Scripture: Matthew 22:37-39
Sermon Series: 2025 Purpose Message
Did you catch King Charles (picture) Christmas Day speech? I doubt it. We’re Americans. We don’t pay much attention to Britain’s royalty. The Christmas Day speech by Britain’s monarch is a tradition that goes back nearly a century. The first one was broadcast over the radio in 1932. It’s one of the most watched programs on Christmas in Britain.
But this speech by King Charles caused quite a stir. As the British monarch, Charles is head of the Church of England. In his Christmas Day Speech, he said that all faiths are the same. Interestingly, that on Christmas he said all faiths are the same. Other religions don’t even have Christmas. But is he right? Are all religions the same? Are Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism the same as Christianity? Is it all one big boat sailing to heaven?
No. The Incarnation, the fact God became human and willingly died to redeem and rescue humanity from our sins is unique to Christianity. That’s our message. It’s a message that other religious don’t believe. It’s a message that most of our neighbors don’t believe.
The Bible teaches the exclusivity of Jesus Christ. It teaches that there’s only one way to have eternal life. All roads don’t lead to heaven. It’s not what God’s Word says, so it can’t be our message.
John 14:6, “Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me’.” Acts 4:12, “And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” Romans 10:9, “Because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.” Acts 10:43, “To Him all the prophets bear witness that everyone who believes in Him receives forgiveness of sins through His name.” 1 Timothy 2:5, “For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” John 17:3, “And this is eternal life, that they know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.”
Our message makes all the difference. That’s why this morning, we want to talk about the direction that we’re headed for this coming year, 2025.
In your bulletin you have a bookmark that we want you to keep this year to remind you of our 2025 purpose. It’s not really new but it’s supremely biblical. 2025 Logo: Love God…Love People. Please pray that this is true in our church and true in our lives.
To circle back to King Charles, it makes all the difference who God is and who you believe that He is. He’s not Allah, or Vishnu, or Brahma or even the Force. He’s the God of the Bible, the One we’re to love. It’s what our theme verses say: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:37-39). This was repeated by Jesus three times in the Gospels and another 10 times throughout the Bible. It’s vital and summarizes our responsibilities as Christ-followers. So, to make sure that we’re all on the same page, let’s work through this today.
1. What does it mean to love God?
A group of professionals posed the question “What does love mean?” to a group of young children. Here are some of their answers: *Love is that first feeling you feel before all the bad stuff gets in the way. *When my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn’t bend over and paint her toenails anymore. So, my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis too. That’s love. *When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You know that your name is safe in their mouth. *Love is when you go out to eat and give somebody most of your French fries without making them give you any of theirs. *Love is when someone hurts you. And you get so mad, but you don’t yell at them because you know it would hurt their feelings. *When you tell someone something bad about yourself and you’re scared they won’t love you anymore. But then you get surprised because not only do they still love you, they love you even more.
I love the last one. When you tell someone something bad about yourself and you’re scared they won’t love you anymore. But then you get surprised because not only do they still love you, they love you even more. It’s where love for God first starts. It’s “For God so loved the world…” (John 3:16) or 1 John 4:19, “We love because He first loved us.” Phillips renders that, “Yes, we love Him because He first loved us.” God is always the initiator.
Did your children love you first or did you love them first? As parents, we love our children not knowing if they will be a hero or zero. They could be Mother Teresa or Adolph Hitler (pictures). But God knew, He knew it all and chose to love us. He knew all the mess and still sacrificed Jesus for us.
In his book Written in Blood, Robert Coleman (picture) tells the story of a little boy whose sister needed a blood transfusion. The doctor explained that she had the same disease the boy had recovered from two years earlier. Her only chance for recovery was a transfusion from someone who’d previously conquered the disease. Since the two children had the same rare blood type, the boy was the ideal donor. “Would you give your blood to your sister?” the doctor asked. The little guy hesitated. His lower lip started to tremble. Then he smiled and said, “Sure, for my sister.” Soon the two children were wheeled into the hospital room—the little girl, pale and thin: her brother, robust and healthy. Neither spoke, but when their eyes met, the brother grinned. As the nurse inserted the needle into his arm, his smile faded. He watched the blood flow through the tube. With the ordeal almost over, his voice, slightly shaky, broke the silence. “Doctor, when do I die?’ Only then did the doctor realize why the boy had hesitated, why his lip had trembled when he’d agreed to donate his blood. He thought giving his blood to his sister meant giving up his life. In that brief moment, he’d made his decision. The brother fortunately didn’t have to die for his sister. Each of us though has a condition far more serious than that little girl. It required Jesus to give not just His blood but His life. It’s why we love Him.
