Listen, Love, and Live

All right. Well, we're going to turn to Deuteronomy chapter 5, chapter 6, and this is a very famous passage of Scripture. Of course, it's one that Christ quotes quite often from the book of Deuteronomy, and we're going to run into one of those verses tonight. So Deuteronomy chapter 6, and here we're going to read the first three verses, then we'll read each segment as we go through the message. Now, this is the commandment, the statutes and the judgments which the Lord your God has commanded me to teach you that you might do them in the land where you're going to possess it, so that you and your son and your grandson might fear the Lord your God to keep all his statutes and his commandments which I command you all the days of your life that your days may be prolonged. Oh, Israel, you should listen and be careful to do it that it may be well with you and that you may multiply greatly just as the Lord the God of your fathers has promised you in the land flowing with milk and honey.

Let's pray. Father in heaven, we thank you for your great grace and the fact that you actually had Moses record these things for your people down through the ages. Father, we are indebted to you because you're the one who has mediated for us all through history. You're the one who's been planning our redemption.

You're the one who's accomplished it. Father, we come before you tonight giving thanks for your great and almighty grace. Teach us to fear you with reverence. Teach us to love you. Lord, help us for we have such a deficit in love. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

May you see it. Trying to introduce this text is pretty difficult, but one thing we can say for sure is that you need a really broad look at Scripture to get to this, because when you start talking about laws, commands, and judgments, people can kind of get off track on that. We'll misunderstand those things. So in reality, we look at the broader context, which you all know, and that is that from the time that Ammon Eve sinned, there was the message of a Savior to come to crush the head of Satan, and all through Scripture, there's that promise of Christ coming, and He came, He died, He rose again, He sinned, and He's coming again. The story of salvation. But in the immediate context of this, the historical context, this is just following the great redemption, physical redemption, from slavery in Egypt.

And so the Ten Commandments were given in Exodus 20, and now they've been repeated and restated in the second law, the Deuteronomy, here in chapter 5, just preceding this. And so now chapter 6 comes, and I want you to go back and you can think about this this week. What is the real theme of chapter 6?

I puzzled that, and so I came up with a theme, but you can probably come up with a better theme than this. What ties all of this together? And that is this, the proposition is that the God who chose us with His everlasting love charges us to listen and obey, to love Him, and to live holy lives.

That's what I see in chapter 6. Okay, the first part, the first three verses that we read is the one that calls us, really emphasizes the fact that we need, we need to listen to God. The God who chose us with everlasting love charges us to listen with the view of obeying Him. The covenant-making God that we have is, He doesn't ask us to obey Him, He tells us. Now that may sound abrasive, but He just simply tells us.

Why? Because He is the One who has bought us with His own blood. He is the One who's purchased to be His holy people. So He tells us, as a sovereign Lord, obey Me, follow Me, listen to Me. Okay, now when we listen to the terms that are used here in the very opening verses of this passage of Scripture, we're getting the terms that are used in treaties and covenants down through the ages. These are the terms that Moses uses.

They're terms like commandments, statutes, laws, testimonies, judgments, and they're legal terms for a covenant. And he's talking about the covenant there at Mount Sinai. Now we must not read these covenants and these laws and these statutes through the eyes of the Hittites. The Hittites in Canaan, they had, they're known to have had covenants very similar patterns.

That's not what we're doing. We're remembering that the covenants that God gave came from Him. He is the author of covenants because He's the One who made that first covenant with Adam and Eve, the first two people on the face of this earth. And all of the covenants are God's idea. His covenants are relational.

And so when we read through this passage, don't get thrown off by laws and commands, realize this is a relational statement. God is filling the void as He takes the children of Israel out of Egypt into the desert. What was the structures they had for their new nation?

A million and a half, two million people. What was the structure? There was none. So He gives them laws, commandments, and statues. He has prepared that for them as He guides them first with the moral law there at Mount Sinai. So that's the context of Deuteronomy 6. It's the law covenant that God has given for the people that He's purchased.

He's freed by the blood of the Passover lambs over the doors as He sent judgment on the Egyptians and He spared God's people and He spared the first sons. These laws, these statutes are from the heart of a saving God who loves us and cares for us. So now sometimes we do hear, particularly I think maybe in America, maybe around the world in recent years, in the last hundred years or so, we can get off on a track and have an erroneous view of the law of God. But I believe Paul sets that straight.

He sets it straight in several ways. The church has been damaged seriously by false presentations and so we sometimes think, well, law is no longer a word in the Christian life. We don't do commandments. We're all under grace.

