Who Do You Say That I Am? "The Teacher of Love"

Good morning. It's good to be together. If we haven't met, my name is Josh and I'm glad that you chose to be with us this morning. I've said it many times, but if you're new around here, you should know you walked into a room full of plain old normal people, people that walked in with our own baggage and sin and insecurities, our own wounds. And we're all pursuing Jesus together.

So whatever you brought in today, us two, us too. We hope you feel welcome. We hope you feel seen here. If you'd like to connect at all here at Whitewater, the best step toward community or getting to know some people or serving or just if you have questions is to go out to the Enfro desk out in the foyer and meet our team there and you can take a step Just four weeks, it's going to be Easter. We, we get to celebrate Resurrection Sunday together.

We have several things going on that week of Holy Week. We've got a dinner on Thursday night, We got a Good Friday service, and we're going to have three Easter services. One on Saturday night at 6:30 and then two at a regular time on Sunday morning. You can find out more information and extra details of all of that on our Easter Landing page on our website. It's just whitewatercrossing.org easter so check that out.

We'll talk about that more next week and in the coming weeks. And I'd encourage you to be praying about who God might want you to be inviting to come with you to Easter services. Maybe it's your one more that person that's closest to you but furthest from Jesus. Hopefully you've been praying for them already. Easter is a perfect opportunity.

People are willing to come if we'd invite them to come. So check out the Easter Landing page. Be praying for who God might want you you to be bringing with you today. We're in week 10. It's hard to believe week 10 of our study through the Book of Mark.

I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I have. Like I've been enjoying this so much.

Just I, I mean I've read through the Book of Mark, but it just reminds me how living and active the Word of God is that as we kind of slow down and pull this out together and look at it together, I've learned so much about who Jesus is and what God's doing. His kingdom. The whole series has revolved around that question that Jesus asked his disciples. Who do you say that I am? A couple weeks ago the whole book kind of.

We said it was like a teeter totter that tipped over and we shifted in focus from who Jesus is to what it actually means to follow him. And as we get closer to what we know is coming, Jesus willingly going to the cross, Mark keeps just kind of turning up the heat, what true discipleship looks like. And the disciples are struggling with fear and insecurity and misunderstanding and selfish ambition. And when we read their story, we realize we're just like them, aren't we? So before we dig in, let's ask God to help us see what Mark is trying to teach us today.

Holy Spirit, we ask for you to open our eyes and our ears, till up the soil of our hearts and prepare your word today like seeds of eternal significance that are planted in us today that we can draw on future fruit for your kingdom. So be glorified today. Speak through me and help us to hear just what you want us to hear. In Jesus name, Amen. When my two oldest kids, Ada and Garrett, were young, they decided that they wanted to sleep out on the deck in a cardboard box in August.

Their imaginations were huge. Their confidence was, let's just say, not entirely connected to reality. Right. Heidi and I looked at each other and said, this will last 20 minutes. Let me show you a video of how it started.

Tell me what you're doing. We are going camping. We were going camping on a little fort we made on the deck. What's it made out of? Cardboard box.

And we are gonna sleep in it tonight. All night? Yes. If we get scared, we'll come in. We don't have an alarm clock, but you think that you'll need us to wake you up in the morning?

No, you won't. We know when it's morning time. Okay. I know when it's morning. How old are you guys now?

Five and four? Six. And she's five and I'm four. No, I'm six.

You think you can last all night? Yes. All right, great. We'll walk you down. We'll play with you, too.

Oh, yeah. It doesn't really close. Okay. Because it will. You want me to tape it up?

No, it would not. All right, Let me see inside. Light it up for me. Okay. Light it up.

That's it, huh? Huh? Yes. All right. And there's a TV in the back.

TV in the back. A tv, huh? Show me the tv. We can't. Oh, okay.

Because there's the TV show. There's the tv. Okay. TV is back here. Okay.

I showed you. Were they not the Cutest. I mean, seriously. Now, to their credit, they lasted more than an hour in this box. And I may or may not have gone around from the front of the house back into the woods and made wolf sounds in the woods to scare them back into the house so that I could go to bed.

Here's the thing. They really believed that they were ready for this. In their minds, this was going to be epic. Like, it was going to be adventure, independence. They had enthusiasm.

