He answered, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself."

Read a poem by Arthur Amon called "Too many ands . . ."

The man who came to see Jesus this time was well respected. And was certainly no fool. Back then, 2000 years ago, he had a very important job—he was a part of a group of people who wrote down the variations of the laws of Moses and then taught the law or acted as judges in disputes over the law. They were in short lawyers.

Now to put a contemporary spin on this, we regard lawyers quite highly. I’ve got a book in my office written by a lawyer about our faith. The fact that he’s a lawyer gives it credibility that he’s got well thought out arguments for our faith. “The case of the empty tomb : a lawyer examines the evidence” and concludes that the fact that Jesus rose from the dead would stack up in a courtroom. When we hear a lawyer agrees with us, we automatically feel as though we are on the right track.

So on this particular day Jesus was probably teaching a group of people who were sitting around him. And it was going quite swimmingly I’m sure. People would have been quite impressed with what he was saying. And this lawyer dude had come to sit in on the discussion, not to learn, but to test Jesus.

After Jesus had finished his seminar, he probably opened the meeting up for questions and answers. This lawyer had sat patiently through the whole thing and came with this one question that he though would totally upset Jesus’ applecart and discredit him in front of everyone. He’d been itching to do this all through the meeting and finally got his chance.

He stood. “Teacher,” just the way he said this with sarcasm dripping like honey from his mouth, set the tone for the rest of the discussion. He didn’t really think Jesus was a teacher as such, but he did need to follow protocol and be at least civil with how he was going to destroy him with his question.

“Teacher, what do I have to do to get into heaven?”

To be honest I’m not sure what it is that was tricky about this question apart from the fact that it would be very difficult to narrow it down to one particular thing. So I think Jesus handled it well (wink). Jesus saw right through the man and saw his motivation was to be tricky. So Jesus answered a question with a question : but not just any question.

See Jesus knew how the discussions between these lawyers went. There were formal procedures and blah de blah that they all went through and it made them appear quite courteous. So Jesus used a formal “scribe” worded question right back at him.

“What is written in the Law? How do you read it?”

in other words, get to the bible and find out, but more specifically the first 5 books of the Old Testament which this guy had actually memorised word for word. These are the books of the law where we learn about how Israel was to live as a dynamic act of continual worship to God.

The law was set up to make sure that every aspect of life could be God-oriented : even the way that we made clothing, or prepared meals. It was easier and harder. Easier because they knew what was required of them to be holy, but harder because it was just impossible to follow it to the letter. So without an understanding of the love of God, the law became a terrible burden. So the lawyer was challenged by Jesus first to find the answer in the bible.

The second thing that Jesus had done with this was use the formal lawyer language and protocol to ask the question. The lawyers, whenever they debated something would be very polite and ask each other, “well how do you read it?”

In short, Jesus was playing his game and playing it well.

The lawyer was unphased by it all, though it did knock the sarcasm out of him. He became aware of all the people around him dangling his reputation in front of him. People are fickle with reputations, always ready to let them be destroyed. And here he was, he realised he’d put a lot on the line here. People were expecting a decent answer from him. But this wasn’t going at all well. Jesus was answering a question with a question, he was supposed to give a wrong answer that the scribe could skilfully dismantle in front of the crowd, job done. But here he had to leave his plan behind for awhile.

“Well, how I read it is like this. I think there’s two laws that sum it up pretty well. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind. that’s the first part, and I thought I’d add mind in there because Deuteronomy seems to neglect that, though it is implicit in the rest of the law.

“The second law is to ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’.” The scribe threw a satisfied smile in Jesus face.

Oohh, exclaimed some of the crowd, they were impressed. He’s done very well and their eyes tennissed to Jesus : the ball was in his court now.

Jesus, caught the ball in mid air and stopped the game improperly. “Ok, that’s a really good answer and I agree. Do those things and you will live.”

So that was that. Not very spicy, almost meaningless. Nothing was proven, the scribe was neither humiliated nor triumphant. It was just a flat little exchange that seemed to have no point to it. People let his reputation slip just a little for not demonstrating anything really clever like he was supposed to.

The scribe sensed this disappointment. And thought he should act.

“Just before I sit I just want to clarify something with you. Who exactly is my neighbour?”

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Deconstruction is always a good way to get off the hook.

Who is my neighbour? If you can’t define neighbour, then you can’t love them can you. This man lived his life to be holy, which means spiritually set apart except he’d got confused and dropped the spiritual aspect so that he was simply set apart from other people, he had spent his life defining himself against what other people were, because he saw them as profane, unholy, pagans, filthy, unrighteous, sinners, dirty, dishonest. These were people who if he hung around with according to the law they would make him unclean. Surely he wasn’t to love these? Love good and hate evil : these people were evil, therefore they need be hated.

Want proof from the bible that he should spurn these unholy people? Why else did God order that the Israelites destroy the inhabitants of Canaan before they took over the land? Because they were unholy!

So the scribe knew how he defined neighbour, maybe he was looking to trip Jesus up with contradictions about how Jesus lived his life among the unrighteous and sinners. Anyway, if you can define neighbour with shades of selective grey, if you could define neighbour as people you like, or already get along with, then getting eternal life is easy.

The problem is, if you believe something is wrong, it doesn’t make it wrong. For example. You can believe for all your hearts content that a knife is blunt, but if it’s actually sharp, your belief won’t stop it from piercing your skin. Or you can believe all you want that that red electrical wire hanging out of the wall isn’t live, but if it is, your belief will not stop you from feeling the effects of electricity if you touch it.