Well, that's true. We're under grace. But Paul says this in Philippians chapter 3 as a law keeper himself, as the premier law keeper of his time, Saul of Tarsus, he says this, if anyone else has a mind to put confidence in the flesh, I far more. Circumcised the day of the nation of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews, of the law of Pharisee, as to zeal, a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness which is in the law found blameless.

That's in the eyes of men. Paul knew that there were some generations in the Jewish heritage that had misunderstood and misused the law of God. But he corrects that when he goes in Galatians chapter 3. He says, look, he says this, therefore the law has become our tutor, our teacher, to lead us to Christ so that we may be justified by faith. The law is good, the commandments are good, the statutes are good, but they were never ever a means of salvation.

Never. And we need to remember that. They're never salvation is not true, it's never been true. So listen to the Paul's condemnation of such an idea. In Galatians 1, 6, 8, and 9, he says, I'm amazed that you are so quickly deserting him who called you by the grace of God, by the grace of Christ for a different gospel. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel, contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be accursed. As we have said before, so I say again now, if any man is preaching to you a gospel, contrary to what you have received, he is to be accursed. Salvation is always and only through the blood covenant of God. And the Passover lamb points us to the final Passover lamb, our Lord Jesus Christ. And that's why when Jesus makes statements like, if you love me, keep my commandments, and we think, well, wait a minute, aren't we saved by grace?

Yeah, we are. But he explains that more further in this passage of Scripture. So it's the admonition of Moses. Moses charges the people there himself, he's charged by God to say, teach Deuteronomy 6 to the people, teach them that they are to live for God, that there be a holy God, and that he is the one who brought them out of Egypt and set them free.

They came out of Egypt for one purpose, to worship and serve God. So the moral law is our tutor that brings us to Christ and shows us our need of salvation. But after salvation with a new nature, the moral law has a new application. The moral law of the Ten Commandments is a tool for our sanctification. Personally, when we listen to Christ, he says, if you love me, keep my commandments.

What he was saying was, just look at the Sermon on the Mount, I'll explain to you what it means to love God with your own heart, how to love God in obeying him. And, or there's another, there's another parable that Jesus told in Matthew 21, it's the parable about two sons, but not the two, not the prodigal son, no, but two other sons. One son, both sons are told by the father, look, you need to go into the field and work.

One says, okay, dad, I'll go and do it. And the second son says, no, I'm not, I'm not going to work in the field today. Well, the first son said he was going, but he never went. And the second son repented and he did go. And Jesus asked the question, who did the will of the father?

Well, the one who repented and went. So he's showing us that to obey those that you love is what we should be doing and what obedience really means. So if you look at, if we listen to what God has done and said, he's promised the children of Israel a blessed life. He's promised that they would have abundant resources in this new land. He's promised them growing families. Well, yes, he said the children of Israel, the sons of Abraham would be like the stars of the sky in the sands of the sea.

He's promised them a land flowing in milk and honey. But then he says, if we listen, if we listen to his commands, laws and statutes and judgments, if we accept God's wisdom over our own wisdom and over the wisdom of the world. So to listen to God's moral law, we don't need to be trying to avoid it because we don't want to see our sin. We don't want to avoid the moral law because we have to admit that we need a savior.

We need to look at the moral law to bring us to Christ and to be a tool for our sanctification. Now, when we get to the, in verse three, it says, God says, hear, O Israel, you should listen. That word listen is Shema, which is the same Shema in verse four.

Shema, hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one. Verse five, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might. These words which I am commanding you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up, you shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as frontlets on your forehead. You shall write them on the doorpost of your house and on your gates. The second point I believe is this, is that the God who chose us with his everlasting love charges us to love him with our whole heart.

I can't do that. I'm not there yet, but that's what the charge is, to love him with our whole heart. And that's what Jesus said is the greatest commandment. Who is God who charges us to love him? Verse four, hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one. The Lord, it means the Lord is only, the only Lord, the only God.

That's what he's insisting upon here. He is a monogamous God. He does not want any spiritual adultery, no idols, nothing placed in place of him. He is the only God. So God is our Redeemer. He takes us from under the master of sin and puts us under his rule of grace and mercy.

And then he calls us his children. He is our God. In order to believe in God, we must believe that he exists and that he is a rewarder of those who seek him. We have to believe and know that he is the great I am. He is the self-existing God. He is worthy of our love singularly, only him. And if we do not love him, we sin.