Our sinful hearts keep us from loving God. When we talk about loving God, we have a problem. It’s a problem with our heart, the part of us God made to be able to love. We don’t love God.
Through the sacrifice of Christ, God can give us a heart transplant. It’s the only way we can ever love God. When we accept Christ as our Lord and Savior, God gives us a new heart. In Ezekiel 36:26, God promises, “And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.” It’s this new heart It’s not our message that makes it possible to love God with our heart, soul and mind. After that transplant, you desire to love God.
What does that mean? It means you’re not hardhearted anymore. God’s Spirit moves you to obey His Word and laws. The question of obedience or doing the right thing becomes an insistent necessity from inside, urging you spiritually forward. When you want to do something wrong, there’s a little tap on the inside. The Holy Spirit tugs on your soul, “Not now. Do this instead.” That sort of experience comes into your life at salvation.
You begin to love God with all your soul. You begin to practice the presence of God until the spiritual atmosphere you live in becomes more natural. You don’t have to go to church to feel religious. God is real in your life everywhere, as He is in the hushed atmosphere of a church. You love Him with all your heart, soul, and begin to love Him with all your mind.
Christianity is not for people who’ve checked their brains at the door. Regenerate minds will mind God. That mind will say, “I have to give the mind God has given me back to Him in such a way that He can instruct it about His nature and ways.” It longs to read His love letter, the Bible and talk to Him in prayer. That’s what it means to love God with all your heart, soul, and mind.
It means exposing your mind to the mind of God. Omniscient God that He is, He will share some of His nature with you. Even though we’re little dust people with little dust minds living in little dust bodies eating dust food, He gives us the capacity to understand and love Him with all our soul, mind, and heart, then we begin to love Him with all our strength as both the Mark and Luke version add to this command. That’s important.
Have you ever watched the beginning of a marathon? All of the runners are ready to start. They want to give their all to the race ahead. Their whole mind is focused on the course. All their soul is dedicated to this pursuit. All their heart wants the prize. All their strength will be applied to run until the last leg. With that same eagerness, that’s how we run for God. He’s worthy of our all and by His grace we can give it to Him. Even if you don’t feel you have it in you, God has enabling power to help you. Call out to Him. He helps us in our weakness and empowers us by His greatness.
And this is where this second part comes in, Love People. In Luke 10, when Jesus gave this answer to a lawyer of loving God and loving your neighbor, He followed it with the parable of the Good Samaritan.
To love God with all our strength, as Jesus explained, means that you’ll love your neighbor as much as you love your self. And if you don’t love your neighbor as much as you love your self, you can’t say that you love God. Sometimes we think we can measure the love we have for God by the feelings we have as we pray or sing in church. Not necessarily. It’s all part of it. But the first sign of loving God is that you love people. Here’s our problem, we’re so busy, too busy for the man in the ditch. Like the priest and the Levite, we make excuses for not having time to love people.
2. What does it mean to love people?
It starts here, right here. It begins with your church family. It’s your brothers and sisters in Christ. It’s the ones we’re to do life with and will spend eternity with.
A church is not an audience, not if it’s biblical. It’s a family. In the early church they called each other brother and sister and even greeted each other with a kiss, a holy one. They had no comprehension of our western individuality. Sadly, we have little understanding of spiritual family. We need to re-read the New Testament. We translate “you” as singular but in the New Testament, it’s nearly always plural.
There’s more camaraderie and connection at most ball games than there is in most churches. Jane and I have visited countless churches. It’s rare anyone ever greets us or even speaks to us…except for one. When we attended church in Taiwan, we couldn’t speak the language, but we sensed God’s love. We were family. They didn’t have a lot, but we were immediately invited to join their church family for lunch.
Our culture is dying of loneliness. It’s an epidemic. Loneliness is as bad for you as smoking over half a pack of cigarettes a day.