You can believe all you want that you can get to heaven by just being nice to people, but it won’t change the rules, that actually it’s not about how nice you are, but about whether or not you actively pursue relationship with God.

Redefining neighbour was all this scribe had to do to let him off the hook in his own mind, it discharged him of having to be responsible for the poor and needy, but that didn’t change the fact that this is what was required of him.

Let’s get into our small groups again. Let’s take one aspect of this idea of loving God with heart and soul and mind and strength. Define one of them.

It’s a dangerous thing to start finding out what these things mean. When we don’t do it, when we let those words just be, then we can sidestep them can’t we. Nice abstract and big cloudy all-encompassing non-specific words. Each carrying unique definitions of self inside tiny four and eight letter packages. Define soul, heart, mind, strength.

Throw them all together? “Love God with everything.” That’s the message from the verse.

Everything. Let’s throw out some examples of what a piece of everything might mean.

Everything. I like how Rick Warren talks about surrender in the book but I don’t think he goes far enough. If you think about surrender in military terms it means to stop fighting and put yourself at the mercy of the others. It’s an acknowledgement that you can’t win. There it is in a nutshell. When we stop fighting God and put ourselves at his mercy then we start to experience transformation and are able to offer worship.

This is what worship is about, it’s about giving pleasure to God, which is through a dedication to righteously serving him and other people. That dedication is about actions. What we do in these services represents only the tiniest fraction of worship.

When Paul says in Romans 12 that we should offer our bodies as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God, for this is true act of spiritual worship,” we need to take seriously the “holy and acceptable” part of that scripture. He has gone to great lengths in his letter to the Roman Church to explain to them that we are saved not through anything that we do, but by God’s gift of grace alone. It’s not that we deserve anything, it’s that God has given it to us by his choice not because we’ve done anything good. But the point is that there is a response to this gift of love from God and that is worship and let me tell you—it’s not singing songs. This is the constant laying down of our beings at the feet of Jesus.

When Paul talks about worship, he’s not talking about singing songs. Very rarely does he even mention singing, instead he constantly talks about living lives full of divinely inspired love. That our lives that are being transformed are being transformed into being good singers and good prayers? NO! That we are being transformed into being people who love God and love others.

So what is this then that we do on Sundays? I think it’s about support and encouragement, building each other up and praying for each other. Let’s read Romans 12.

We sang a song this morning, that said that we’re getting back to the heart of worship and that it’s all about God. It’s half right. Yes it’s about God, but it’s also about others. The heart of worship is also about making ourselves available to God at all times.

Love God and love people. That’s the golden rule. Not simply, Love God. Love God and love people. Jesus didn’t demonstrate just love for God, but also love for people. If we do all the right things but do not have love then we are clanging gongs.

Everything. Heart, soul, mind and strength. Why would we even attempt such an impossible feat? We will surely fail at it. We do fail at it. I challenge anyone here to say that they live in complete surrender to Jesus. So if we fail then why does God call us to try?

There are two spirals here. One is upward and one is downward and which way we spiral depends an awful lot on how we view the Christian life.

If the Christian’s success is measured by how well we live, then we will always fail and we will spiral downwards. This is what has become known as a works based faith. We try to live righteously for God’s approval, but never succeed, because we find something else that we’re not doing right and so we keep feeling low about ourselves because we will always fall short. We feel that if we fail at living righteously then God thinks of us as despicable and that he is constantly angry with us. We get caught up with how vile we are and I think this pushes us further from God. We do not understand his grace, only his wrath.

The upward spiral is this. That if we acknowledge that we can’t do anything to earn God’s favour or love, but accept this as a gift, that he actually wants us to be blameless in his eyes, that means that God’s desire is to see us as washed clean of all our sin and simply establish a relationship with him, then the spiral is towards him. As we realise we are made righteous by his love, we are thankful and brought closer to him. And as we are brought closer to him we respond with love. As we find some sense of freedom from the bondages that we feel in this world we begin to want to live more for him. We are drawn into a positive spiral.

In the first spiral our relationship with God is damaged by the fact that we think he despises us because we are sinful and therefore we must be punished. The second spiral accepts our sinfulness as a given but that God loves us so much that he wants sin to not be a barrier. So the thing that keeps the relationship between us and God is our acknowledgement of our sinfulness and acknowledgement of the fact that God is not wanting to punish us, but wanting to restore us. If that doesn’t inspire us to love him what will?

And worship becomes our gratitude for that fact.

Giving all to God is the least we can do because he gave all for us.

The scribe looked at Jesus and waited for a response. “Who is my neighbour?” was his question. He tried to wheedle out of the commitment to the rule by asking a question that he didn’t want an answer to. He wanted neighbour to be indefinable. He didn’t want to know the answer because he wanted to carry on as he always had. I suspect that we are all afraid of defining the words that are in the verse.

What is my mind, or my heart, or my strength or my soul, really? They’re difficult to define, so why try? Let’s keep the law as an ideal, not as a way of life.

We might do the same because we don’t want to have to change from where we are — because to acknowledge the things that hurt us and break us we think is just too much for us to bear. But in spite of the worst of the worst that you think you are, God loves you. And you can’t escape it. But you can embrace it : that’s what being a Christian is all about.