They had confidence. What they didn't have was any real understanding of what it actually feels like to sleep in a cardboard box with no ventilation and 100% humidity.

And as Heidi and I watched their bold little optimism, we had this mixture of affection, awareness. They thought they knew what they were signing up for. We knew that the night was really going to demand something more from them than what they could imagine. And this is how I imagine the disciples are with Jesus. They think they're ready to boldly step into this new kingdom, but they don't really grasp the cost following Jesus.

Last week, Russ talked about that moment where James and John, they pulled Jesus aside and they're like, hey, Jesus, what do you think about me getting on your right side, my brother being on your left side? We can sit at your side in glory. They're thinking about power and influence. They see adventure. They want the best seats in the kingdom that they think Jesus is about to establish.

And Jesus looks at them and he says, can you drink the cup I'm about to drink? In other words, do you understand what this is going to cost? And with the confidence of kids climbing into a cardboard box, they go, mm, yeah, we can do this.

But they have no idea what this cup is really gonna require. And it's not like Jesus was hiding it from them. He's been very clear. He said, if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. Well, then Mark keeps uncovering more and more of what matters in the kingdom.

We get this scene where people are bringing children to Jesus for him to bless them. And the disciples try to push them away because kids don't seem important. And Jesus flips the whole thing on its head and he says, unless you become like one of these, like a child, you'll never enter the kingdom of heaven. The kingdom isn't about status. It's about simple faith.

We get another scene where a rich young ruler asks Jesus, what must I do to be saved to inherit eternal life? And Jesus says, sell everything you have and give it to the poor. Why not? Because that is the most single important thing in the kingdom. But because Jesus knows that wealth and stuff is what's seated on the throne inside of this guy's heart.

And the man walks away sorrowful, it says, because he had so many possessions. Then we get this request from James and John for power and position. And Jesus says, you don't understand. The kingdom is not about climbing higher and higher. The kingdom is actually about getting lower.

He said, even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. Jesus keeps pulling back the curtain. More cost, more surrender, more clarity about what his kingdom really requires. And today we arrive at a moment where, after all the questions about power and position and inheritance, someone finally asks a different kind of question. Not about status, but a genuine desire to know what matters.

And Jesus response should immediately grab our attention. He doesn't give a long answer. He doesn't give us a list of things that we have to do. It's not a complicated system. He goes straight to the center.

And he says, basically, if you get this part, if you understand what I'm about to say and you actually live it, then you get it. Mark 12, starting in verse 28. And one of the scribes, that's one of the teachers of the law, came up and heard them disputing with one another and seeing that Jesus had answered them well, what has been going on is all these people are trying to trap Jesus with difficult questions, and Jesus has been answering them well. The scribe is like, I like this guy. He asks him, which commandment is the most important of all?

In other words, the guy asks Jesus, if we only get one thing right, what's the most important thing to get right? If everything else falls away, what stands at the center? What single commandment is the central pillar that everything else is built on? Now, by this point in Jewish history, they had identified 613 commandments that they followed. 613.

Every detail mattered. Every command carried weight. Faithful Jews took obedience to these commands very seriously. So the question, which commandment is the greatest? It might seem odd.

It was actually a question that was normal among the rabbis. They would debate what was the greatest commandment. They would discuss which commandments were heavier, which ones were lighter, which ones summarized the rest? Which ones carried the most weight? This was a legitimate question.

Out of all of it, what matters most? And don't miss the timing of all this. This is Tuesday. Jesus will be on a cross. On Friday, the crowds are swelling in Jerusalem because it's Passover, the town goes from about 40,000 people to 200 to 250,000 people in a short period of time.

The religious leaders are plotting. The tension is rising. Jesus has ridden in on a donkey, which we'll talk about in a few weeks, and palm branches and hosanna. He's flipped tables and called them snakes and robbers.

In the middle of this, this is what Jesus gives as an answer. Verse 29, Jesus answered, the most important is this. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. Now, to us, this probably sounds familiar if we've been around the church at all. But for them, this probably was the most familiar command that they would have known in their lives.