This is why we have a greeting time in each service. We want to remind you that it’s not about you. It’s about us. It’s about His family. We’ll even add humor because some of you look like someone licked the red off their lollipop. We want to remind you that joy is God-given. If you speak to someone during the service, hopefully you’ll talk to them afterwards.
Jesus’ early followers were convinced that group comes first—that I as an individual will only become all God wants me to be as I begin to view my goals, desires, and relational needs as secondary to what God is doing through His community, His family, the local church.
For our good, and the good of those around us – and especially God’s glory – we must recapture that – that we’re family together. Relationships are not part of the church; they are the church. We’re not a building or a “service.” We’re a gospel family.
Relationships. It implies closeness. We’re to have a rich, deep community with one another. We open up our lives to each other. We let others see our frailty and our fallenness. We’re vulnerable before our brothers and sisters. We let them apply the gospel of Jesus to our lives, reminding us of what He’s done for us and who we are in Him. We share our biggest joys and our deepest griefs. We don’t walk through life alone.
Messy. Families are messy. Church families are messy. The gospel of Jesus brings transformation in individuals, in churches. Problems and conflict will show up in families. What separates a healthy family from an unhealthy one is how they deal with the conflict or if they even deal with it at all. We’re committed to working through things in our church family.
Sharing. Believers sharing their stuff with one another. We don’t just see relationships. We see responsibilities. That implies giving to one another. Sometimes it’s time. Sometimes it’s money. We commit ourselves to our family. We’ll give our brothers and sisters what they need – meeting spiritual, emotional, and material needs.
Relying. That’s hard for Americans. Being family means that we lean on others for those same kinds of needs. It means we open ourselves up, we humble ourselves and ask for help. Everyone here needs help in some area. It might be encouragement, prayer, service or finances. It includes receiving teaching and guidance from those around us.
We’re great Americans. We give and help. We’re lousy at being humble Christ-followers. We’ll cut an arm off before we admit that we need help. In a healthy church we don’t go to our brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers in the faith last. We go to them first.
That’s what family looks like. One thing you might say in response is: I ain’t got time for that. We always make time for the things that are most important, don’t we? God has designed that life in His family of God is the best thing us, for our spiritual growth and health.
This week I read about a man who was standing near a hole that had been dug as part of a large excavation. Many workers were in the hole removing dirt when the walls collapsed around them. Rescuers began running from everywhere, but the man stood by and watched the scene with detachment. Suddenly a woman called out from a nearby house: “Jim, your brother is down there!” Instantly he ripped off his coat and began digging for dear life. Why? His brother was in mortal danger, and he had to get him out. Who is my brother? Who is my sister? Who is my mother? My father?
Other Christ-followers in danger, or in need, or in pain, anyone in trouble. Look around you in this family. All of us are in trouble in some area.
It’s loving our neighbor who isn’t in His family…yet. One of my constant prayers is that the Lord would give us this community. While it’s a religious community, for the most part, it’s religious without Jesus.
Just because you do God-talk doesn’t mean you know Jesus as your Savior. Jesus said, “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few” (Matthew 7:13-14). In other words, everyone talking about heaven or doing God-talk, isn’t going to heaven.
Maybe you’re here this morning and you don’t know Jesus. If you talk to most people about the Lord and ask them if they’re going to heaven, the vast majority will say, “I hope so.” God wants us to know so…to know that we’re part of His forever family.
How do you know if you really know something? If you know something, you can share it with someone else. Have you ever asked for directions but it’s obvious the person doesn’t know what they’re talking about? If you talk to a chef, they can tell you how to cook. Talk to a CPA and they can explain finances and taxes. So, if you’re going to heaven, then you know based on God’s Word, how to get there and can give someone else clear directions. If you’re not sure how to tell someone else, maybe it’s because Jesus doesn’t really know you. Too often we ask the wrong question, “Do you know Jesus?” The question in the Bible is: “Does Jesus know you?”
Jesus gave us a mission. We must be passionate about reaching those around us with the good news of God’s love. Kevin DeYoung (picture) writes, “The mission of the church is to go into the world and make disciples by declaring the gospel of Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit and gathering these disciples into churches, that they might worship and obey Jesus Christ now and in eternity to the glory of God the Father.”
