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Love the Lord Your God
Love the Lord Your God by Remembering What He Has Done for You Deuteronomy 11:1-32 Key Verse: 11:1 “Love the Lord your God and keep his requirements, his decrees, his laws and his commands always.” Last week we thought about the real Christmas message and the greatest gift any of us have ever received. The message was good news of great joy that was for all people who simply believe it. The good of great joy was that a Savior had been born to us. A Savior who frees us from bondage to sin and the fear of death. A Savior who promised to prepare a room for us in His eternal home in Heaven. Jesus is the best and only present any of us will ever need. This is the Christmas message that all people need to hear every Christmas. Today we begin a new year. I searched for an appropriate New Year’s passage to write a message on, but I just couldn’t seem to find one that I was comfortable with. Finally, God led me back to the book of Deuteronomy which we have been studying and through which God has been opening up His word to me in very fresh and new ways. I read chapter 11 and immediately realized that this is the message we all need when beginning a new year. We need to be reminded that we should love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul and strength. The best way of doing this is to remember what God has already accomplished in our lives. This is a great message for any time of the year, but it is particularly fitting for the beginning of a new year. It is the perfect time to look back and see what God has done in our lives so that we can thank Him, love Him and obey Him in the upcoming year. May God bless our study of this passage and richly bless each one of us in 2017. First, Love the Lord your God and keep his requirements by remembering what he has done for you (1-6). Let’s look at our key verse. “Love the Lord your God and keep his requirements, his decrees, his laws and his commands always.” Deuteronomy 6:5 says essentially the same thing, but it is a much more famous verse. It says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” In our key verse the words “…with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” are replaced by “…by keeping all his requirements, his decrees, his laws and his commands always.” I always like to study passages like this because I often think that many Christians get the wrong idea about what it means to be a Christian. We all know that we are saved by faith and faith alone. It has nothing to do with our works. We are saved when we accept Jesus as our Savior. What Jesus did for us is what saves us. It is not our good works that get us into heaven. It is Jesus obedience, even his obedience to death on the cross, that pays off our debt of sin and enables us to stand before the judgement seat of God and be admitted into the kingdom of heaven. Most Christians believe this and this is absolutely true. However, many Christians stop right there. They think that because Jesus did everything required for their salvation, they don’t have to do anything more. But I don’t think the Bible teaches this at all. Jesus came to save us so that we could serve Him. Jesus is our king and He has given us orders to carry out. The orders are to love the Lord our God, love our neighbor as ourselves and take the gospel message to all people. The new testament is full of verses that tell us this. John the Baptists father, Zachariah, was filled with the Holy Spirit at his son’s birth and the Bible tells us he prophesied concerning the messiah. What did he say? He said God’s promised Messiah came “…to rescue us from the hand of our enemies, and to enable us to serve him without fear in holiness and righteousness before him all our days.” (Luke 1:74-75) Zachariah says that Jesus came to save us so that we can serve Him without fear for the rest of our lives. Again, in first Corinthians 15 Paul gives us an in depth doctrinal course on the gospel and his conclusion for Christians was “Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.” Paul says that because of the good news of the gospel we should fully commit our lives to working for God. And James, Jesus’ own brother says “But someone will say, ‘You have faith; I have deeds.’ Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds.” James is saying that real Gospel faith will lead us naturally into doing good works for Christ. These are just a few examples. There is a lot that a Christian has to do once they have accepted the salvation that Jesus offers us. Yes, but some Christians may argue that this has nothing to do with the requirements, decrees, laws and commands of the Old Testament. Really? What is the sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7? This is perhaps Jesus greatest sermon ever recorded and it is all about the true meaning of God’s law. It is interesting to note that Jesus ends this sermon with a parable about wise and foolish builders. The wise builders are those who hear Jesus’ words and put them into practice – this means that they work on them. In this sermon. Jesus didn’t give us a new law he just expounded on the law that God had given Moses. He told us the true requirements of the law and what we must do to keep those requirements. Furthermore, if we think about who God is, we must realize that God is unchangeable. Hebrews 13:8 say, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. Jesus is God so the same words apply. God gave the His requirements, decrees, laws and commands to Moses and He has not changed. When He came to us, Jesus told us what these really were, so, my conclusion is that Deuteronomy 11:1 is just as much for us today as it was for the Israelites of Moses time. But how can we love God in this way? Verses 2-6 give us the key. The key is to remember what God has already done for us. Moses says that all the Israelites that he was talking to had witnessed God’s great works in Egypt and through the forty years of wandering in the desert. Many people wonder why Moses started with the miracles God performed in Egypt. Weren’t the people who saw those all dead? Hadn’t they all died off in their forty years of wandering in the wilderness? Not all of them had died off. Only those who were 20 years old and older at the time they were at Kadesh Barnea and God told them to go up and take the Promised land, but they refused because of the reports of the spies had died. All the teenagers and children were still alive and they had witnessed what God