They practice this every morning and every evening. It comes from Deuteronomy, chapter 6. It's called the Shema. It's what Moses says. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. That first word, hear, Hear, O Israel. Here is the Hebrew word shema. But it doesn't mean just listening with your ears the way that we use that word most of the time in Hebrew. Thinking, hearing, and obeying.

They weren't actually separate ideas. Shema goes beyond simple detecting sound. It includes listening, reflecting, and responding. To truly, Shema meant you received the words in a way that changed how you lived. To hear was to respond.

Faithful Jews would recite this every morning and every evening. Parents taught it to their children. It was literally on the door frames of their homes. Some even carried it in these little leather boxes that they would tie around their arm or on their forehead. They were called phylacteries.

Shema is a daily declaration that there is one God, as opposed to all of the other nations around them that have many gods, and that every part of their lives, their heart, their soul, their mind, their strength, belongs to him. The Shema is the foundation that every decision that we are supposed to make is to be built on. So when Jesus is asked what matters most, this is where he starts. And it wouldn't have been a surprise to them at all. He makes it very clear that this ancient practice, yes, this is still the most central peace.

But if the most important thing for us to understand and live out is loving God with all that we have and all that we are, then we should be asking the question, where does that kind of love come from?

Because we live in a world where love often feels conditional, fickle, circumstantial. Love happens to us. The heart wants what it wants. We don't control love. Right.

So how do we actually grow in loving God with our whole selves? I love the way Matt Chandler puts this. He's a preacher down in Dallas, Texas. He says there are things that stir our affections for God, and there are things that rob our affections for God. Think about it this way.

Take any hobby or interest that you have. Whatever it is, there are things that stir up your affection for that and things that slowly rob it. Take golf, for example. I don't golf, but take golf, for example. There are things that make you want to play more golf.

Watching a really good tournament on tv, getting a lesson that fixes your swing, playing with friends you enjoy, or walking out on an incredible course on a perfect day. All this stirs your affection to play the game. But there are also things that can rob your affection, which is why I don't play.

Always playing with people who are way better than you, shanking the ball into the trees every time you tee off and not having any clue how to solve that problem. I've heard that's really frustrating.

Using clubs that don't fit you, playing in terrible weather, playing with people you don't actually like.

So what do people who love golf and want to love golf more do? Well, they intentionally pursue the things that stir their affection, and they try to minimize the things that rob their affection. Right. If you love cooking, you watch cooking shows. You try new recipes, you buy interesting, good ingredients.

If you love fitness, you follow trainers. You track your progress. You surround yourself with people who push you. If you love music, you listen to it constantly. You learn about it.

You go to concerts, you play an instrument. When we truly love something, the practices that stir our affection for it don't feel like obligations. They feel natural. They're done with joy. In fact, most of the time, we have to limit how much we do them because we still have a family or a job or other responsibilities.

But for whatever reason, when it comes to God, we just assume that love for him should just kind of appear like if it's there, it's good, and if it's not there, well, wait for the wind to blow.

And the very things that might stir our affection for him, they start to feel like burdens. Reading scripture feels like homework. Prayer feels like this obligatory task. Gathering in church with other believers like this on Sunday morning is just another thing on our calendars. To fulfill.

And statistics say on a good day, Our average is 1.9 times a month.

Giving feels like it's taking from us. Serving feels like a part time job that we don't want to go to. But what if those things were actually meant not to be obligations? What if they are actually the environments where our love for God grows? What if the practices we sometimes treat like chores are actually the very things that stir our affections?

When we open the scriptures, we're not just checking off a box or learning something cognitively. We're putting ourselves in the place where we can see God more clearly. We can see how he cares for people all through time. We can see his faithfulness, all the things that he's done. When we pray, we're not just reciting words.

We're practicing desperation. We're stepping back into relationship with the God who knows us, who hears us, who invites us to bring our fears and our failures and our hopes to Him. We're just spending time with him in conversation. When we gather together like this on Sunday morning, we're not attending an event. We're reminding our hearts together that God is worthy of our worship and that we're not in this alone, but we have this whole family of believers to encourage and build each other up.