Our purpose statement, “Grace Church exists to glorify our Heavenly Father by continually making more followers of the Lord Jesus Christ.” The Great Commission says, Matthew 28:19-20, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel (picture) said, “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.” Do we love our neighbors? Do we love our co-workers? Do we love our friends? Can we honestly say that we love them if we’re unconcerned about where they’ll spend eternity?
We must realize we’re God’s representatives in our circle of influence. Every believer has a mission field. It’s no accident that you’re in your neighborhood, family, job, club or team. It’s the place you have influence. Those in your circle of influence are your responsibility. You’re the God’s missionary in those places.
It’s imperative that we accept the responsibility God has given us. In his blog, Toronto pastor, Darryl Dash (picture), writes, “The suite next to our condo is a small studio. The neighbors who lived there when we moved in fit the profile: young, professional, and private. That’s why I was surprised when the new guy moved in. He was older. He didn’t work. He was pleasant enough, but also awkward. His place was a disaster. When I left my suite, I’d sometimes see into his. Laundry baskets were stacked from floor-to-ceiling. A trail of debris began at his door and continued back in down the hallway. I’d sometimes find his cart and his backpack outside his door. We’ve always wanted to hold a floor party. We didn’t. We never invited our neighbor for a coffee. We’d make small talk in the hallway, but I never learned his name. On Monday night, I found police officers outside his condo. More police arrived, and someone in a suit. Someone must have complained, I thought. The police must have called a social worker. But then I heard them talk about the coroner. My neighbor died last weekend. They found his body on Monday. A police seal now secures his door. My neighbor is gone…Nothing might have changed if I’d invited my neighbor for a coffee, but I would have known his name. I might have known his story. Now I’ll only know him as the hoarder next door. And that’s no way to know a neighbor.”
Do you know your neighbors? Their fears and struggles? Do you know if they know Jesus? Do they know you? They’re your neighbors! To be a redemptive person you must acknowledge that and act on it.
How do you start? Begin with prayer. In 2025, please pray for at least one lost person, one person who doesn’t know Jesus, in your circle every day.
We’re going to give you creative ways again to reach your neighbors and co-workers this year. And if you have ideas, please share them with us. That’s our mission. That’s our purpose this year and really every year: (2025 Logo) : Love God…Love People.
Conclusion
Our world loves BIG. God loves faithfulness. In 2025 let’s commit to being faithful, to partnering together for this purpose. If we do, we’ll make a BIG difference. Please don’t just let this be for this Sunday. Let’s keep this stirred up all year and keep talking and focusing on this throughout 2025.
God wants us to have His purpose. He wants us to be faithful. This all reminds me of something I read about NASA. In 1972, NASA launched the exploratory space probe Pioneer 10 (picture). The satellite’s primary mission was to reach Jupiter, photograph it and its moons, and beam data to earth about the planet’s magnetic field, radiation belts, and atmosphere. Scientists regarded this as a bold plan, because up until then no satellite had gone beyond Mars, and they feared the asteroid belt would destroy the satellite before it could reach its target.
But Pioneer 10 accomplished its mission and much, much more. Swinging past Jupiter in November 1973, the space probe was hurled at a higher rate of speed toward the edge of the solar system by the planet’s immense gravity. At one billion miles from the sun, Pioneer 10 passed Saturn. At some two billion miles, it hurtled past Uranus; Neptune, at nearly three billion miles; Pluto, at almost four billion miles.
By 1997, 25 years after its launch, Pioneer 10 was more than six billion miles from the sun, and it kept going. Though nearly 8 billion miles from the sun, the satellite kept sending signals.
Radio communications were finally lost with Pioneer 10 on January 23, 2003, because of the loss of electric power for its radio transmitter with the probe at a distance of 7.5 billion miles away. Perhaps most remarkable was the fact that those signals came from an eight-watt transmitter, which radiates about as much power as a bedroom night-light and takes more than nine hours to reach Earth.
“The Little Satellite That Could” was not qualified to do what it did. Engineers designed Pioneer 10 with a useful life of only three years. But it kept going and going and going. By simple longevity, its tiny eight-watt transmitter radio accomplished more than anyone ever thought possible.
Love God…Love People. That’s what happens when we offer ourselves to serve the Lord. God can work even through someone with eight-watt abilities. God can work even through a church with eight-watt abilities. My friend, even if you only have an 8-watt faith, God can use it.
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:37-39). Are you in? Let’s make 2025 the year of passion for God and love for others.