This transcript was generated by whisper.ai. Welcome to day four of our Look Through Matthew chapter 22. I have a feeling this might be your favorite day of this week's study because we get to look at Jesus' great commandment, Jesus' clear teaching about the most important thing you and I can do with our lives. Listen to what happened in verses 33 to 40. "When the crowds heard this, they were astonished at His teaching. Knowing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees and the Pharisees got together, and an expert in the law tested Him with this question, 'Teacher, which is the greatest commandment of the law? ' Jesus replied, 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment, and the second is like it. Love your neighbor as yourself. ' All the law and prophets hang on these two commandments. " Notice that last verse, all the law and prophets. Everything in the Old Testament hangs on these two things. That's the importance of loving God and loving your neighbor. Jesus in this great commandment tells us what to do, and He tells us how to do it. Did you notice that? He says, "Love God. " That's what to do. And then He says, "Here's how to do it. With all your heart, all your soul, all your mind. " And then He says, "Love your neighbor. " And then He says, "Here's how to do it. As yourself. " Let's just take a closer look at this today. First you love God. How do you love God? You do it with all your heart, with all your soul, and all your mind. And you know that in some places He also added all your strength. You do it with all your heart. That's where you feel. You do it with all your soul. That's where you decide. You do it with all your mind. That's where you think. Now Jesus says this is the most important thing you can do with your life. So any day of my life that I don't love God with all my heart, all my soul, all my mind, I have missed out on the most important thing that I can do that day. So let's do it right now. Love God right now with all your heart. That's where you feel. So tell Him how you feel. Tell Him how you feel about what's going right in your life. Tell Him how you feel about what's going wrong in your life. Sometimes we have a hard time sharing with God our feelings. We need to learn from the example of David. We need to learn from the example of Jesus, who were very open with sharing their feelings, what was going on. When they had times of discouragement, they shared them openly with God. When they had times of joy, they shared them openly with God. Tell God how you feel about what's going on in your life right now. God, I feel disappointed. God, I feel ecstatic. God, I feel depressed. God, I feel full of joy. Tell Him how you feel. Love God with all your heart by telling Him how you feel. And you love God with all your soul. Your soul is where you decide. Your soul is the seat of the will. So you love God with all your will by deciding to follow Him today. By deciding to do it His way and not your way. A lot of times we want to do it our way. We have a battle of wills with God. I think if this, I just followed a little bit of this temptation, it would make me feel better about life. But it's not true. You need God's wisdom. You need God's strength to live a different way. God, help me to decide like you would decide. Let me love you with my will today. And then love Him with all your mind. That's where you think. Pour God's Word into your mind. Pour Godly thoughts into your mind. Whatever is good and honorable and right and pure and lovely, let those things be the things that you think about today. Any day I don't do that, and there are some days I miss doing that. I get caught up in a project I'm doing. Maybe it's even a project for God that I'm doing. But I don't do that. I don't love Him with my heart, my soul, my mind. Any day I don't do that, I've missed out on doing the greatest thing that I could do that day. Love God. But Jesus says the second command is very close to it. And I want to focus a little more on this one because there's something we misunderstand often about this one. Jesus says here's what you're to do. You're to love your neighbor. But then He says you're to do it as yourself. Let's take a close look at that. As yourself. That assumes that you love yourself. God made you to love yourself. I know that sounds strange to you at the beginning. I'm not saying He made you to be selfish, but He made you to love yourself. How could He say love your neighbor as yourself unless you loved yourself? If you hated yourself, then to love your neighbor as yourself would mean you hated your neighbor. That makes no sense at all. No, He's assuming here a proper love of self. Now this idea, this expression love of self, it can mean something that's not good, of course. But here we see that in the Bible it can mean there is a proper use of this phrase love of self or self-love. There's got to be a good way to love yourself. Not self-centeredness, but a self-respect. A self-love that understands God's love for you. You have to respect yourself as someone who is made in the image of God. Your life. Your life has sanctity. It has dignity. You have an immortal soul that God has given to you. And so because of that, God has made you to be concerned about your own well-being, be concerned about yourself. That's one of the ways that you express the image of God that's in you. The person that God has made you to be. And one of the reasons that we struggle sometimes with loving others is in all honesty we struggle with loving ourselves. Maybe it's