March 9, 2008 Fifth Sunday of Lent
Sermon Title: “All Your Strength”
Series: Extreme Love: The Greatest Commandment
Text: Mark 12:30
Dr.
Delivered on March 9, 2008
“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.”
Mark 12:30 NRSV
All Your Strength
If you are an average adult, over the next 24 hours, your heart will beat 103,689 times, your blood will travel 168,000,000 miles, you will breathe 23,040 times inhaling 438 cubic feet of air. You will eat 3.25 pounds of food and you will drink 2.9 quarts of liquids. You will also move 750 muscles, exercise over 7 million brain cells and speak 4800 words, including some probably unnecessary ones if you’re like me. Whew! Of course, as I said, that’s only if you are an average adult, and we don’t have any of those around here do we? There’s nothing about us that’s average! That’s why this morning I don’t feel bad at all reading you the Scripture I just read and reminding you one more time that God expects that while we’re doing all that other stuff I just mentioned like breathing, and eating and talking, God expects us to love him with every ounce of our being. Are you getting that message yet in this Extreme Love series? I hope so!
Actually, I started my message with all those body facts because today we’re on the last body part mentioned by Jesus in the Great Commandment, our strength. Let’s face it; if you take the parts we’ve already gone over, what’s left is your body. Your strength has to do with your physical self; the part of you that does things. The parts we’ve already talked about, the heart, mind, and soul are like the software of your being. What’s left, the hardware if you will, is your body. It’s your arms, legs, mouth, hands, etc….
Those of you who have been with us each week, or who have been working through the daily devotionals for this series are hopefully beginning to see a pattern emerge in what Jesus commanded here. It goes something like this: Loving God is largely comprised of three things: right understanding, which corresponds with the mind; right attitude, which corresponds with the heart, and right action, which corresponds with the body. So far in this series we have learned that in the greatest commandment Jesus said we are to love God with all our understanding and with all our attitude. Now today he says we are to love him with our bodies, our “physical force to will” something. So here is the key thought of today’s message: Our expression of love toward God must take into account and include the physical dimension of who we are in order to fulfill the Great Commandment.
To talk about that I’m going to give you a little history about the body in Christianity, and then I’m going to talk about how to love God with all your strength, or body.
Let’s start with the history part because I believe it is important to see how this has evolved over the centuries and so we can avoid some traps others who have gone before us have fallen into.
First of all, we need to be clear that Christianity is very much an “embodied faith.” What I mean by that is the “body” is an important element of our faith; our physical bodies are important to God. Look at Jesus, for instance. Jesus is God enfleshed. Jesus is God in a body. Our God isn’t some high and mighty vapor on high. He came to earth in a real body like you and I have; a body that got hungry, thirsty and tired. Jesus was all about the body; beginning middle and end. As for the beginning, you know the verse by heart, “The word became flesh and dwelt among us…” John 1:14. Jesus came to earth in a body to demonstrate what God is really like because apparently we couldn’t get it with just the mind or the heart – we had to see God in action, what he did. That’s the middle part, his ministry. One of the most important facets of what Jesus did while he walked the face of the earth was to heal broken bodies. He is frequently depicted as touching people. In describing his ministry to some of John the Baptist’s followers Jesus said tell him, “the blind see, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up” Luke 7:22. Jesus had a ministry in a real body, to the real bodies, of real people. Not only did he get hungry and tired, he recognized it in others and it mattered to him. Even at the very end, Jesus was all about the body. His last three acts all have to do with the body. First he shared a meal with his disciples; a meal which he said represented his body and blood which we still reenact to this day. Then he sacrificed his body on a cross and shed his blood there for us. And then, three days after he died he was resurrected. And the resurrected Jesus wasn’t just a “spirit.” He had a real body. It was a transformed body, but it was a real body you could touch, and which could eat food, and laugh, and smile. And the Bible says that when those of us who are believers die, we will also receive a body like his, a resurrection body. The bodies that house our spirits now are susceptible to sin and suffering, but they will finally be transformed by the resurrection. But any way you cut it – now or later – Christianity is about bodies.
