Last week, we started a message series about the Beautiful Church, Christ's physical presence on earth. I told you Jesus shared the most beautiful truths of God's love the world has ever known. Unfortunately, His followers have not always lived up to His ideals.
We shared a little illustration last Sunday to demonstrate how we shouldn't judge Christ's message by the poor performance of some of His followers. Did you see it?
In our day, we take for granted how comprehensively Jesus Christian message has influenced our world. We take so much for granted. Just consider one aspect–how Jesus teachings are found everywhere in our conversations. We get the following expressions directly from Jesus. How often have you used one of these saying or heard them used by someone else?
Salt of the earth
City on a hill
Love thy neighbor
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you
Good Samaritan
Prodigal son
Blind leading the blind
A cross to bear
Pearls before swine
Do not let the left hand know what the right is doing
Judge not lest you be judged
A wolf in sheep's clothing
Cast the first stone
Eat, drink, and be merry
Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s
Sign of the times
Go the extra mile
Shout it from the rooftops
Log in the eye
And many, many others
Whether or not a person is a Christian, these sayings are used so often people forget they came directly from Jesus. And understand, these are not just used by English speakers, but also in French, Greek, Italian, German, Dutch, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, Hungarian, and Russian.
Without Jesus, we wouldn’t have these expressions or the ideas they automatically conjure up in our thinking.
However, as colorful as these expressions of wisdom are, they are only minor notes in the main theme of Jesus’ beautiful tune. What then is the core of Jesus’ tune? It is love.
34 But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees with his reply, they met together to question him again. 35 One of them, an expert in religious law, tried to trap him with this question: 36 “Teacher, which is the most important commandment in the law of Moses?”
37 Jesus replied, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.”
Love is the Greatest of All
Jesus teaching about love was revolutionary. I can’t overstress this, because after 2,000 years we take for granted that love is the highest virtue. One is tempted to think the world has always thought of love as Christians do. This is not so.
This is not to say that other great civilizations did not love, but their concept of love was purely transactional. A ruler might “love” his people, but it was only because doing so was in his best interest. A ruler who loved his people and did good for them would earn the loyalty and support of his people. Ultimately, this kind of love was an effort to “buy” support and honor from the people he ruled. It was a transaction. Even the love between a husband and wife in these ancient civilizations was primarily transactional. Marriage was a contract more about what the husband and wife got out of the deal than about mutual, unconditional, sacrificial love for one another.
There was in ancient civilizations a concept of giving charity (in other words, a rich leader might pay to have a well dug for the community or to build an expensive temple), but these were done for the sake of getting honor and fame for the donor. It was a transaction–a gift given in return for honor and fame.
But Jesus came along and said, “Don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.” He taught us to give our gifts in secret and don’t make a big deal out of it. Jesus said, “If you love only those who love you, why should you get credit for that? Even sinners love those who love them! 33 And if you do good only to those who do good to you, why should you get credit? Even sinners do that much! 34 And if you lend money only to those who can repay you, why should you get credit? Even sinners will lend to other sinners for a full return. 35 “Love your enemies! Do good to them. Lend to them without expecting to be repaid. Then your reward from heaven will be very great, and you will truly be acting as children of the Most High, for he is kind to those who are unthankful and wicked. 36 You must be compassionate, just as your Father is compassionate.” (Luke 6:32-36)
Jesus was the first one to espouse universal, unconditional, sacrificial love. It was revolutionary. He said we should love this way because it is an imitation of God’s own character and we are made in God’s image and should love the way He loves.
Well, anybody can talk about love. But these were more than just words for Christ. His mission on earth was to live out this unconditional, sacrificial love for all people. The ultimate expression of Jesus’ love was his death on the cross for the sins of the world. As Romans 5:8 says, “God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners.”
The love Jesus championed was ludicrous to almost everyone in the first century. Jesus’ own people, the Jews, who knew about God’s love from their own holy Scriptures, would never have thought to love their Roman overlords. They wanted God to destroy their enemies. People in ancient times might be willing to sacrifice their lives for someone who was worthy—maybe to die for their family or for their country or a great leader–but no one would die for their enemies or for evil-doers. And yet, Jesus chose to die for sinners. Ultimately, the Christian message is that every person is a sinner and none of us are worthy of Christ’s sacrificial death, but He died for us anyway. This was a whole new concept Jesus revealed to our world. Through the centuries, it has reshaped everything about the way modern people view love and sacrifice and the sacred value of every human life.