That is how blatant this is. So he is the believer's God. All the believers who left Egypt knew that it was the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob that had taken them out of that land. They knew that it was God who sent the plagues. It was God who parted the Red Sea. It was God who fed them. It was God who gave them things to drink. It was God who protected them. It was not their own doing. They also knew God Almighty was and is the only God. All the images of Egypt, the various gods that represented fertility, represented prosperity in the field, represented health and wealth, all those gods and images were nothing.

And even the leaders of Egypt and the counselors of Pharaoh came to realize that as God sent the plagues, they said, that is the finger of God. They knew there was only one God. The only God, the only Redeemer charges us, charges me and you to love him. The one God, majestic and holiness, Almighty, eternal, the Creator loves his people and he wants us to love him. Now with how much intensity and purpose are we to love God? How much time are we to give to him? How much devotion are we to give to him? So Jesus made it very plain in verse five. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.

The God who saved charges us to love him with all of our heart. So what is the heart? What is the soul?

What does he mean by strength? The heart is the seed of our emotions. It's our will, our volition. The heart describes the center of our inner nature. It is a center of our conscience. It is the center of our nature of where we understand what is purity, what is wisdom, what is uprightness, what is piety.

This is the home of our personal life. It is with the heart that we first believe. Then we are further charged to love God with all of our soul. What is the soul?

The Hebrew word is nefesh in E-P-H-E-S-H. It means your person, all your living being. So our appetites and our passions are to be aimed at loving God above all else. Our nefesh, the soul, is historically defined by the word of God.

And we turn to Genesis chapter 2 where the word is first used, chapter 2 verse 7. God says this, Then the Lord formed man of the dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being, a nefesh. He became a living soul.

He was different from all other creatures. Man has a soul that will never die. Man has a soul that can commune with God and know God because he's made in his image. So we are to love God fully from our soul, all of our soul. Then it says that we are to love God with all of our strength or all of our might. All our efforts, all efforts include the discipline of knowing God's word, the time of prayer, the time of service, the way we look at all of life. We are to act to serve God. And the children of Israel were sitting in a different situation than we sit in today. They were literally physically sitting there having to face the fact that they needed to love God so that they would go into war and destroy the wickedness of the horrendous Amorites in the land that they were to possess.

That took courage, that took a total commitment. But all of these words, heart, soul, strength, it's simply saying this, that we of all of our being, we're supposed to love God. I don't. We don't. We need to be taught by him. We need to meditate on this passage. We need to realize that we love him because he first loved us.

That's always true. Our love for God is to permeate our whole life and overflow into our teaching and the example and word and deed and everything. So he says, here, listen, love God with all that you are. And he is making us and he is correcting us. He is shaping us by his word. And he expects us to make that commitment to him, a wholehearted commitment.

So he says, teach diligently, teach your children, teach other children in your community diligently, teach from the circumstances in which you live daily. So when you see a moral violation, maybe it's a traffic violation like mine, or maybe it's another kind of violation that we have, just name it. It's a sin against God.

It's a sin against that neighbor or that friend. But speak openly about what God says in the daily activities of life. That's how we're to speak. That's how we're to live. Point out the sinfulness of humankind and that we need a savior, even if it's to your workmate or your boss.

Tell the truth. Speak openly. None of us can live perfectly. None of us can live a life that is perfect before our children or grandchildren. But yet we can confess that we can't and we can bear testimony to the fact that we need a savior.

So let me put it this way. If we get up in the morning, and this is not you, this is just an example, but if we get up in the morning and we forget God, if we go through the morning and we don't pray, we don't think about God, if we go through the day and we're silent about Christ and we don't say anything about him at all, if we go to bed at night and we don't even utter a prayer or let him cross our mind, then we've taught our families one thing. We've taught them the way of agnosticism or worse. What we live is what we teach. What is in and on our hearts is what we communicate. That's what this is saying. We should love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength. And we're in the school of learning what that means. Write a record of God's word and truths in and around your home.

That's what he's saying here. He's referring to a number of different things of the commandments of God that they're to be part of our life. And in Jewish families, this was literally done. They wrote things. They put them in a phylactery. They put a little box and put it on the forehead that hung around here. And they had scripture in that box. And on their arms, they'd have another amulet and there would be a scripture in that box. Now, Jesus didn't mind people doing that, but what he says, don't you wear a big box and a big one on your hand, say, look, I really keep scripture. No, that's what Jesus did. It wasn't the fact that they was on their minds and in their hands and the works that they did.

That was all right. But this was different from Egypt. In Egypt, people wore trinkets around their neck. Now, the various gods and goddesses and symbols, they had symbols that they put on wrist bracelets around their hand.

