evenings.
Matthew 22, and I'll begin reading with the
thirty-sixth verse.
Then, by the way, we're going to turn
quickly to John the fourteenth chapter and begin
with the fifteenth verse.
Master, which is the great commandment in the
law?
Jesus said unto him, 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.
And the second is like unto it.
Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.
On these two commandments hang all the law
and the prophets.
Now, please, to John chapter fourteen.
The question this evening is, who is it
that that loves the Lord?
And what does it mean to love God
with all your heart?
Last evening we saw the great commandment.
Tonight we're going to see the great call,
the call that Christ gives to himself.
Now, beginning with verse fifteen of John fourteen.
If you love me, keep my commandments.
And I will pray the Father, and he
shall give you another comforter, that he may
abide with you forever, even the Spirit of
truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it
seeth him not, neither knoweth him, but ye
know him.
For he dwelleth with you, and shall be
in you.
I will not leave you comfortless.
I will come to you, yet a little
while, and the world seeth me no more.
And I will pray the Father, and he
shall give you another comforter, that he may
abide with you forever, even the Spirit of
truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it
seeth him not, neither knoweth him, but ye
know him.
For he dwelleth with you, and shall be
in you.
I will not leave you comfortless.
I will come to you, yet a little
while, and the world seeth me no more.
But ye see me, because I live, ye
shall live also.
At that day ye shall know that I
am in my Father, and ye in me,
and I in you.
He that hath my commandments and keepeth them,
he it is that loveth me.
And he that loveth me shall be loved
of my Father, and I will love him,
and will manifest myself to him.
Judas saith unto him, not Ascariot, Lord, how
is it that thou wilt manifest thyself unto
us, and not unto the world?
Jesus answered and said unto him, If a
man love me, he will keep my words.
My Father will love him, and we will
come unto him, and make our abode with
him.
He that loveth me not keepeth not my
sayings.
And the word which ye hear is not
mine, but the Father which sent me.
Now, at least five times in that portion,
the Lord Jesus said that the evidence that
you love God with all your heart and
mind and soul is that you keep his
commandments, that you hear his words, and that
you keep his words.
It's just that simple.
This is the test, and this is the
evidence.
Now it's important for us to find out
what his words are.
What did he say to his day and
to his time and generation?
I think a good place for us to
begin is in Luke, the 14th chapter.
In this occasion, the Lord Jesus is speaking
to a multitude of people, just passers-by,
just the throng that have gathered.
There's a little bit of evidence that perhaps
they were the crowd that gathered outside the
home of one of the Pharisees where the
Lord Jesus had been invited for lunch.
Apparently, at that time, the Pharisees thought that
if they made an offer good enough, they
could get this young preacher from the country
on their evangelistic team.
And they thought that if you can't lick
them, you'd better join them, and the best
way to silence him would be to hire
him, because no one really bites the hand
that feeds them.
So apparently, they brought him in with something
of the view of trying to persuade him
to do some preaching for them, some street
preaching, and at least they're there in a
strange and unusual setting.
And of course, the first 25 verses in
this, or 24 verses, are a lesson in
directness, in frankness, in the fact that the
Lord Jesus was more concerned about the needs
of the people with whom he was having
this luncheon than he was about their opinion
of him.
You might say that he was most insensitive.
You might even go so far as to
say that his manners lacked something.
Perhaps you could even suggest that he hadn't
had the opportunity of reading Dale Carnegie's very
helpful little volume, How to Win Friends and
Influence People.
Rather, he seems to be specializing how to
alienate people, because he is more concerned that
they should see themselves and the desperate need
of their own hearts than he is that
they should, in a sense, just have very
fine ideas about him.
Well, you read that with this in view.
Then, after he has spoken so directly to
what he saw expressed by the people going
up to the chief place and inviting their
friends to a luncheon who could invite him
back, and so on, one of the good
gentlemen raises a question or makes a statement,
you know, tries to get the conversation back
on safe territory, and says, Blessed is he
that shall eat bread in the kingdom of
God.
Well, that started another sermon, a three-point
sermon by the Lord.
And he then began to tell about a
certain man that made a feast, and he
bade his neighbors to come.