This paradigm shift cannot be overstated. Jesus is the reason our world values love today. Whether or not you are a Christian or even believe God exists, Jesus changed humanity forever for the better. And Jesus did not do it alone.
Jesus birthed the idea of God’s unconditional, universal, sacrificial love and died on a cross to prove it. However, it was the Church Jesus commissioned–people who believed in Him, followed Him, and dedicated their lives to His mission–who convinced the majority of the world, against all odds, that Jesus’ way of love is the best way of all.
I know the Church has played many sour notes throughout history, and people have often misunderstood or purposefully misused Jesus’ teachings for their own selfish gain. But contrary to the picture an unbelieving, anti-Christian world paints, the Church has gotten it right more than it has gotten it wrong. And when the Church has been true to Jesus’ Beautiful Tune, we have pushed the world to be a much better place. And many in the Church–just like our Lord–gave up their lives in the effort. History is colored with the blood of martyrs–some named, but most unknown–who gave their lives to advance the cause of Christ and teach people His love.
You can say what you want about the Church, but if you cherish the greatest virtue in the modern world, one of the things you ought to say is: “Thank you.”
Tomorrow is Martin Luther King Day, a day to remember and honor this great civil rights leader. Everyone knows what King did, but don’t forget he was the Rev. Martin Luther King. MLK was a Christian. He was even named after the great 16th century Church reformer, Martin Luther. King’s conviction to fight for the equal treatment of black people was firmly rooted in his Christian faith that said all people are created equally in the image of God, and we are to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. And we are to love our neighbor as ourself.
In one of King’s famous sermons, “Loving Your Enemies, he preached at Dexter Baptist Church:
“Yes, it is love that will save our world and our civilization, love even for enemies. Now let me hasten to say that Jesus was very serious when he gave this command; he wasn’t playing. He realized that it’s hard to love your enemies. He realized that it’s difficult to love those persons who seek to defeat you, those persons who say evil things about you. He realized that it was painfully hard, pressingly hard. But he wasn’t playing. And we cannot dismiss this passage as just another example of Oriental hyperbole, just a sort of exaggeration to get over the point. This is a basic philosophy of all that we hear coming from the lips of our Master. Because Jesus wasn’t playing; because he was serious. We have the Christian and moral responsibility to seek to discover the meaning of these words, and to discover how we can live out this command, and why we should live by this command.”
King’s commitment to Christ’s unconditional, universal, sacrificial love was so complete, he suffered beatings, imprisonment, and ultimately lost his life in service to our Lord, Jesus Christ.
If you remove from history Christ and His Church, you do not have a Martin Luther King, Jr. You do not have a motivation for non-violent resistance that leads to dramatic social change. You do not have the civil rights movement. You do not have the abolition of slavery. You do not have equal rights for all people or equality for women. You do not even have America, a land where we believe
“that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
What other essential virtues of our world today would be missing were it not for Christ and His Church boldly proclaiming for the last 2,000 years: “Love the Lord Your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind; and love your neighbor as yourself”?
Conclusion
Now I want to close by saying there is much more work to do. We have not yet realized the fullness of Christ’s Kingdom on Earth. We who are Christians, who follow Jesus as Lord, have much work to do. And our work may include suffering. So let us pray for courage and determination. Let us pray for God’s love to fill us,
because the kind of love we need to do Christ’s work is not in us naturally. And let us pray for more laborers to join us in the vineyard, because the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few.
And I call out to you–you who are listening to me right now, but are still not part of Christ’s Church. Perhaps you feel, today, Christ calling to you saying: “Come, follow me!” And so I join His invitation. Will you join with me? Will you join with all the faithful followers of Christ from every place and every generations who have fought the good fight to share Christ’s transforming love with the world. I hope you will.
Closing Prayer from Martin Luther King, Jr. “Oh God, help us in our lives and in all of our attitudes, to work out this controlling force of love, this controlling power that can solve every problem that we confront in all areas. Oh, we talk about politics; we talk about the problems facing our atomic civilization. Grant that all men will come together and discover that as we solve the crisis and solve these problems—the international problems, the problems of atomic energy, the problems of nuclear energy, and yes, even the race problem—let us join together in a great fellowship of love and bow down at the feet of Jesus. Give us this strong determination. In the name and spirit of this Christ, we pray. Amen.”