And the world uses symbols all the time. But Jesus says that this law is to be where? It's to be in our hearts.

And that's the main message here. The Christian faith is evident in the home. It's wonderful to walk into a home where you know that that person put that sign, God bless this home, or for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. You know that's there because that's what's in their heart. What a testimony to anybody who walks in that house. And it's a testimony.

It should be on our doorpost. You remember the story of the movie Ben-Hur, if you've ever saw that, a long time ago. And Judah Ben-Hur comes to his house and there's a wall there. And then there's this little box and he goes over and he kisses that box.

What is in that box? Deuteronomy chapter 4, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. These are the words which I commanding you today shall be on your heart.

That's what was in that box. But God does want it to be in our hearts. He wants us to love him first and foremost because he chose us and he loves us. Then we get to the second passage of Scripture. We talked about how God says listen to him because he has the words of life and he says love him with all our heart.

Then next we get the longer section that we're going to read. It's talking about living for him, living for him in the place or their place was the promised land. Our place is wherever God puts us.

All right, here it is. Then it's your verse 10 and following. And when you get to verse 25, you'll say, wait a minute, what does that mean?

Okay, verse 10. Then it shall come about when the Lord your God brings you into the land which he swore to your fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to give you great and splendid cities which you did not build, houses full of good things which you did not fill, and hewn cisterns which you did not dig, vineyards and olive trees which you did not plant, and you eat and are satisfied. Then watch yourself that you do not forget the Lord who brought you from the land of Egypt out of the house of slavery. You shall fear only the Lord your God and you shall worship him and swear by his name. You shall not follow other gods, any of the gods of the peoples who surround you.

For the Lord your God in the midst of you is a jealous God. Otherwise the anger of the Lord your God will be kindled against you and he will wipe you off the face of the earth. You shall not put the Lord your God to the test as you tested him at Massah. You should diligently keep the commandments of the Lord your God and his testimonies and his statutes which he commanded you. You shall do what is right and good in the sight of the Lord that it may be well with you and that you may go in and possess the good land which the Lord swore to give your fathers by driving out all your enemies from before you as the Lord has spoken. When your sons ask you in the time to come saying, what do these testimonies and the statutes and the judgments mean which the Lord our God commanded you? Then you shall say to your son, we were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt and the Lord brought us out from Egypt with a mighty hand.

Moreover, the Lord showed great and distressing signs and wonders before our eyes against Egypt, Pharaoh and all his household. He brought us out from there in order to bring us in to give us the land which he had sworn to our fathers. So the Lord commanded us to observe all these statutes, to fear the Lord our God for our own good always and for our survival as it is to this day. It will be for righteousness for us if we are careful to observe all of these commandments before the Lord our God just as he commanded us. We are to live for God but not for his blessings. The covenant that God made about 600 years before the Exodus, before they went into the promised land, that covenant was that he was going to bless his people in the promised land where Abraham had first set his foot.

But he warns in verse 10 that do not just assume that riches are there just because you're so good. He included houses and walled cities and he turned over to the Israelites. He included sources of water, wells, cisterns. It included vineyards and fruitful olive trees and grain fields and produce that they had not planted. This was better than the leeks and the vegetables of Egypt because they owned it. They possessed it. It was a gift to them and they were free, free to worship and serve the living God.

God's promised land. The warnings came in verse 12. He says, watch yourselves, do not forget the Lord. And this is the danger of every civilization and every Christian family, church and individual, that we become rich, we become satisfied, become comfortable and our hearts forget God. And it's very easy to do.

It doesn't take but a moment. Our remaining sin natures are tempted to focus on the blessings rather than God who blesses us. We can forget the giver and just love the gifts. That is a major sin for us all.

The second warning comes with the acquisition of the land. The rampant pagan practices of the land were around them. They were worshiping the local deities and they were not worshiping the creator. They were not looking for a redeemer. But in verse 14, it says, you shall not follow other gods, any of the gods of the people who surround you.

That does sound primitive, doesn't it? We're not out worshiping little idols. We're not out worshiping the Asherim. We're not, you know, following Moloch. We're not doing that. We're not doing what the Amorites did.

We compliment ourselves. But this reemphasizes that God is a monogamous God. He is to be the only God and he is the only God. All these others are false deities.

So there is no neutral ground. You either believe in God or you don't believe in a God at all that's real. So the warning comes, do not follow the cultures around us. He can wipe us off the face of the earth.

That's pretty blunt. And if we follow the ways of the Amorites, then we could face his judgment. We must reject pagan culture.

