Jesus' Checklist for His Followers

I'm a list lover. I'm one of those freaks who keeps a list for just about everything. I keep a running to do list in my phone to keep up with what I need to accomplish each day. Jill and I keep a shared grocery list that we add to on a weekly basis (guess which one of us came up with that idea). Our leadership team at the Church adds discussion topics and testimonies to a list for our weekly staff meetings. I list out things to pack for trips, I list out sermons and series ideas for our Church, I list out names of people I ask the Lord about discipling. Are you getting the picture? My life is a litany of lists.

So, when it comes to following Jesus, it can be extremely difficult for rigid list-makers like me to not reduce our faith to a set of rules and to-dos. Certainly, the Judaic system was built on ten commandments which blossomed into many more over time, making up the entirety of the law, but Jesus came to fulfill the law on our behalf.

Now, that doesn't make the law moot, but it does require that our faith no longer be in a set of rules but rather in the Son of God. You've probably heard it said like this: "It's a relationship, not a religion." Cool saying, but who needs to hear it? Well, list lovers like I need to. Because we find it so much easier to just be given a list of steps to take to ensure we're staying on track in the life God has called us to live. Relationship sounds much more difficult, not because I don't know how to relate to others, but because I don't know how to measure my effectiveness at relating to others.

Can I just get a list of what to do instead?

THE WORD

One of them, an expert in the law, tested Him with this question: “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ - Matthew 22:35-37

In Matthew 22 we find Jesus being confronted by the religious elite: the Pharisees and the Sadducees - the ultimate list-lovers. When asked by an "expert of the law" which law is the most important, Jesus knew it wasn't a genuine question. They just wanted to catch Him off balance, trap Him in His words, and maybe even flex their intellectual knowledge of the law for all the honeys in the market that day (I'm guessing).

These guys loved rules and they loved religion. Their list of laws had grown so long, it had now reached well over 600 by the time Jesus was walking the earth. Yet Jesus did not hesitate to answer their question, and with a LIST no less!

Without hesitation Jesus declared the greatest command of all is the love your God in four specific ways. When Jesus listed them, I just have to believe he had people like me, those prone to become Pharisaical, in mind. Here's the checklist that Jesus gives us to obey the greatest command of all:

1. Love God with all your HEART – PASSION

We are called to love God passionately. Did you know the word passion means to suffer? Perhaps there are some married folk reading this right now and realizing that you have a passionate marriage after all - lots of suffering!

No, but really – passion means to suffer. That's why Jesus’ death on the cross is often referred to as the "Passion of the Christ." To be passionate about something means that you're willing to suffer for it. Loving God with ALL your heart will cost you. The heart is the life organ that pumps blood to every other part of your body. To love God with all of your heart is to love Him with all of your life. His blood was spilled for us, so our blood will pump for Him!

2. Love God with all your SOUL – WILL

Your will is your ability to choose and it's rooted in the soul. Allow me to counter the culture for just a moment. Love is not a force or an energy. Neither is it true that "love is love." People just say that when they wish to make "love" (i.e. attraction, desire, infatuation) their god. But love is not god, God is love. He defines what love is and how it is to be expressed.

Love is also not a feeling. If it was, Jesus couldn’t command us to do it. Love is not a puddle, meaning it’s not something you fall into. You don’t fall in love, you fall in puddles, and the problem with treating love like a puddle is that puddles dry up. If you can fall IN love, you can fall OUT of love. 

No, love is a choice. You choose to love. And perhaps that sounds way less romantic than "I'm falling for you" or "love at first sight" but I would argue that the ideology behind those ideas has dramatically cheapened the meaning of love. What’s more romantic: "I want to spend the rest of my life with you because my heart is making me." or "I want to spend the rest of my life with you because you are the one I choose out of every other person in the world."

This is why we don't just worship, serve, or obey God when we "feel" Him. There were times in the Psalms where David commanded his soul to love the Lord. Loving God with all of our soul means making the choice to love Him despite what we feel or what we are enduring.

3. Love God with all your MIND – THOUGHTS

To love God is to submit your mind to Him. 2 Corinthians 10:5 says "we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” God has given us a mind to manage, which is quite the task, especially in a society constantly vying for our attention. Loving God with your mind means doing the hard work of bringing your thoughts back to the Lord over and over again.

On average a person checks their phone somewhere around 144 times a day. In a 12 hour window, that's every 5 minutes. What if we trained our minds to come back to Jesus as often it comes back to our phones?

To love God with your mind also means to grow in your knowledge and understanding of Him. Reading your Bible, taking notes in Church, even studying theology and doctrine are all ways to love God with your mind.

4. Love God with all your STRENGTH – ACTIONS

Love is a verb. For those who struggle with grammar, a verb is an action word. Jesus said in John 14:15, "If you love me you will keep my commands."  To love God with our strength is to walk out what He has called us to do. C.S. Lewis once wrote that if you struggle to love someone, then simply treat them as you would if you did. In other words just act like you love them, and as you do, somewhere along the way you will! Love is what we do, not what we feel.

Loving God with our strength means whatever we do, we do it as an offering to the Lord. Believers don't just work for a paycheck, a boss, or a company. We work for a Kingdom! Our work is how we express our love for the One whom we serve. Perhaps you've never seen your job or your role in your family as an active way to love God. Renew your lens now! What you're doing matters and it will yield so much more fruit when you do it for the glory of God.

There's an age-old classic called Practicing the Presence written by Brother Lawrence. He was a Catholic friar and monk who lived in the early 1600s assigned to wash dishes in a French monastery. That dish-washing monk impacted the masses by finding the pleasure of God's company as he washed dishes day after day as an offering to the Lord. If Brother Lawrence can love the Lord with suds and plates, surely whatever you find yourself doing in this season can be a labor of love to the God you serve.

CONCLUSION

The only way to live a life of love is to make Jesus the love of your life. Perhaps you're familiar with the story in John 21 where Jesus sat with Peter after the resurrection and asked him, "Do you love me more than these?"

Peter quickly responded, "Of course, you know I love you!" As if Jesus' question came from left field. Well, I mean Peter, you did just abandon Him in His darkest hour and deny Him three times... you don't think that begs the question?

Nonetheless we know that while Jesus and Peter are having one conversation, they're discussing two very different loves. Peter is willing to give Jesus a brotherly, affectionate kind of love known in the Greek as phileo. It's a love among many loves, similar to what we mean when we tell someone "I love you" at the end of a phone call or when we declare our devotion for pepperoni pizza. Sure we love it, but we're not willing to suffer for it.

Jesus on the other hand is talking about an unconditional love, known in the Greek as agapeo. The kind of love that requires everything of you. I recently heard Pastor Landon Schott phrase it as "loving God for no reason." This is a love that makes no demands and requires no qualifications. Jesus was asking Peter, "Will you love me with all your heart, soul, mind and strength?

Jesus is still searching for those who will not love Him like they love the world but rather will love Him more than anything this world has to offer. Run through this checklist in the coming days. It's about as close as you're going to get to a list of rules clearly marked out in this relationship with Christ. And as someone who has a bit of an unhealthy obsession with lists, I'd say it's a pretty good one.