When we give, we're loosening the grip that money tries to have on our hearts, reminding ourselves that everything that we have ultimately comes from him and that stirs up our affections for his generosity toward us with gratitude. When we serve, we're stepping into the very posture of Jesus, the one who said he did not come to be served, but to serve. These things aren't meant to be burdens. They're the places where our affection for God is stirred up, where our hearts are softened, where the Holy Spirit reminds us of the beauty of the Gospel and our affection for our salvation and our Savior. But just like every good thing God has made, the enemy is constantly working to twist our perception of the greatest things.

He wants to convince us that what is good is a burden and that what slowly pulls us away from God is harmless. This is just one of the thousands of areas that he does this in. And he knows exactly what robs our affections for God. Constant distraction, where every bit of quiet gets filled with with a notification or a screen or another piece of content. Just stand in the grocery line, three people back with no phone in your pocket, and suddenly you realize busyness running so fast from one responsibility to the next that we don't even have time to slow down and notice what God's doing around us.

Comparison scrolling and scrolling and scrolling through other people's lives until we start believing that what we have isn't good enough. Resentment. Holding on to anger until it just quietly hardens our hearts and we didn't even notice. Self reliance convincing ourselves we can handle life without really needing God or other people. We got this comfort when life becomes so full of small comforts.

We forgot we needed him. We forgot we were hungry for time with Him. None of these things usually destroys our affection for God overnight. It's almost never a dramatic collapse. It's just a slow drift.

A thousand little distractions pulling at us to dull our senses.

And before we realize it, we still believe the right things about God. We can say them. We show up, we say the right stuff. Stuff. But he's no longer the center of our attention because he's no longer the center of our affection.

Jesus says the most important thing is this. Love the Lord your God, with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength. That's everything. Because when that love for God is alive and stirred up, not only does it fuel more of that love, but it fuels what Jesus says is the second most important command. That's not what the guy asked for, but Jesus gave it to him.

He continues, in verse 31, Jesus says the second is this. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There's no other commandment greater than these. Now, we don't have time to pause and parse all the details and definitions of love and neighbor. I'd really encourage you to go back to last year when we went through the Fruit of the Spirit.

I spent a ton of time on Love Week defining what is biblical love and what biblical love isn't.

And the shortest answer for who our neighbor is. According to scripture, it's the person in our path. That's it. Both those who are like us and easy to love, and especially those that we least want to love. Now, every time I preach about loving our neighbor, someone always feels the need to send me an email afterwards.

And it basically says the same thing every time. You really miss the opportunity to point out how certain other people in the room don't love. And then you fill in the blank with your favorite people that others don't love. And almost always they will suggest that fear must be the only reason that I don't mention the people that they think might be disruptive for me to mention. So with zero fear, let me disrupt all of us all at the same time.

Whoever you are and whatever people group you think I need to have come out of my mouth right now to convince others to love more. I promise you. I promise you there is an opposite or different people group that you are willfully, maybe even happily refusing to love too.

The Bible doesn't let us limit the category of neighbor to the people who are easy to love or the people who vote like us or think like us or live like us, or believe what we believe. According to Jesus, our neighbor is simply the person in our path. Sometimes that's the person who's easy to love, and sometimes it's the person who makes us most uncomfortable or even offended to love. But don't get the definition of love mixed up with what the world is telling us. The definition of love is.

Go back and listen to our message from the fruit of the Spirit. The call of Jesus doesn't change depending on how lovable someone is. Why? Because Christ loved us when we were difficult to love.

You can't miss that. And if you think that you weren't difficult to love, back up and start over.

Romans 5 says that even as we were enemies of God, did you know you were an enemy of God?

Lost and dying in our sin, Christ died for us. Jesus says the second most important thing for us to hear and do is love our neighbor as ourselves.

And if we have truly received the love of God in our own lives, then we should no longer have any desire to separate and define who our neighbor is. There's probably no greater summary of this than one John, chapter four. I'll read some of it now. He says, dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.

Whoever does not love does not know God because God is love. That word for know is this experiential knowledge. This is how God showed His love among us. He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through Him. This is love.

Not that we love God, but that he loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. Don't miss this. No one has ever seen God. But if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love whoever loves. Whoever lives in love lives in God and God in them. This is how love is made complete in among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment in this World, we are like Jesus, we love because he first loved us.

