Focus: Achieving
Your Highest Priorities
Getting Out from
Under: Redefining Your Priorities in an Overwhelming World
Gaining Control: Managing
Capacity and Priorities
Priorities: Tyranny
of the Urgent
You Can't Manage
Time: But You Can Manage Priorities
Time Management: Set
Priorities to Get the Right Things Done
Those are the titles of just a few of the books on Amazon.com on the subject of prioritising your life, or at least your work…. Then there are the slogans that people repeat about priorities. “First Things First.” “Plan your work; then work your plan.”
Life is complicated, and there seems to be a built in urge in most of us to simplify it. To boil it down into a few priorities that we can focus on, and if we do that then the rest of life will fall into place.
Ecclesiastes says that there is nothing new under the sun, and that’s certainly true when it comes to human behaviour. People have been trying to boil down what it means to be successful for hundreds, even thousands, of years. And Jesus’ time was no different.
One of the teachers of the law came and heard
them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him,
“Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”
Over the last few weeks we’ve been looking at questions that Jesus’ enemies asked him. This week is a little different because this “teacher of the law” doesn’t seem to be out to trick Jesus. He seems to have been impressed by Jesus’ wisdom and genuinely interested in hearing what he had to say. So he asked a question that was important to him as a teacher of the law; a question that addresses priorities. “Which is the most important commandment?”
As a teacher of the law he would probably have had his own opinion on this. And he would have been aware of the ways in which other people had answered it…. An early Jewish teacher had taught that there were 613 precepts in the Old Testament, and many Jews believed that they were all equally important. In fact they added extra laws to explain how to fulfil those 613 commandments. That was one tradition, of increasing laws. But there was another, of boiling the law down its basics. You can see it in action in the Old Testament.
In Psalm 15, David
reduced the 613 to 11.
1. He who walks blamelessly.
2. And does what is right.
3. And speaks truth from his heart
4. Who does not slander with his tongue.
5. And does no evil to his friend.
6. Nor takes up a reproach against his
neighbour.
7. In whose eyes a reprobate is despised.
8. But who honours those who fear the Lord.
9. Who swears to his own hurt and does not
change.
10. Who does not put out his money at interest.
11. And does not take a bribe against the
innocent.
In Isaiah 33:15, Isaiah
reduced them to 6.
1. He who walks righteously.
2. And speaks uprightly.
3. Who despises the gain of oppressions.
4. Who shakes his hands, lest they hold a
bribe.
5. Who stops his ears from hearing of
bloodshed.
6. And shuts his eyes from looking upon evil.
He shall dwell on high.
Micah reduced the 6
to 3. (Micah 6:8.) 1. To do justice. 2. To love kindness. 3. To walk humbly
with your God.
Later in Isaiah the 3
are brought down to 2. (Isaiah 56:1.) 1. Keep justice. 2. Do righteousness.
Finally,
Habakkuk reduced them all to one. “The righteous shall live by faith.” (Habakkuk
2:4.)
So this wasn’t some trick question to catch Jesus out. This was part of a living tradition of trying to sum up all of what it meant to live a good life, a godly life, in as few words as possible. Rabbi Hillel, who was almost a contemporary of Jesus, was once asked by a Gentile to teach the whole of the law while standing on one leg. So he stood on one leg and said, "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole law, the rest is the explanation; go and learn."
In today’s text Jesus accepts his place in that tradition, and provides his own teaching on the essence of following God, only with a twist. The teacher had asked Jesus to name the most important commandment. That would imply one commandment. Jesus responds with two; the most important, and the second most important, and so we’re talking about priorities.
If you were to go out on the streets today
and take a poll and ask “what is the highest priority for humanity today?” what
kind of answers would you be likely to get? In the West the answer would almost
certainly be “global warming.” In much of Asia and
(There is a sad irony to that. One of the main reasons why there is a food shortage in the third world is because the West is diverting grain to make bio-fuel, so we can have a cleaner power source to run our vehicles. So, as a result of our preoccupation with global warming, Africans and Asians face starvation. As I said, life is complicated.)
If you asked someone in
It’s unlikely that many would give Jesus’
answer. 29 “The most important
one,” [the top
priority] answered Jesus, “is this:
‘Hear, O
How often do you hear that quoted outside of church? Lots of people like to quote Jesus. Even in our secular culture he’s respected as a great teacher (for the most part) and his name lends a certain weight to an ethical argument. But, in general, when people quote Jesus, they quote his second priority, “Love your neighbour as yourself,” not his first priority, ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ That might be because they’re using Jesus to support their own arguments. They set the priorities and then look around for heavyweights to support their position.
As Christians, we don’t have that option. We don’t have the luxury of picking and choosing just the things we think are important from Jesus’ teaching. If we say that he is our Lord and Saviour, that means that “what he says, goes” in our lives, even if it doesn’t fit the culture around us, or make us particularly comfortable.
And Jesus says that the most important thing, the top priority in life, is to ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’
This isn’t original to Jesus. He’s quoting
from his favourite book of the Bible, Deuteronomy. Jesus quotes Deuteronomy
more than any other book of the Bible, and this is taken from Deut 6.4-5. Deuteronomy
means, “a repetition of the law.” It’s framed as Moses’ farewell address to the
people of
So, what does it mean to love God?