Unfortunately, and this is my second point under the history of the body in Christianity, the body has received a “bad rap.” And it’s not difficult to see why. Our bodies are the source of some of our greatest pleasures in life. It is our bodies that enjoy a fine meal or a glass of wine, or a good massage. Our bodies bring us the pleasure of feeling the warm sun or a cooling breeze on our skin. Our bodies take in the beauty of a sunset or magnificence of a waterfall. But because our bodies are the instruments through which so much pleasure come they can also easily cause us to fall. At least that’s what the Bible teaches. Jesus said, “The spirit is willing, but the body is weak…” Matt. 26:41. Paul said he knew what he should do and what his attitude should be in every situation, but there was what he called “another law at work in his members” and he was “captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members” (Rom. 7:23-24).
Yes, through the years we’ve figured out that it is through our eyes and stomachs and loins hands, and other assorted body parts that we most often go astray from what we know to be God’s best for us. And so over the years followers of Christ have made numerous attempts to belittle, or even to do away with the body.
For instance, early heretics almost as old as Christianity itself known as the Gnostics held that the spirit and mind were “good” while the body was inherently “evil.” They held that Jesus didn’t really have a flesh-and-blood body but only appeared to have one so we would “get it.” For them the body was so horrible that they couldn’t imagine God himself inhabiting one. Later on came the monastics, ascetic monks who did things like wear hair shirts and walk with rocks in their shoes and starve and flagellate themselves to punish and subdue their bodies. Much later than that in Victorian times most anything to do with the body was condemned or covered up – all as an extension of this thought that somehow the body is “dirty” or evil, while the mind or spirit is pure and good.
But based upon what we just said a moment ago about Jesus and Christianity as an embodied faith, “body as evil” thinking is clearly a wrong-headed concept. Yes, the body is susceptible to sin and suffering, but it may also be offered to God in worship and it will be finally transformed by the resurrection. Again, look at what the Bible says about the body. In the very beginning God created man from the dust of the earth and breathed life into his nostrils and declared his creation not only good, but very good (Gen. 1-2). And in the words of the Psalmist, it was God who formed our bodies, it was he who “knit us together in our mother’s womb” and therefore we “praise him for we are fearfully and wonderfully made” Psalm 139:13-14. Yes sin is at work in the body, but it’s at work in the mind and heart too! It was Christ himself who pointed out that you don’t have to actually commit a sin like adultery to be guilty of it. He said if you look upon someone with lust in your heart you’ve already done the deed! (Matt. 5:27).
Do you see what I’m saying here about the body in the history of Christianity? I’m saying we need to rescue the body. Christianity isn’t about repressing or covering up our bodies, or acting like we somehow don’t have them. Christianity is about loving God with our bodies. It’s about devoting them to God and finding ways to use their beauty, power and strength to do what God has called us to do in them and with them; namely to love and glorify him through them. And that leads to the “how to” part of this message – How to love God with all your strength in which I’m going to give you three ways to love God with all your strength this morning.
The first way to
love God with all your body is to offer your body to God. Paul, writing
to the church in
But wait a moment; you may not know what I’m talking about here. How do you offer your body to God? You do so through your service to God; putting arms and feet and hands and legs to what you say you believe.
The little New Testament book of James has much to say about this. James was the brother of Jesus and so, quite naturally a lot of what he has to say sounds a lot like his older brother. It was James, who stressed the importance of acting on our faith; who emphasized the importance of practicing what we preach. It was James who said, “Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers” James 1:21. It was he who asked what good is it to see someone who lacks adequate clothing or food and to simply say to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill” but then not do anything to help them. “Faith by itself,” says James, “if it has no works, is dead” (James 2:14-17).
So how do you offer your body to God? You act on what you believe. You remember that Jesus laid down his life for you and so you lay down your life for him by serving him and somebody else besides yourself for a change. We believe in this at NewSong so much we built it into our mission statement – look there, in the third clause of our mission statement, it says we want to “Share with the world all the gifts he’s given me.” When you do that you are loving God with all your strength and not just your mind or heart.
A second way to love God with all your strength is to honor God with your body in all that you do. In 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 we read, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.”
A popular mantra of the modern age says, “It’s my body, I’ll do what I want with it.” But for the Christian that simply is not true. As Paul reminds us, our bodies are not our own, they were bought with a price.
How do we honor
God with our body in all that we do? As I see it this has to do with personal holiness.
