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How would you describe the state of your heart? I am not talking about your outer world of your
actions, your words, your relationships, or your work. I am talking about the inner world of your
will, attitudes, thoughts, emotions, motivations, and affections. Is it well-ordered, ruled by the love,
joy, and peace of God? Or is it a mess, ruled by anger, fear, envy, turmoil, conflict, despair, regret
and so forth? For most of us, I’d guess that that it’s more of a mess than we’d like. A big part of the
brokenness of our hearts is the tangled mess of unmet desires and cravings that seem to control us
in ways that are unhealthy. If your heart were a garden, would you say that it looks more like a
tangled mess of brambles—or a beautiful, healthy, thriving, and well-ordered garden [show 2
pictures of gardens]?
Dallas Willard wrote a book called “Renovation of the Heart.” I love that metaphor of taking
something that is old, broken, disfigured, rotting, or disordered—and then renovating, renewing,
restoring it—making it beautiful and well-ordered, like new—even upgrading it.
Here is a picture of a house before and after it was renovated. And the next slide is a picture of a
car before and after it was restored.
In Rev 21, John has a vision of the age to come, the new heavens and the new earth. In that future
age, God declares in V 5:
Rev 21:5
“I am making all things new.”
God’s plan is to completely heal and renew all things. This includes healing the creation itself,
healing the broken systems of this world, healing our bodies, healing our relationships, and healing
our hearts. But even though this complete healing and renovation will occur in the age to come, we
don’t have to wait to die to start the process. Both the OT and NT use the words renew, restore,
and heal to describe the work that God is doing in our lives and in this world today. Here’s one
example:
Psalm 23:3
He [the Lord] restores my soul.
Let that sink in. Isn’t that wonderful? God desires to restore your broken, messed-up soul to a place
of wholeness. How can you start to experience the healing, transforming power of God in your
heart today?
There are many ways that God restores our soul, and this sermon series is about one of the most
important ways, which is that God renovates our loves, our affections, our desires, our delights.
The title of this sermon series is: Loving and Rejoicing in the Lord. This is absolutely at the center of
what it means to live well as a disciple of Jesus. If we can learn to wholeheartedly love and rejoice
in the Lord, it will begin to properly order everything else in our lives. It’s like the organizing and
healing power that can straighten out the other stuff in our hearts.
The great church father, Augustine, said: “The essence of sin is disordered love.” He also defined
virtue as “rightly ordered love”. What he means is that all our brokenness can be traced to loving
created things too much and not loving God enough. It’s not a bad thing to desire power, prestige,
wealth, comfort, safety, or romance. The problem is that we love these things too much, and it
turns our hearts into a tangled mess of brambles. These things become heart idols. This is clearly
seen in Jesus’ teaching about the cost of discipleship in Luke 14.
Luke 14:26
“If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and
sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.”
Why does He say we should hate our family and even our own lives? Jesus is using exaggeration
here because we know from elsewhere in scripture it’s a good thing to love our family. But He’s
saying we should love Him so much, that in comparison our love for our family would look like
hate.
For most people, if you ask them what it means to be a Christ follower, they’d probably say it’s
about following a bunch of rules, the do’s and the don’t’s: Do this, do this, don’t do this, don’t do
this. Doesn’t that describe the ten commandments? Thou shalt and thou shalt not? Yes, most of
the ten commandments regulate our actions, but the first one is the foundation of all the other
commandments.
Ex 20:3
“You shall have no other gods before me.”
This first commandment is one primarily of the heart rather than actions.
Let’s say you asked me to tell you about my relationship with my wife Kim. What if I described our
relationship by telling you about the rules I follow, the do’s and the don’t’s? And I said, here are the
do’s: I do the dishes twice a week, I buy her flowers once a month, and I give her a hug every day.
