Joel Snider's Sermons from FBC Rome

November 18, 2007

Loving God—With All You Are

Mark 12:28-30

There is a book that is making the rounds in religious circles. It has a very interesting name. It is called The Year of Living Biblically. The author is A. J. Jacobs, and if you have not seen him on the talk shows or heard about this book, you might be a little surprised, I guess, about some of the content.

Jacobs is an ethnic Jew but not a practicing person of religion so he decided that he would collect all the commandments of the Bible, and for a year tried to live keeping them all. He came up with a little more than 700, and even though his heritage was Jewish, he decided that it wouldn’t be fair if he didn’t take New Testament and Old Testament alike so he did this and then wrote his experiences about it. Some of the wise and life-changing laws he found were things like keeping the Sabbath. He said it is really a good thing that people have ignored this gift from God to take one day out of seven and not work.

Another one that he listed as wise and life changing was wearing white. He said that way you can always tell the good guys from the bad guys.

A third one was giving thanks. Giving thanks just helps make life better. We will talk about that a little bit next week. He said there were some he was able to keep all year, like he did not marry his wife’s sister which is precluded in the Book of Leviticus, nor did he plant two types of seed in a field which is also in Leviticus. That is kind of like my New Year’s resolutions. I haven’t had turnip greens in about 15 years, and it is always my New Year’s resolution not to eat turnip greens this year.

On his website, he has a page that says, “You, too, can live biblically.” Some of the things he suggests if you would like to live biblically are: one, wear sandals. He said they are really cool and really comfortable. Another one was eat Ezekiel bread which I was not familiar with. And a third one was drink goat’s milk which I don’t want to be familiar with. These were the things that he said he did or tried to do to live biblically.

I had heard about this book and it came to me late in the preparation, and late in the week, I could not find a copy of it. So I have to confess, I have not read it, but either Jacobs or his reviewers have, I think, taken the easy way out and have focused on the trite and avoided the most important. If I wanted to live a year biblically, sandals, goat’s milk, and burning myrrh in my house as an offering to God would be child’s play compared to loving God with every ounce of my being.

Maybe he includes that in the book, but it is not in anything that I could find in reviews about the book. It’s all about these silly, Levitical laws that obviously have no bearing on our lives today, and dropping the weightier things like, “Teacher, what is the greatest commandment of them all.” The greatest is, “O Israel, the Lord our God is one and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.”

Now, you take 700 commandments and you whittle them all down and really there is only one. If that is the only commandment, it is everything. I have quoted it before, but Martin Luther said it so well. He said, “Love God and then do as you please because once you have loved God, then there are certain things that you can no longer do. If you love God truly, then there are some things that you now must do simply because you love God. Love God, and then do as you please.” That’s all we really need, isn’t it? Not 700 commandments, just one. “Love God and do as you please.”

The prayer that Jesus actually prayed in ancient Judaism—and Judaism goes by the first word in Hebrew, Shema Yisrael, “Hear, O Israel.” It’s much like, in some traditions, the Lord’s Prayer is called the “Our Father.” It is the first words in the prayer. Jesus didn’t make this up. They didn’t say, “Hey Jesus, make us up one commandment that is better than all the rest. It comes from the Book of Deuteronomy 6:5, and is mentioned or at least referenced six other times in the Book of Deuteronomy. It is what is held up to be the summary of all of the law. It is held up to be what does capsulize everything. In Matthew and Mark, Jesus is asked, “What is the greatest commandment?” and he answers this. In Luke, it takes a slightly different twist. Someone says, “Teacher, what’s the greatest commandment?” and he says, “Well, you tell me how you read it. What do you think?” And the person who asked the question says, “Well, I guess it would be, ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one and you shall love the Lord your God with all you are…” and Jesus said, “Good answer. Good answer. Great answer. You are right.” This is the epitome of what it means to be a Christian, what it means to follow God.

If you pick up the book, I assume his picture is probably on the jacket somewhere, or if you go to the internet and search Year of Living Biblically, you will find his website and see his picture, and I have to tell you, he looks a little bit like the Uni-bomber. He is wearing this white gown through the streets of New York, I think, and since one of the laws is, “Don’t let a razor touch your beard,” he has this kind of wild man’s face with a beard and so forth. It makes a joke of what it would mean to live biblically. What would my life look like if I lived biblically for a year and if I understood that to mean love God with all my heart, with all my soul, and with all my strength? What would my life look like if they took a picture of me somewhere and put it on the internet and said, “Here is what this person looks like who has tried to live biblically for a year” but we understood it according to what Jesus has said is the great commandment. What would my life look like? What would yours look like? How would it be different?

For me, this is a perplexing thing as a pastor because it is easy to say that we should love God more. All of us, we all know that we ought to love God more, but what do you? How do you do it? If you really say, “OK, I want to love God with all my heart, with all my mind, with all my soul, and with all my strength. What am I going to do? What are some actions that I can take?” It’s one thing to say that we should, but it’s another thing to say how?

