Jesus on Our Purpose
About this series
Jesus was God-in-flesh. He was (and is) the purest, most loving and truth-filled human being the world has ever known. And yet what he taught, how he lived and the kingdom he inaugurated directly confronted the human culture in which he spent his years on earth. He was truly counter-cultural. And he is no less counter-cultural in every part of the world today.
To follow Jesus is to embark on a lifelong journey of counter-cultural transformation in which we can expect that being a disciple will lead us towards challenge, temptation and costly decisions at every turn. It’s to this that he calls every single person who follows him.
It’s a lifestyle:
That requires obedience to him above all else.
That will lead us into conflict with the world, the flesh and the devil.
That witnesses to the world of his greatness.
The goal of the first series this year - Just Jesus - was to spend time specifically focussed on the person and work of Jesus. And the goal this time is again to look at Jesus - how he was (and is) counter-cultural. So we’ll be speaking about Jesus - showing how his teaching and actions were counter-cultural in his day and then applying it to our day. We’ll be asking how we submit to his words and live like him in a world where his values are so dramatically opposed to the values of our culture.
About this talk
Matthew 22:34-40
This famous encounter between Jesus and the Pharisees comes towards the end of a series of similar encounters, where various groups are seen questioning Jesus. Chapter 21 ends, “When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard Jesus’ parables, they knew he was talking about them. They looked for a way to arrest him, but they were afraid of the crowd because the people held that he was a prophet.”
Jesus has entered Jerusalem on a donkey (21:1-11) and is now less than a week from his crucifixion. The tension is high and the religious authorities are plotting how to arrange for him to be killed. All of this is the immediate setting for the question, “Which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” On the face of it, this is a perfectly reasonable question, but it should be noted that the expert in the Law was seeking to test Jesus.
Rather than give one of the 10 commandments, Jesus answers with the commandment recited every day by faithful Jews, from Deuteronomy 6:5: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength”. To which he adds, “And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’” (from Leviticus 19:18). In other words, love for God, which is first, is intimately connected to love for others.
In Jesus’ day:
In a very God-conscious culture, the Jewish Rabbis had found 613 commandments in the law and added many other restrictions to ensure they didn’t break any of them. They liked to put another level of ‘fencing’ around the commandments so that people would be in no danger of breaking any of the laws. The Pharisees’ priority had been to obey God by keeping all the commandments; Jesus says the priority is to love God and others. If they focus on that, they will obey find that they are in fact obeying God and keeping the intent of all his commandments.
In our day:
In our God-unconscious culture the continual message is that your priority is to your own happiness, to realise your own potential and express the ‘real you.’ And so, from a very different angle, Jesus’ words challenge the core narrative of our day. He strips away all the nonsense about self-actualisation (loving oneself as the central point of life) and refocusses us on loving God with all we have; which, if genuine, then flows to loving and caring for others with the same intensity we love and care for ourselves (cf. James 2:14-26).
Audio only