Paul makes a long argument in the chapter where the two verses above come from how our being united with Christ has made us holy therefore we shouldn’t unite that which God has made holy with that which is not holy. Personal holiness in our actions isn’t about a long list of things we shouldn’t do like cuss, smoke, drink, or chew. Personal holiness is more about realizing as Paul says in that verse that our bodies house the very Holy Spirit of God and so we need to ask before taking any action with our bodies is this something Jesus would do? I’m not talking about a list of sins; I’m talking about a lifestyle of holiness. There’s a great checklist of five questions found on Day 32 of the Extreme Love devotional guide. They call it a “strength test” and it only has five questions:
· Am I living a restless, busy life, running from pillar to post?
· Do I live a passive life? Am I a “couch” or “mouse” potato?
· Am I eating intentionally? Am I an overeater, a carboholic, or a fast-food junkie?
· Am I addicted to drugs, chemicals, or obsessive habits? (shopping)
· Do I have sexual integrity? Adultery, premarital sex, emotional affair, or sexual escapism?
In honoring God with our bodies we must strive to live holy lives. What we do with our bodies matters. It matters in our relationship between us and God, and it matters to others because they see us and it hurts their relationship with God. The devotional guide quotes Brendan Manning who says, “The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge God with their lips, then walk out the door and deny him with their lifestyle.” Ouch! Let’s practice a little integrity in our walk with the Lord; people are watching, so let’s honor him with our bodies.
I want to mention one more way to love God with all your strength this morning, and that is to worship God using your body. Verses about this are scattered throughout the whole Bible. For instance, Paul writing to Timothy says, “I want men everywhere to lift holy hands up to God in prayer” 1 Tim. 2:8, and the Psalmist says, “Come, let us worship and bow down, Let us kneel before the LORD our Maker” Psalm 95:6. I could stand here and quote verses for thirty minutes all about the various ways the Bible says we are to physically express our love and adoration to God using our bodies. In fact, the two most sacred acts of worship we do in the church, Holy Communion and Holy Baptism, are both expressions of love to God using the body – ingesting food, a very physical act, or submerging our bodies under water.
Protestantism is a great thing, don’t get me wrong, but we’ve also lost some very valuable aspects of the Christian faith by being so upset by the Catholics with all their kneeling and bowing and crossing themselves, or by the Pentecostals with all their hand-raising and clapping. We’ve gotten so worried and upset about it that it seems the only acceptable posture in many churches is sitting on our hands in the Protestant Slump or standing mute and motionless while hymns are being sung by others. I’ll be honest with you, the most physical acts I see sometimes from up here are people whose heads are nodding as they go off to sleep. I guess that has more to do with my preaching than with you or with loving God though, come to think of it. Sorry about that ;-)
Seriously, I realize I’m speaking strongly here. I also want you to know that we’re all about you being comfortable in worship here. I’m not saying if you don’t raise your hands, or sing, or clap your hands you’re less of a Christian. What I am saying is if you’re worshipping God and you feel your eyes filling with tears and you try to hide it from the person sitting next to you. Or if you feel moved to want to raise your hands, or dance before the Lord, or to bow down and you don’t, there’s something wrong. You’re more worried about what men think than God.
Do me a favor. One day during your personal prayer time, in the privacy of your home, get down on your knees to pray instead of just sitting (or lying) there. Or try this, put on some good worship music and really let your heart go and worship him and see if you don’t begin to somehow physically worship God. It’s just a natural thing.
Let me close with this. I realize in speaking of the body this morning, about offering your body to God and about honoring God with your body and about expressing your love to him with your body, that I’ve talked about a lot of things we all should “do.” I feel like you may have the impression that Christianity is just about trying harder. Hear me clearly on this, God doesn't ask or need for you to try hard. God’s work is finished. He did it all on the cross. But sometimes when we want to obey Him, even if it’s obeying his command to love him, we’re going to have to go out of our comfort zone and it’s going to feel like “work.” Jesus once said, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matt. 11:28). He was talking about salvation there. He prefaced it by saying, “Come unto me…” If you’re here this morning and you’ve never done that – I haven’t really been talking to you the last 25 minutes. The invitation is clear, the work has been done, and all that remains is for you to come to him. But you know what? Once you do he loves you too much to leave you in the messed up condition you’ve been in all these years. He wants to change you, and that may take some work on your part. That’s what I’ve been talking about this morning; loving him with all your strength.
How about you? Have you accepted his invitation? Do you love him with all your strength? I pray that you have, and that you do. Amen.