because you weren't loved growing up. Maybe it's because of some scar that's in your life. Maybe it's because of things that you have done. Maybe you look at your personality and think, "I have a hard time with my personality thinking good about myself. " But the truth of the matter is you spend a lot of time putting yourself down. I can't do anything. I'm of no use to anyone. I could never do that. I just don't understand why God even put me on this earth. Instead of love for yourself, you have a sort of a negativity and even a bitterness towards yourself. I want you to remember with me right now that the first commandment comes before the second. Love God with all your heart, all your mind, all your soul. You start there. And when you love God and you get closer to God, you're going to understand better what God thinks about you. Not what your parents think about you, not what that friend thinks about you, not what you think about you, but what God thinks about you. God thinks you valuable enough that Jesus came from heaven to earth to be born for you, to live for you, to die on a cross for you, to be resurrected for you. When you discover the great love that God has for you, that's where a proper love for the self that God has given you comes from. And so you start to love yourself in a good way. I like what John Piper says about this. He says, "To satisfy your hunger for food is not evil. It's in essence an expression of your love for self. " Piper says, "To want to be warm in the winter is not evil. To want to be safe in a crisis is not evil. To want to be healthy during a plague is not evil. To want to be liked by others is not evil. To want your life to count in some significant way is not evil. " So you take that love and you apply it to others. That means that as you long for food when you're hungry, so you long to feed your neighbor when they're hungry. As you long for nice clothes for yourself, you long for nice clothes for your neighbor. As you want to work in a comfortable place, you desire a comfortable place for your neighbor to work. As you want to be safe and secure from troubles and struggles and violence, you seek that comfort and security for your neighbor. As you seek friends for yourself, you seek friends for your neighbor. As you want your life to count, you want your life to be significant, so you desire significance for your neighbor as yourself. That's a big word here, the word "as. " It doesn't mean instead of yourself, it means as yourself. You have this energy for pursuing your own happiness, but you have the same energy for pursuing the happiness of somebody else as yourself. You want to be creative and strong and think through, "What are the good things I can do for my life? " As yourself, you do the same thing in other people's lives. Now Jesus isn't saying you seek for your neighbor the same things that you have. He says as yourself. You do them in the same way, the same excitement and enthusiasm that you have for meeting the needs in your life. You apply that to other people's lives. Now I know some people, they're terrified actually when they think about this commandment to love as yourself, because they think if we take Jesus seriously here, you're going to have to love others instead of yourself, but he didn't say to stop loving yourself. In fact, he says the very fact that you love yourself is the foundation for your love for others. You don't reject that love that God has for you and the love that you have for yourself based on that. You accept that and you build on that a love for others. Out of God's love for you, his grace towards you, out of the respect for yourself, the love for yourself that grows out of that comes the power to love other people. The truth is the most loving thing you can do for yourself is to love others as yourself, because that's where your deepest needs are met. Real life comes from what you give, not from what we're given. That's what Jesus is getting to here. Love your neighbor as yourself, because actually it's the best way you can discover God's love and you can love yourself is by serving others. God sent Jesus to serve and God made you as a follower of Jesus to serve. As we love your neighbor, the neighbor you meet today might be somebody at your office, it might be your literal neighbor who's living next door, it might be a stranger that you meet walking down the street. As you love your neighbor this day, you're doing the greatest possible thing you can for God's kingdom, but you're also bringing the greatest joy you can into your own life. Let's pray right now that we can do these two things we've talked about. Jesus, we ask, Father, we ask together that you help us first to love you, all our heart, all our soul, all our mind. Right now we tell you our feelings, we give you our will, we let you enter into our thoughts. We want to love you with our heart, soul, and mind. And God, we want to love the people around us as we love ourselves. We don't want to put ourselves first or before in a way that cheats us of the joy you want to give us as we serve others. So Lord, show us how to serve today. Thank you for telling us what to do and telling us how to do it. So today give us the power to do it through Jesus because we can't do this on our own power. We need your power to love you. We need your power to love others. And we ask for it right now in Jesus' name, Amen. Well tomorrow we're going to see, Jesus, He's been answering questions all through this chapter. Tomorrow we're going to see a question that Jesus has.