It All Begins With Love Keith McFarren July 13, 2025 Mark 12:28-34 Are you physically fit? Do you eat right? Do you drink the right amount of water every day? Do you exercise every day? Do you huff and puff when you over exert yourself? We talk a lot today about being physically fit. Run, walk, buy a treadmill, or even buy a fancy home workout machine that has everything built into it that you’ll need so that you can exercise at home and become a new person with abs (abdominal muscles) like steel and biceps so big you can hardly fit into a short sleeved shirt. Think how physically fit Jesus must have been. He was always on the go, always moving from one place to another. Always walking down roads that led into villages and cities…always stopping along the way to talk and teach and heal others. And along the way he picked up new disciples who needed nothing more than a good, sturdy pair of sandals to start their new life. They were constantly on the move…with Jesus always setting the pace and determining where they would go. He lived a reckless, freewheeling lifestyle which meant that everyday life with Jesus was an adventure to say the least. But we can’t fully understand what Jesus was trying to teach until you consider where he teaches it and what the situation is when he arrives. Rather than schmoozing with the elite, Jesus hung out with the social outcasts, and the Gentiles and the Roman soldiers; he hung out with women and people who were physically and mentally ill as well as people who were demon possessed. He chastised the rich and the powerful…and comforted the poor and the vulnerable. And rather than admonish and ridicule sinners, he ate with them and forgave them of their sins. There is a reason Jesus takes his disciples on this fast paced, reckless, no holds barred journey. He is trying to teach them how to love God with all their heart and all their soul and all their mind and with all their strength. But to do so, he also has to teach them to love their neighbor as they love themselves. For us to live out the Great Commandment, to love God and to love our neighbor, we first need to learn to “be love” or to “give love” to those around us. And to do that…so that we can be like Jesus…we have to learn to take risks and be reckless with the love we show to God and the love we show other people. There are 613 commandments in the Hebrew Bible…some of those commandments tell you what to do – “Honor your father and your mother” …and some tell you what not to do – “do not lie” or “do not lust.” But when the teacher asked Jesus for the most important commandment, Jesus didn’t miss a beat – “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Deut. 6:4-6). This commandment was so important for the formation of every generation that the people back in Old Testament times, were told to teach it to their children as soon as possible…and to wear the commandment on their person, and place it on the inside and outside of the doorway of their home so that they would be reminded of it whenever they went out into the world or whenever they returned home to their family. Their love for God was not just a feeling they took to church with them once a week or some type of spiritual high they experienced during their worship service. To love God with all your being was to live life the way God wanted you to live it, not just sometimes, but all the time. The love of God was to be a commitment that came from the heart. This is why Jesus talked so much about the condition of our heart. If we are to love God fully, we have to consider two important questions about our own heart: ·What bad things need to be removed from my heart? ·What good things need to be brought into my heart? There is nothing that helps us examine the true condition of our heart better than the second part of our scripture reading: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31). It’s a commandment that was originally found way back in Leviticus 19:18, but Jesus has taken it and created one essential statement that creates a necessary priority for the life of anyone who decides to follow him. And there is nothing wrong with that…it is a good idea to love your neighbor…but when you stop and think who your neighbor is, it is sometimes easier said than done because we don’t always get along with our neighbor. In fact, we don’t even like some of our neighbors because they think and look and act and believe differently than we do. And if we go one step further, we could say that there are even times in our lives when we have a hard time loving those who are closest to us. Families have conflicts. Husbands and wives have conflicts with each other and with their children and grandchildren. We get mad and we hold grudges and those grudges turn to hatred because of what someone said or did to us. Loving others sounds good, but it can sometimes be a tall order. But when we learn to love God through Jesus Christ and we make a commitment to follow him as a disciple, our lives are going to begin to be filled with qualities and desires that weren’t there before our decision to follow him. Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, lists some of those qualities as being “…love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23). But it is only when we make the heartfelt commitment to love our neighbor and then set out to intentionally uphold that commitment that we will really learn what it means to fully love God. Nothing, writes Tom Berlin, reveals what keeps us from fully loving God more than attempting to love our neighbor (Tom Berlin, Reckless Love, Nashville, Tennessee; Abingdon Press, 2019, 21). If you have ever owned a boat you know how difficult it is to keep the underside of your boat clean. That’s because all sorts of bacteria and algae collect together on the underside of your boat to create a type of biofilm on the hull of the boat which then creates a perfect condition for slime to form….a condition called fouling or biofouling. Our lives are a lot like the hull or the underside of a boat. As we go through life we’re faced with all sorts of sinful habits, disappointments, and relational wounds…and over a period of time, all these negative things begin to collect together and they all begin to attack our personalities. Unfortunately, when we’re attacked by negativity and hurtful words and actions, rather than reaching out in love we turn inward and we become selfish and we begin to care only about ourselves. And when we care only about ourselves bad things begin to attach themselves to us like the slime on the hull of a ship and like the hull of a ship, we experience sin-fouling of the soul. Sin-fouling of the soul can impact not only us, but it can also impact the people around us because it negatively changes our relationship with other people. Sin-fouled people who were once happy become depressed. Hopeful people become pessimistic or cynical. Once our lives become sin-fouled, people who were once kind and gracious to others suddenly find themselves becoming unforgiving of others. But here’s the good part. Just as there are treatments to remove the filth and the grime and the crud from the hulls of boats, there is also a treatment for people with sin-fouled lives…and that treatment comes from yoking together the two commandments that Jesus talks about – love God and love your neighbor. Once we make the decision to love God, our eyes are opened and we can suddenly see the dirt and the crud and the slime that’s sticking to our hearts and our souls…all stuff that needs to be removed. It’s as though the light of God’s love allows us to see what’s going on inside of us. It’s as though the light of God’s love allows us to suddenly see the grudges and the animosity and the hatred and the bigotry that has become an unwanted part of our personality. But know that it isn’t easy loving our neighbor because we have to realize that one imperfect, sinful person is attempting to love another imperfect, sinful person…and without God’s help the chances of everything working isn’t very good. We can’t do it ourselves…we’re going to need God’s help. “The hardest spiritual work in the world” writes Barbara Brown Taylor, “is to love the neighbor as the self – to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, or change, or control…but simply as someone who can spring you from the person of yourself, if you will allow it” (Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith, New York, New York; Harper Collins, 2009, 93). Love God and love your neighbor. Jesus linked these two commandments together in such a way that they connect and form a perfect circle…meaning that when we love both God and neighbor we enter into a virtuous, continual cycle that works to transform our lives. Loving God enables me to fully love my neighbor, and loving my neighbor enables me to fully love God…and until I learn to love my neighbor, I will never be able to fully love God. Let me finish this morning with a quote from author Anne Lamott. She says: “You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do” (Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird). It’s not up to you to decide who your neighbor is and who your neighbor isn’t. Your neighbor doesn’t have to look like you or believe like you. It doesn’t matter what color your neighbor is or what their religion or politics is. It doesn’t even matter if your neighbor is gay or straight or somewhere in between. Your neighbor is everyone. Your neighbor is here, he’s there, he’s everywhere. He’s in this church. He’s next door. He’s across town. He’s across the country. He’s on the other side of the world. I’m sure Jesus was in pretty good physical shape because he walked so much. And there is nothing wrong with being in good physical shape. But we also need to be in good spiritual shape as well. Being in good spiritual shape begins in our heart with emulating Jesus and following his commands. Love is not just a principle we believe in. It is not just a target we set our sights on and hope to achieve. It’s not just for those we think deserve it. Love is a Christian commitment that sets the course of our daily lives. It is vital in the conversations we have with other people. It is vital in the assumptions we make about other people. And it is vital in the actions we take against other people (Berlin, 29). It all goes hand in hand with Jesus and his reckless love and the way he reaches out to everyone, even to those whom we might think don’t deserve his love…or ours. Let the love of God change your heart and soul as you work to honor the Great Commandment of loving God and loving your neighbor. |