He invited them to come and sent his
servant out to tell them that everything was
ready and that they could come to dinner.
And he said they all, with one consent,
began to make excuse.
And you know what happened.
One of the men said, I'm sorry, I
can't come.
Now, remember to whom he's talking, a group
of Jewish businessmen, Pharisees and scribes and so
on, and Jewish businessmen are rather able businessmen.
And you know that if you're in the
investment business, you aren't going to be caught
in the situation that's described here.
One man said, I'm sorry, I can't come.
I have bought a piece of brown, and
I forgot to measure it, so I've got
to go out now and measure it.
Now, I don't know what you do about
buying property, but I am confident that the
people that heard the Lord say this didn't
do that.
If they were going to have a title
search and make absolutely sure that every square
meter of land was in that piece before
they bought it, I bought a piece of
ground, and now I've got to go measure
it.
Well, the second fellow is in the, that
he tells about in his illustration, apparently runs
a dredge line.
You know, he's in the transportation business.
Maybe he's got some wagons that are pulling
goods from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
And he says, I can't come.
I have bought five yoke of oxen, and
I have to go out and prove them.
Now, I've never bought oxen or driven oxen.
I've done a lot with horses, but never
oxen.
But I know one thing.
You don't buy them and then prove them,
do you?
You prove them first.
And then, of course, the last one.
If you don't think the Lord has a
sense of humor, then you see this.
He's talking to a group of Jewish men,
you know, and he says, and the third
man said, I have, I can't come.
I've married a wife, and she's already taken
over and got a ring in my nose,
and she won't let me out of the
house.
That's the essence of what it is.
She just isn't going to let me go.
Well, now you know that this is ludicrous.
But what's he saying?
He's saying that the excuses that men use
for not coming to the feast that he
is providing are ludicrous and absurd.
They're nothing but excuses.
And someone has said an excuse is nothing
but the skin of a lie stuffed with
a reason.
It just doesn't have any substance to it.
He says, my investments keep me from coming.
My business keeps me from coming.
My family relationships keep me from coming.
So that's the message that he has for
this group at the luncheon.
So when he finishes and leaves, and it's
about time to finish, I guess.
He's just about exhausted his friends.
They're not going to be too interested in
his staying much longer.
When he finishes, he goes outside, and the
disciples are there, and I think there's this
throng of people.
And the disciples have been saying, now, just
as soon as he comes out, you just
wait around.
We'll have him speak to you.
Well, be that as it may, that's the
way I see it, at least.
Here are the Pharisees that he's been having
lunch with behind him, the disciples beside him,
and a throng in front of him.
And so what's he saying?
Now he's talking to the common people who
heard him gladly.
And so beginning with verse 25, he says,
and there went great multitudes with him, and
he turned and he said unto them, now,
these are just multitudes.
They're not any special class.
Now listen to what he said, and remember
what he said.
He that heareth my words and doeth them,
he it is that loves me.
Now what did Christ say to the sinners
of his generation?
Now this is what he said.
If any man come to me and hate
not his father and mother and wife and
children and brethren and sisters, yea, and his
own life also, he can't be my disciple.
Now let me stop for a moment.
What's it mean, disciple?
Years ago a friend of mine wrote a
book, and it was a good book.
I bought it, I gave it away, and
that's why I haven't written many books, you
know, because I don't know, I just, he
sort of spoiled it for me.
He wrote this book, and in it he
made the statement, he says, easy to be
saved, all you have to do is accept
Jesus.
But it's hard to become a disciple.
Well, that sounded pretty good.
So I found, you know, you pick up
things like that.
So I found myself saying, it's easy to
be saved, you accept Jesus, but it's hard
to become a disciple.
Well, one day I got my concordance, and
I started to study that word disciple, because
I had just taken it for granted that
disciple was a kind of a next stage,
a next plateau about being saved.
And I went through it.
It's like, it's like the lady down south
that was given a commentary for her, for
Christmas.
And about the middle of July, the one
who gave it to her, the one she
did laundry, says, and how do you like
that, the commentary I gave you?
And she said, oh, that's a wonderful book.
You know, the Bible sure does throw a
lot of light on that book.