When the Bible talks about “love” it isn’t talking primarily about an emotion. Not that emotions aren’t involved, just that they’re not at the centre of what the Bible calls “love.” In the Bible, love is first and foremost something you do, before it’s something you feel.
Unfortunately, we’ve come to expect love to look like a Hallmark commercial, complete with soft music and sentimental tears. But love is more than a pretty picture. And love is more than a feeling.
In “The Road Less Traveled” M. Scott Peck writes that love… “is an action, an activity… Love is not a feeling,” “True love is not a feeling by which we are overwhelmed. It is a committed, thoughtful decision.” “Love is as love does,” he wrote. “Love, then, is a form of work or a form of courage."
I found a song on the internet called “Love is as love does.”
I can see by your pain
you're in a terrible state
Well I identify, I commiserate,
Better get you some help now before it's too late,
I hear love is the key to it all
Well talk is just talk, Love is as it walks
Talk is just talk, Love is as it walks! Love should result in action. That’s how God loves.
Deut 4:37 says, Because [the Lord]
loved your forefathers and chose their descendants after them, he brought you
out of
And in Deut 7:8 it says, But it was because the Lord loved you and kept the oath he swore to your forefathers that he brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the land of slavery, from the power of Pharaoh king of Egypt.
Love is as love does. John 3.16 doesn’t say that God so loved the world that he felt all warm and gushy about us. It says that God so loved the world that he did something about it. He sent his son; he sent him to die in our place and restore us to fellowship with him.
Love is as love does. Love is a way of living that chooses the best for the other person, starting with God and working out from there. We love God because he first loved us. (That’s 1 John 4 again.) And our love for God is a response to his care and provision for us. He has won our love and, if we truly love God, we will seek to live our lives in ways that honour him.
What does that look like?
In
Genesis we read the story of Joseph whose master’s wife tried to seduce him.
Joseph’s response was “How then could I do
such a wicked thing and sin against God?” So she framed him and he ended up going to
prison for years.
Polycarp was an early church leader in what
is now
Those are extreme cases, but they make the point that loving God means choosing what is best for his sake, even if it doesn’t go well with us.
Once we have God in the right place in our lives, everything else begins to fall into place.
31 The second is this:
‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”
Jesus is quoting again, this time from Lev 19.18, a section of the Old Testament law that fleshes out what it means to love your neighbour, and includes things like leaving grain and fruit after the harvest so the poor can gather food for themselves.
Caring for those around us is not an option. People often criticise Christians as being so heavenly minded they’re of no earthly good. Meaning that they only worry about “spiritual” things, and don’t care about the people around them. Nothing could be further from what the Bible teaches, both Old and New Testaments. In Matthew 25 Jesus sets up our love for our neighbours, especially those in difficulty, as the real test of whether on not we love God.
I may claim to love God, but you can’t actually
see my love for God. What you can see is whether or not I love those around me.
It is perfectly possible for people who do not love God to love their
neighbour. I worked alongside some really great people in
It is perfectly possible for people who do not love God to love their neighbour. However, Jesus would say that it is simply not possible to love God, and not love your neighbour. Our experience of God’s love should overflow out of our lives to touch the lives of those around us.
Jesus says to love your neighbour as yourself. Now, I recognise that, for some people, loving themselves is an issue. But most of us do OK at loving ourselves. Remember, “love is as love does.” Most of us do OK at feeding ourselves and clothing ourselves. If we love others as we love ourselves we will be tolerant of them, we will have time for them, we will be interested in them (as we are in our own lives), we will make excuses for them, and we will want what is best for them, because that’s what we do for ourselves.
And that in turn puts everything else,
including any religious stuff we do, in its place. 32 “Well said, teacher,” the man replied. “You are right in saying that
God is one and there is no other but him. 33 To love him with all
your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love
your neighbour as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and
sacrifices.”
This was a man who was a professional religious worker. He was a Bible teacher. Some of his colleagues, the priests, might not have been too happy to hear him dismiss what they did. But he got his priorities right.
We are to love God first. Then we are to love other people, made in God’s image. If we get those two right, then everything else can be assessed according to whether they help me love God first and love my neighbour.
There was nothing wrong with the sacrifices and offerings of the Old Testament. God had instituted them as a way for people to fellowship with him. But they were a means to an end, not an end in themselves. In the same way, our Sunday morning services are a means to an end. They’re a way for us to corporately express our love of God and, hopefully, to learn from scripture how to love him better.
It’s easy for us to get our priorities wrong.
One way is to focus on religious activity instead of acting in love. That often puts ourselves and our own needs in first place. We come to church because it makes us feel better.
Another way to have wrong priorities is to focus on loving others first. That’s more acceptable and there are many people who do that. We honour them with things like the Nobel peace prize, or citizen of the year awards. But Jesus would say that their priorities are still wrong.
The order Jesus calls us to follow is; God first, others second, everything else after that. May he grant us the grace to live that.