And here are the don’t’s: I don’t lie to her, I don’t yell at her, and I don’t cheat on her. You’d
probably say that it seems weird that I would describe our relationship in terms of rules. Just
because you follow the rules doesn’t mean you have a healthy, happy marriage. The essence of a
healthy, happy marriage is love, connection, intimacy, and delighting in each other. Sure, there are
some rules and some boundaries. It’s a good thing that I don’t cheat on my wife. But the rules are
not the essence of a marriage—they are boundaries that help to maintain a loving relationship.
In the same way, our walk with God isn’t primarily about the rules, the do’s and don’t’s. It’s about
love, connection, intimacy, delighting in each other. The rules are important, but they are not the
essence of what it means to walk with Jesus.
One of the most common themes of Jesus’ teaching is that God is more interested in our hearts
than our outward actions. What is going on in here [point hand] is more important than what’s
going on out here [move hands]. This is clearly seen in the sermon on the mount, where Jesus says
it’s not just about following the commands to not murder or not commit adultery, but about our
heart attitudes of anger and lust. He then says that when we pray or give money, it’s not about
how much we give or how long we pray, but our heart attitudes of loving God instead of wanting to
gain the approval of others. The NT teaches that God wants to heal and transform us from the
inside out, not just make us follow a bunch of rules.
The Jewish leaders were zealously meticulous in trying to obey all the hundreds of OT laws, but
Jesus repeatedly rebuked them for obeying laws outwardly while having improper motivations. At
one point during one of these rebukes, he quoted Isa 29:13:
The Lord says: “These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but
their hearts are far from me.”
This was written to OT Jews, but Jesus said it still applied in His day. This is a sobering indictment.
It’s possible to be a person who knows the Bible very well and has accurate theology, who is
zealously meticulous in following the rules (do this, don’t do this), but who has a heart that is far
from God. It is so easy for us to fall into this sort of religion. But I don’t want to be the sort of
Christian that Jesus would rebuke with the charge that I am coming near to God with my mouth,
and doing many of the right things outwardly, but have a heart that is far from Him. How can we
avoid this? How can we have a heart that is loving God passionately and experiencing the joy of the
Lord? How can we be healed and transformed from the inside out rather than just trying to follow
the rules? How can we experience connection and intimacy with the Lord—delighting in Him and
Him delighting in us?
Let’s start with the well-known passage from Matt 22:35-40:
35
One of [the Jewish leaders], an expert in the law, tested Jesus with this question: 36 “Teacher,
which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” 37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all
your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest
commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 All the Law and the
Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
OT scholars considered there to be 613 distinct commands in the OT. So this guy is asking Jesus
which of the 613 is the most important. And Jesus gives him two: love God and love others, and
everything else hangs on these two commands. That is remarkable: He’s saying that if we can learn
to do these two things well, everything else falls into place.
I have many goals in life—many desires—but if I am a follower of Jesus, loving God and loving
people should be my supreme goal, my ultimate desire. For example, I have financial goals, I have
goals about my physical health, I have family goals, I have career goals, and so forth. If I were to sit
down for a few hours, I could probably write down a hundred different goals, pursuits, and desires I
have. And if I were to prioritize these goals—rank them from most important to least important—
as a follower of Jesus, loving God and loving people should be at the top of the list—more
important than any other pursuit.
And if love is my supreme goal, all other goals must support this goal. Here’s an analogy: if you are
an Olympic athlete and your supreme goal is to win a medal, then all your other goals (like how you
eat or how you sleep) should be subservient to and helping to advance the goal of winning a medal.
You hopefully wouldn’t say, “I am going to eat 2 liters of chocolate ice cream today because it’s
really yummy even though it will set back my chances of winning the medal.”
That is why learning to love God and love people can help to heal the brokenness of our lives. If our
desires are like a tangled mess of brambles, love can help to order the affections and cravings of
our heart to look more like a beautiful garden, as all the desires and pursuits of our lives get in line
with our supreme mission of love. According to Jesus, everything else hangs on the two great
commands of love.