I tried to think of ways that we could learn something from loving one another and things that we do when we love each other that might give us some insights into this and my mind started going towards things that happened when people don’t love each other, particularly when they did and don’t love each other as much as they have before. I think about friendships, I think about marriages, I think about other deep relationships and things that go south, and some of the things that I hear are: “Well, she just takes me for granted. She just takes me for granted.” Who in a friendship or a marriage or another deep relationship of life wants to have a sense that there is no appreciation, wants to have a sense that the person assumes without any sense of return obligation, that there is a sense of being devalued. When that happens, how do you get out of that? If you want to turn back around and love more, don’t you really have to think about what the other person does? Don’t you really have to think about what the other person gives you, what the other person does for you? Don’t you have to take a little bit of time to ponder what that relationship has meant in your life? If we are going to love God more, then don’t we have to take some time to really think about what that means and not just assume that because our name is on a church register some place that that means we love God?

Another thing, a lack of communication. “You never call me anymore. We never talk anymore?” Do you hear that? Have you ever experienced that in a good relationship? If I stand up here and say, “So, therefore, we all ought to pray more.” That sounds so preacher-like to me it makes me a little ill. But it’s one thing to say, “You ought to pray more,” and it’s another thing to say, “Do you realize that we have this opportunity to communicate with the creator of the universe? We have this opportunity to speak to, and hear from, God. And God cares about our lives, and God wants to invest in our lives, and the way that we let God do that is by praying and listening. The way that the deepest concerns of our lives get some help is by lifting them up to God. That’s not a should or an ought, but that is a great thing that we could do. If we truly want to love God more, we would do what we do with our best friends or with a spouse and we would communicate a little bit better.

Another place where it seems to me where we can see love breaking a little bit are those time when we are selfish. Someone says, “I used to be friends with him but he sucked the life out of me. All he was ever thinking about was himself.” If we are truly going to love, then there has to be some giving of ourselves, doesn’t there? It’s not 50/50. It’s 100/100 that we all have to give. If we are truly going to love God, then somehow I am going to have to give something of myself to God, don’t I? It doesn’t mean you have to be a missionary or a pastor or some other type of minister, but there are ways that we can give our lives to God.

If there is any committee in the church that I would like to change the name of it would be the Stewardship Committee because when people hear that, they start thinking about money. If you are a guest, we are glad for you to listen in, but to our membership was mailed a card like this. There are two parts to it. It is perforated so that I can tear it. On one side, there is a list of suggestions that I could do if I ever wanted to do things to show God that I will love more next year. Check them off. But the other side just simply has blank lines and it says, A whole new list of ways to show my love for God. The first side is the easy side. The other side is the side where I have to pray about it and think, “If I was going to live biblically and love God with all my heart, my soul, my mind, my strength, and every ounce of my being, what am I going to write down here that is different than the people on the pew in front of me or behind me or over across the church from me or upstairs or downstairs. What is it that I know I want to do, that I need to do, that would be a way of indicating to God that I love God more?”

This could be just a mechanical exercise. You could just say, “I will check that, stick it in my Bible, and pull it out in August and see if I am still doing any of those things.” But it could be a great spiritual exercise where I really think about what would my life look like, what would I be doing if I loved God this way.

There is a card that we ask people to turn in and that side has about your offering. I am not going to preach the last two sermons over again, but we have talked over the last two weeks about how we spend our money shapes who we are, and it shapes what we care about. I think money, more than anything else, is an extension of our lives and our hearts and is a way of giving ourselves to God as nothing else is.

Why do you write these down? Let me use this illustration. You decide you want to lose 15 pounds or you want to quit smoking or some hard thing, something that there is in our lives that is very difficult. It’s one thing if I say in my mind on New Year’s Day, “I think I am going to lose 15 pounds this year.” But when I say it out loud to someone else, all of a sudden there is a new accountability to it. All of a sudden, it takes on a life that it didn’t have before. I can forget, I can say, “I was just kidding,” I can say, “What was I thinking when I thought that,” but when I write it down and have taken the effort and the energy, somehow it takes on a new life that it didn’t have before.

It’s the same thing if we write these down. It is very easy when you get your card to say, “OK. I see that part, A whole new list of things I can do to show my love for God. I’ll write that down later.” We do that, why? Because it gets a little threatening to write it down. True, even for a pastor. So I made myself do it—not because I am a pastor but because I am a Christian and because I wanted to indicate what I might do to love God better.

So what does your life look like if you live a year or a lifetime biblically? What does your life look like if you say, “I mean this and I want to love God with all my heart, with all my soul, with all my mind, with all my strength. I mean this.”

What does your life look like? You have a chance to shape that today.

Copyright 2007. P. Joel Snider. All rights reserved.

Back to top

2007© First Baptist Church of Rome Georgia