And I find that the Bible throws a
lot of light on a lot of books.
And consequently, I just took the concordance, and
I began to go through and find out
what the word disciple was, what it meant.
Well, first I found out that it means
a learner.
From the time a child begins to learn
to say mama and daddy is a disciple,
he's learning.
And when he's so old that all he
can do is just look into the face
of the Lord and learn something new about
worship, he's still a learner.
All it means is learner.
And you start learning, and you keep on
learning, and essentially it was this in the
context that when you found a teacher, you
attached yourself to the teacher, and what he
taught you did.
Now the Lord Jesus is applying it.
And he is saying to this multitude, just
these outsiders, just this unsaved bunch, he's saying,
now listen, fellas, I don't want to fool
you, and I don't want to con you,
and I don't want to mislead you, and
I don't want to fill up my ranks
with folks that don't know what I'm talking
about, so I'm going to level with you
right now.
If you want to get into kindergarten and
start learning the ABCs about me, then you've
got to understand who I am and what
I'm requiring.
That's about what it is.
That's an awfully free translation, and I call
it a paraphrase.
I don't think it's a translation at all.
But it's the essence of what it is.
For instance, you find, and you come to
John 6, a very interesting thing.
I studied that, and I was kind of
amazed because you remember one day the Lord
multiplied the bread and he fed them, and
the next day they came and were going
to take him by force and make him
a king, and he said, listen, you men
don't know what you're talking about.
You just want to do this because I
gave you a free lunch.
That's all you are.
You think if I'm king that you aren't
going to have to work anymore to get
your food.
No, you don't understand anything about this.
And then he went on to say this,
except you eat my flesh and you drink
my blood, you have no life in you.
And immediately they began to argue and say,
look, we're not cannibals, and we don't eat
anybody's flesh, and we don't drink anybody's blood,
and we're not going to listen to this
kind of talk.
And so they went away.
And he turned to the disciples and he
said, are you guys going to go too?
And they said, we've been thinking about it,
Lord, but we don't know who to go
to.
You're the only one that's got the words
of eternal life.
And then it says this, and from that
day many of his disciples followed him no
more.
Does that sound like a cut above being
saved?
Doesn't to me.
They found out how to have eternal life
and they became dropouts.
They quit school.
They didn't like what they heard.
And so they left.
Now what's the Lord Jesus saying?
That's our definition of disciple.
Learner, learner, learner.
Student.
Sitting at the feet of a teacher, listening
to the teacher, and as long as he
does what the teacher tells him, he's a
student.
When he stops doing it, he's a dropout.
And so the Lord Jesus said, if any
man come to me and does not recognize
that I am God and that my lordship
transcends the right to all human relationships, that's
what he's talking about.
I'm God.
And as God, when you come to me,
you have to come on my terms.
My terms.
My lordship, my sovereignty transcends the right to
your relationship with your father and your mother
and your wife and your children and your
brethren and your sisters, your own life also.
Now, if you don't understand that and accept
that, then you can't get into kindergarten and
start on the ABCs of what it means
to be a disciple of mine, a learner
of mine.
So here's the first issue, and he's confronting
the people.
Well, now let's go back.
What happened?
Mother Eve was beguiled.
She was led away by the deceitfulness of
sin and by the deception of Satan, and
she ate.
And there was an issue presented to Adam.
He either stayed with the Lord and let
God do with Eve as God saw fit,
or he committed himself to the human relationship.
And it isn't surprising, therefore, that when the
Lord Jesus comes back and stands among men,
that he begins at the very place that
the crime of sin entered into the world.
And he is saying that when you come
to me, you must understand that I am
God and that my sovereignty and my lordship
transcends all human relationships.
I remember we went out in the fall
in the plains of Zendinka, out of Malut,
in the upper Nile province of the Savan,
to bring the students back to the school.
We came to this little village, and there
was a young boy, Dang, Dang Roon, and
he was supposed to come.
And when we came into the village, there
was his mother, and she'd taken a piece
of broken pot, and she had scarred her
breasts, and the blood was there.
She put ashes over her face.
She was crying, Ah, my Dino.
She was holding on to Dang.
She didn't want him to go, and she
was saying, Dang, Dang, Dang, you hate us.