That said, here are two questions that every following of Jesus should be an expert on:
1. What does it mean to love God?
2. How do we develop more love for God?
If you are a follower of Jesus, such that loving God is your supreme goal, then it’s imperative to
understand what it really means to love and how to achieve it.
If I return to the example of an athlete, let’s say you are an Olympic football player. To move from
being a mediocre player to a champion player, you need to understand at least two things:
1. What are the skills needed to be a champion football player?
2. How do I develop those skills?
If you don’t understand what the needed skills are or have a plan for how to get those skills
through training, you will not achieve your goal of attaining the gold medal.
When you look at your life—how you spend your time and your money and your energy; what sort
of things you think about or dream about; what sorts of things get you excited or delighted—would
you say that loving God is your supreme desire, your most important goal? Do you know what it
looks like to love God? What’s your plan—your strategy—for becoming a person of love? If you
don’t have a plan, it’s unlikely to happen; we don’t usually drift into loving God; we typically drift
into self-absorption and self-deception.
And: we must have this understanding of love, not only for our own sake, but for the sake of the
people around us. We are responsible for helping others develop into loving followers of Jesus.
So, that’s what we will be looking at during this sermon series: what does it look like to love God,
and how we can develop more of that love?
When you ask the first question, what does it mean to love, I think many people would say the
essence of love is commitment and service. If I love God, that means I am committed to God and
serve Him faithfully. If I love my wife, that means I am committed to her and serve her. But I don’t
think that’s right. Commitment and service are closely related to love and are the necessary result
or fruit of love. But they aren’t the essence of love.
John 14:15 (Jesus said)
“If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”
He did not say that keeping his commandments is what love is. He distinguished the two and made
obedience the evidence of loving Him, the fruit of loving Him, not the definition of loving Him.
The essence of love can be explained with these words:
Value
Joy
Desire
If I love something, it means I value and enjoy and desire that thing. If I love pizza, it means that
pizza is valuable to me and gives me joy, so I desire it. If I love my children, it means they are
precious to me and make me happy, and I desire to have connection with them, and desire their
wellbeing. This leads to being committed to my children and serving them.
Thus, the essence of loving God is treasuring God, considering Him to be more precious than
anything or anyone else. It’s a matter of the affections, which then results in external actions of
obedience. It’s an experience of cherishing, savoring, delighting, admiring, valuing, appreciating,
and enjoying God’s infinite greatness—which leads to desiring and seeking God and finding
satisfaction in Him more than anything else—which then leads to commitment and service.
There are many expressions of this sort of treasuring and delighting found in scripture, which we
will look at during this series. Here is one we will briefly look at today.
Psalm 27:4 (George preached on this last month)
One thing I ask from the Lord, this only do I seek:
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life,
to gaze on the beauty of the Lord and to seek him in his temple.
This is the cry of someone who loves God with all his heart. How would you complete this
sentence? One thing I ask from the Lord, this only do I seek… Fill in the blank. Now, be perfectly
honest. What you would put here as the thing that you desire more than anything else? What
would give you more delight than anything else? What is most valuable to you? What if a magic
genie appeared to you and said he would grant you one wish—anything in the world—what would
you ask for? Whatever it is, that is your greatest love. David greatest wish was to be with God, to
know Him, to gaze on His beauty. Are you enthralled with the beauty of God?
Picture your love for God like a fire that powers a steam engine. In a steam locomotive, the fire
boils steam that powers the engine, and the engine drives the entire train. Without a powerful fire,
the train will not move. And what does a fire need in order to burn? It needs fuel, like wood or coal.
Here’s a video of someone feeding coal into the firebox to make the steam train go faster.
[video]
Just as the fire powers the train, our love for God is like a fire that powers our life. Is your love for
God more like a blazing fire or a few smoldering coals? [show pictures] To have a passionate love
for God that orders and powers our life, the fire of our love must have fuel. And what is that fuel?