had done in Egypt. The others, who were born later all saw great miracles, like mana from heaven every day, water coming from rocks and quail descending on the camp so that everyone could all eat meat. They had also witnessed God’s righteous wrath on several occasions. In verse 6 Moses brings up the incident with Dathan and Abiram. If you aren’t familiar with this incident, please look at Numbers 16. Dathan and Abiram were two elders in the Reubenite clan. They together with 250 other well know community leaders (apparently mostly Levites) rebelled against Moses. Moses summoned Dathan and Abiram to talk with them about there concerns, but they refused to come. The next day God told all the Israelites to separate themselves from Dathan and Abiram and once they did, God opened up the ground and swallowed them and their entire families. Fire also came out from the Lord and consumed the 250 men who had joined them in their rebellion. They had also witnessed other acts of God’s righteous wrath. One such time was when the grumbled against God and Moses when they were going around Edom and God sent poisonous snakes among them. This time God gave them a miraculous way out of this punishment – a miraculous way out that points directly to Jesus. Moses made a snake and put it on a pole. Anyone who was bitten by a snake and simply looked at the snake Moses had made hanging on the pole would be saved. The point is all these people had witnessed some great work of God in their personal life, and now God had brought them to the front door of the promised land. If the people could simply remember all these things, then they could remember God and love Him for all the great things He had done for them. The same is true for us today. We must remember what God has done for us. A perfect time to do this is right now, at this time of a new year. In UBF we have a tradition of choosing a key verse for the upcoming year. When we do this, we write a testimony, reflecting on how God worked in our life in the year that just went by. This helps us to remember what God has done in our life and focus on how we can live our life for the glory of God in the upcoming year. For 2017, I have chosen Mark 9:23 as my key verse. “’If you can’? said Jesus. ‘Everything is possible for one who believes.’” In 2016 God blessed me abundantly. At the beginning of the year, he showed me that I really have a talent for teaching and connecting with my students. This gave me great joy and a renewed sense of mission at Dream School. I didn’t think things could get much better, but God showed me otherwise. During the summer vacation, God opened up the Bible newly for me. He gave me hours each day to read and study the Bible and he helped me to begin studying systematic theology. Studying about God and the doctrines found in the Bible was truly wonderful. Once again, I didn’t think it could get any better, but again God stepped in. When school started, my Bible reading and study of theology was greatly slowed down by the demands of teaching, cooking for the students and my habit of going for long bike rides. God fixed that by enabling me to injure my knee. I couldn’t cook for the students or ride my bike so I had plenty of time to pray, study my Bible and study theology. God was so good to me in 2016. I chose Mark 9:23 as my key verse for 2017 so that I could try to put my faith to work for God. The context of Mark 9:23 is a man who brought his young boy to Jesus for healing. Apparently, he had brought the boy to Jesus disciples earlier, but they were unable to heal the boy. The man said to Jesus, “It has often thrown him into fire or water to kill him. But if you can do anything, take pity on us and help us.” Jesus was a little surprised and He answered the man with a kind of rebuke. “’If you can?’ said Jesus. ‘Everything is possible for one who believes.’” It is also interesting to note that when Jesus cast out the demon he said that it was a deaf and mute demon, meaning that it couldn’t hear or speak. Well, I find myself in kind of the same situation as that boy – I am deaf and mute. I cannot hear Korean nor can I speak it. I need faith to overcome this in 2017, therefore I have chosen this as my key verse. Please pray that I can cast out this deaf and mute demon by faith in 2017. Second, blessings and curses (8-32). The remainder of the chapter is Moses urging the people to obey all the commands and decrees that God had given him. He tells the people that there are consequences for obedience and consequences for disobedience. This is true for all people in all times – there is always a consequence for our actions. God’s desire is to bless His people. Verse 9 tells us that God wants His people to live long in the good land flowing with milk and honey that He is giving them. Later on it says that He wants to send them rain in season so that they can enjoy abundant crops. But in order for them to enjoy the blessings from God they must do their best to remember and obey God’s requirements. In verses 18-20 Moses tells them how they can do this. “Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.” When I read verses like this, I see why the world we live in today is so full of confusion and missing so many of the Blessings that God wants to give us. Do the majority of people, even the majority of Christians, live their lives like this? Do they take the word of God this seriously? I don’t think they do. They forget the word of God because they are too consumed with their own personal problems. They forget to teach their children the word of God because there is always something else to talk about when they are sitting at home or walking with them on the road. Is it any wonder then that we don’t see many people making an effort to keep God’s requirements, decrees, laws and commands? As a society we don’t make an effort to keep God’s word in our heart and minds and in the hearts and minds of our children, so we find that we are not living under God’s blessing. In verse 26 Moses told the people that he was putting before them both a blessing for obedience and a curse for disobedience. The same is put before us today. It is far better to live under God’s blessing than under His curse, so let’s choose to “Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.” I pray that God may help us all live by faith in 2017, keeping his decrees and commands. I also pray that God may bless each of with one key verse to hold in your heart and live by in 2017. |
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