If you didn't hate us, you couldn't go,
you couldn't leave.
The grandmother was there doing the same thing.
And this fine young man, who committed his
life to Christ, had such great pity and
love in his face and his eyes for
his mother and his grandmother, handed his bundle
up to one of the students on the
back of the truck, and he took his
mother's hands, he took his grandmother's hands, and
in his large, strong hand, he held them
together, the four of them.
And he said, Listen, I love you.
You don't understand now how much I love
you.
You'll never know how much it hurts to
have you feel this way about me.
But mother, grandmother, as much as I love
you, as deeply as I feel with you
the pain that you're feeling, I love Jesus
Christ more, and I am committed to him,
and I must obey him.
And so with that, he held their hands
out.
He put one foot on the tire.
He took the bars of the truck body
and the other, let go of them, held
them back a moment, swung up and said,
Please go.
And there were the two old ladies screaming,
You hate us, you hate us.
No, he didn't hate them.
He loved them, but he just loved Jesus
Christ the way Christ says he must be
loved.
Elsie Klor was a Jewish girl in Chicago.
There at the Chicago Hebrew Mission, these dear
two godly women witnessed to this young Jewish
girl, and she opened her heart to Jesus
Christ.
She was just in high school, getting ready
to go into nurses training or in nurses
training.
Her parents said, Elsie, you must now.
We thought that this was just something that
had come like a disease and you'd get
over it.
But now you either must renounce this Jesus
as Messiah or elsewhere, we'll have to disown
you and have a funeral for you.
And Elsie said, Mother, Father, as much as
I love you, I can't do it.
I cannot.
And so the day came when they asked
her to pack her goods.
They took her to the door and they
gave the little formula that said, You're dead,
you're dead, you're dead, you're no longer our
child.
And out they went.
The next day, they had a funeral in
the synagogue.
There was a casket.
There was a picture of Elsie in the
bottom of it.
There were flowers.
The family came.
They passed by it and they wept.
And my mother-in-law was out in
Iowa.
And one of the dear women in Chicago
had learned about Central Holiness University, later John
Fletcher College.
And Elsie Klor went out there and she
roomed with my mother-in-law in those
early days when she was so heartbroken.
She finished her nurses training and she finished
her college and then she went with the
Southern Baptists as a missionary to Jerusalem.
And she was there.
She had no desire to come home.
She stayed with her co-worker, Eunice Henderson,
for many years.
And then she came back on furlough.
Walking down the streets of Chicago one day,
she saw her mother and her father coming.
And she stood there, her face lighted, her
eyes lighted, and her arms outstretched, and mother,
father.
And they parted and walked around her.
She didn't exist.
She was dead.
Not a flicker of an eyelid, not a
facial expression, not a sound escaped that pair
that had buried this girl who had betrayed
them.
Then, one day, a letter came from one
of the sisters to whom Elsie had been
writing, and it said, Mother has been taken
ill.
The doctors think it's terminal.
We know you're not scheduled for a furlough
for another year, but we've talked with the
mission, and if you like, would, they would
let you come home, because mother is asking
for you to tend her at the hospital.
So Elsie came home, and the mother recognized
her.
She said, Now, Elsie, don't talk to me
about your Jesus, but I do want you.
You understand me.
But it's the night when there was nobody
around, when they were alone, when the mother
couldn't sleep, when the pain was so acute.
She'd say, Elsie, is Jesus really the Messiah?
Is he really, is he really the long
-awaited one?
And one night, a few days before she
died, that mother said, Elsie, just to be
quiet.
And she turned her face up and closed
her eyes, and she started to talk to
Messiah Jesus, and she received him.
She said, Don't tell father, it'll kill him.
Don't tell your sisters.
Elsie said, No, I won't, but mother, you
will, because if you love him, you will
confess it.
So it was not long before she died,
they gathered the family, and she said, I
have trusted in Elsie's Messiah.
His, her Jesus is now my Jesus.
And shortly she died.
The father was, wanted to be bitter.
On the other hand, he knew that his
wife had died in peace, that he couldn't
understand.
This is the end of side one.
Please stop the machine at this point and
turn the cassette over.