There is no neutral ground. There is one Lord and only one God. Who do we listen to? Who do we read? Who do we watch?

All these are good questions. Is your favorite celebrity a pagan? Do you follow them? Is your news network managed and produced by those who hold a pagan worldview? Is your medical advisor a pagan?

Are the public policies that you endorse, do they parallel paganism? These are personal questions that I need to ask myself and we all need to ask ourselves. To whom are we tuning our ears? Who are we listening to?

Who are we really loving? Who are we living for? We live to fear God and that fear is a reverent fear and standing in awe of God who would even dare to give his life for us as sinners. So why not pray for someone to be a city councilman, to be a county commissioner, to be a godly mayor?

Why not do that? We are charged to live for God and conquer the world for him. Of course, we know there's opposition, but we're not a civil law like the nation of Israel. No, we're not that, but we are God's people and we're to be salt and light in the land where we live to be a blessing to our neighbors. We are to rule and manage the sphere of influence that God has given to us. We are not to blend our spheres with Christianity and paganism.

We are to present one Christian worldview and live for Christ. We are to live to please God and not quarrel. Jesus, in this passage of scripture, it talks about how the people, before they ever went into the pagan country of the Amorites and the Canaanites, while they were in the wilderness, they rebelled against God because they were quarreling with Moses, complaining about lack of water, and actually their rebellion was against God and they tested God. He says, don't test God, trust him. And this is the passage of scripture that Jesus refers to when he's faced by the temptations of devil. He says, we're not supposed to tempt God.

And so he says that happened. But then there was the, so outwardly, there are other types of tests that come and that's in verses 18 and 19 where the clear instructions are that they are to drive out the Amorite. They are to take captive, as we would say, every thought for the Lord Jesus Christ. We are to assert his moral commandments, all of his holy word. We are to be blessings to our communities by the lives that we live. We are to join. We can join in our moral crusades. They're not the anti-gospel is the answer, but we also need to be salt and light and think about the vulnerable, the poor, the winter, the orphan, the unborn.

We do. That's part of living for Christ. But live to testify for the grace of God, to praise him and his abundant mercy.

Verse 20 begins a whole new section. He says, what if your children are asking you, well, why do we do this? Or why do we do that? Why are we doing the Passover and remember eating lambs and remembering what happened in Egypt? And you explain because we were slaves.

So what do we do like this morning? And as it was explained, we do, we, when we do the Lord's communion, we remember that we were slaves to sin and Jesus has given his life and bought us with his own blood. And we're under that covenant blood of Christ. We are his children. We are his chosen people chosen to live for him.

So how do we come to a conclusion to this matter? There's a, there's a particularly verse we'll get down to verse 25. It says, it will be righteousness for us if we are careful to observe all those commandments. Well, it doesn't mean that we're earning our salvation because if you look at the context, it's an amazing thing. It is the God who loves us with everlasting love who brought us to the place of salvation to begin with. It is our God who brought us out to bring us in. He brought us out of darkness to bring us into light. It is our God who has given us his commands and his testimonies that make us wiser than all the other peoples of the earth.

It is our God who has shown distressing signs as he did in Egypt and he destroyed Pharaoh. It is our God who has planned long ago to redeem our lives and bring us into his kingdom. So all along, it was God's mediatorial work. All along, it was God who was interceding for us.

All along, it was God's plan to live and die for us and to love us first and draw us to love him because he loved us. Remember, the God who chose you and I with his everlasting love charges us to listen and obey, to love him completely and to live holy lives that please him and that glorify him. That is the biblical instructions for living in the kingdom. That is the biblical instructions for today and tomorrow in this New Year. Our motivation is to love God with all our hearts.

So the foundation and core of this whole context of chapter 6 is found in verses 4 and 6. First, we have to believe that God exists and that he is a rewarder of those who seek him. We must know and entrust the only God, the one God. And then secondly, we must love God with all our heart. This is only possible because he loved us and he planned and carried out that plan of salvation with Christ as our Passover Lamb. Why God chose to love us as sinners is a question that we'll be asking through all eternity.

But God charges us. He teaches us and motivates us to love him with all of our hearts. We are called and charged to listen to, love and live for the three in one with all our heart, soul and strength. This is our worship and service to love and follow the one and only God, our Savior. Let us pray. Father, we thank you that we do not live by our power, we are not saved by our power, we are saved purely and totally by your amazing grace that you planned long ago and that you suffered so long for and continue to intercede for us. Father, we come before you asking you, help us to love you more, help us to know you more deeply. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.