Getting back to the Book of Mark, Jesus says these are the two most important commands. Love God with all that you are and all that you have, and love people like you love yourself. The scribe basically says, I agree, and says back to him what he's heard. Jesus nods and notice his Response in verse 34. And when Jesus saw that this man answered wisely, he said to him, you are not far from the kingdom of God.

Now this is really interesting to me. He doesn't say, you get it? Welcome to the kingdom. He says, you're almost there. You're circling the truth.

You're seeing something important. You understand the heart of the law. You recognize that loving God and loving people matters more than ritual and burnt offerings and showing up to church and sacrifices. You have heard with your ears, you agree with your mind. But if you want a truly Shema, it must be embodied, it must be reality in your life.

And those words of Jesus keep echoing through this series. He who has ears to hear, let him hear. He who has eyes to see, let him perceive. There's often a very wide gap between conviction, nodding along and agreeing, and obedience becoming something. Faith doesn't become faith until we actually step onto it.

Listening isn't truly listening until it changes the way that we actually live our lives.

It's possible to agree with Jesus, to admire what he says, to even repeat it back to him perfectly and still stop just short, just short of surrender, just up to the threshold of the kingdom, but never stepping in.

And it all hangs on how we answer the title question to this series. Who do you say that he is? Who do we say that Jesus is? Because if we say that Jesus is a good teacher, a moral character, a nice story, even the greatest man that ever walked the planet, then not far. That will be close enough.

Not far is a perfectly comfortable distance. But if he's Lord of creation, if he's co equal with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit, if he truly is King of kings, not far. We'll never be close enough. And if we want to be his disciples, study his ways and practice them in our own lives to get to know him and become more and more and more like him, then whatever he says is most important must be most important to us too. Not just in our heads, in our homes, in our schools, in our relationships, in the community.

Love the Lord your God with all of your heart and with all of your soul and all of your mind and all of your strength and love your neighbor as yourself. If these really are the two greatest commands, then our response should be pretty simple. What if we threw everything else out and we just did these two things? First, love God more. Not in some vague emotional way, in a practical way.

This week, choose one thing that you know stirs your affection for him and actually do it. Open the scriptures. Spend time seeing who he truly is. Take a walk and thank him for the beauty of his creation. Turn on worship music in your car instead of a podcast.

Slow down long enough to actually pray. Take part in the practice of presence that we've been encouraging everyone to take part in through this season of Lent, where we just take a breath. Not because we have to, not because it makes us good Christians, but because love grows wherever our attention goes. Love grows wherever our attention goes. And second, love your neighbor more.

Pay attention to the people who show up in your path this week. What if your neighbor is simply the person in your path? Your home, your workplace, your school, your neighborhood, out in the community, waiting in line with no phone in your pocket.

Be looking for who God might be calling you to intentionally love, even in the simplest of ways, and then take a small step of love toward whoever God puts in your path. Yes, especially them.

When we practice the things that stir up our love for God, the beauty is it naturally spills over into the way that we love people around us. And then when we love the people around us, it reveals the love of God to someone else, which also stirs our affection for God's love for us, which stirs our own affections for God all the more. And then we want to love people more. And it's just this giant, giant cycle that spills back on itself and fuels itself. Love God, love your neighbor, love your neighbor.

And love God more. And more and more and more and more. This is why these are the two greatest commandments, not in some cute way that the world wants us to believe is be nice to everyone, but in this beautiful picture of self sacrificing love. If we practice these two things, we won't just be near the kingdom, we'll be right in the middle of it.

We will be the answer to this request. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, because we are ambassadors of reconciliation everywhere we go. Love God, love your neighbor.

This is the call. So simple, so hard. Will you pray with me, God? We confess this uncomfortable resistance that I know is in all of us. This, this tension between what we believe to be true and what we're willing to do.

And we invite you to just break that off.

Holy Spirit, would you show us, even in this very moment, would you show us the one thing that we need to step into that stirs our affections for you?

And would you help us to keep our heads up, our radar on, for the person in our path, the person that may have been praying desperately all morning. God, show me that you're real. And then we step in and we look like Jesus in this world.

Use us.

Help us. Thank you for your great love for us.

In Jesus name, amen.