Life Baptist Church: 2012 Vision- The Great Commandment, the Great Commission, and the Good Samaritan

This is an excerpt of our New Year’s Day service.

I want to begin by reading the Great Commandment and the Great Commission texts and toward the end we will get to the main text, the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Luke 10
…‘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, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’

Matt 28
18 Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

The Greatest Commandment and the Great Commission. One is the greatest commandment because Jesus himself said it is the greatest and therefore most important commandment. And the other one, the Great Commission, is Jesus’ farewell address, his final words to his disciples prior to his ascension after his death and resurrection. If you are on your death bed, for your family members, your final words would hold a lot of weight. Your loved ones would pay close attention to what was said. In the same way, the Great Commandment is important because Jesus said it was important, but also, the Great Commission is important because it was Jesus’ final words to us.

Love God, love neighbors, make disciples of all nations–all 3 have to be pursued simultaneously.

How do you do that? That’s why living out Christian life is messy. Which one is a priority, which one should be done first, is there an order we should follow? No, there is no order because in my reading of Scripture, all 3 are fundamentals. Like legs of a tripod, you take away a leg and the tripod will fall down.

If one of these 3 components is missing, your spiritual life will fall down and not take off as it should.

Clearly, we know that what passes for spirituality today, the kind of ME-first, self-centered, God-you-need-to-meet-my-needs, that kind of faith we know is a distortion of the Bible. God does meet our greatest needs. He forgave me of my sins and so let me spend the rest of my life loving him–we know that’s a good first step but that is like reading the opening chapter of a book and then closing it. You miss the character development, the twists in the story, the conclusion if all you do is to read the first few pages.

The same goes for the Christian life. It’s more than just living in a monastery and praying and reading the Bible all day and feeling close to God in a devotional sense. Love, according to the Bible, is not a fuzzy emotion. In John, 14:21, John links love with obedience.

John 14
21 Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and show myself to him.

If we love God, we will obey him. And what should we obey? I believe it has to be related to the Great Commandment and the Great Commission.

And therein lies the tension. We are not spirits so we can only be at one place at a time and only do one thing at a time. There is a tension between loving God and loving neighbor. There is a tension between loving my family and loving those outside the family. There is a tension between loving my actual neighbors, meaning those I spend most of my time with–my wife and my kids, perhaps my friend down the street–and loving those outside my immediate sphere of contact. There is a tension between loving those within the church and the stranger, those outside the church. There is a tension between building up the local church and equipping the saints and releasing our members for works that will take them outside our local context. There is a tension between local evangelism and local missions and God’s call which for some will take us to places where the gospel has not yet been preached. Amen.

Life Baptist Church, 2750 New York Dr., Pasadena, email info@life-baptist.org or visit www.life-baptist.org.