It’s the understanding and appreciation of God’s glory and beauty. All of us are naturally drawn to
love things that are amazingly beautiful and glorious. To the degree that we grasp the
immeasurable worth of His beauty, His greatness, His love, His holiness, His justice, His wisdom, His
power, and His faithfulness—our love will be a blazing fire instead of smoldering coals.
And this is why our mind is so important. Our mind is like the woman in that video, shoveling coal
into the firebox and stoking the fire. We can employ our mind to fuel our love for God and stoke
the fire by meditating on God’s manifold glories. This is why biblical truth is essential for life
transformation. Right thinking, if it is accompanied by humility and the work of God’s Spirit, is the
fuel that leads to right loving.
I have two quotes and one video from John Piper that I will share. Here is the first quote:
Our thinking should be wholly engaged to do all it can to awaken and express the heartfelt fullness
of treasuring God above all things… We cannot love God without knowing God; and the way we
know God is by the Spirit-enabled use of our minds. So to “love God with all your mind” means
engaging all your powers of thought to know God as fully as possible in order to treasure him for all
he is worth.
And where should our mind focus to know God most fully? It is helpful to look at nature because
the heavens declare the glory of God. It is helpful to look at people because we are made in the
image of God. But the magnificence of God is seen most clearly in His word, and especially in the
person of Jesus Christ.
Hebrews 1:3
The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being.
[see also John 1:14] When you look at Jesus, you see a clear picture of God and you learn to love
Him. Jesus is the radiance of God’s glory. When was the last time you read through the four
gospels? Whenever I study the life and teachings of Christ, I fall deeper in love with Him. There are
inexhaustible riches in Him. Read the gospels with a hungry heart that cries out: I want to see the
glory of Christ. There is no one like Him.
When is the last time you read about how the Jewish leaders tried to entrap Jesus with tricky
questions, and his brilliant responses confounded them so thoroughly that the text says: no one
dared to ask him any more questions. When I read that, something happens in my soul: “Yes, that’s
my Lord! Such brilliance!” When is the last time you read John 13 where it recounts Jesus washing
his disciples’ feet, the Lord of the universe doing the job of the lowest servant in the house? If that
story of staggering love doesn’t bless you, your blesser is broken. That’s my Lord, that’s the one I
love, that’s the one I will worship for all eternity.
And, within the life of Christ, we can especially focus our gaze on His death and resurrection. That is
where His glory, His beauty, His power, His love, His holiness, His faithfulness, His justice, and His
wisdom shine most brightly. And out of all these attributes of God’s magnificence, I think the most
beautiful is His love. Love has a way of melting and captivating our hearts, and producing in us a
response of love, like nothing else can.
Here’s another John Piper quote:
If you wanted to increase your love for the glory of classical music, you would study it and spend
time talking with people who love it, and you would listen and listen and listen. If you wanted to
develop a love for the glory of visual art, you would study it and go to museums and spend time
with those who love it, and you would look and look and look. If you wanted to develop a love for
the glory of the heavens above, you would get a telescope and you would read astronomy and you
would spend time with people who love the stars, and night by night you would gaze and gaze and
gaze. And if you want to love the glory of God above all other glories, then you will study God and
spend time with lovers of God, and listen to God and look at God and gaze and gaze and gaze at the
revelation of the glory of God—especially in Jesus.
This quote mentions one other important aspect of developing our love: If you spend time with
people who passionately love something, their love naturally rubs off on you. So: Do you
intentionally spend time with others who love God passionately so that their love rubs off on you?
But there’s another important point to consider. So far I have been talking about what we can do
to develop our love. However, there also needs to be a work of God’s grace through the HS for this
to happen. In other words, the responsibility does not lie completely with us to conjure up this love
with our own efforts. In all areas of our walk with God, there is a mysterious union between our
efforts and God’s grace, between our work and God’s work in us. We strive while, at the same
time, trusting in God’s enabling.
This slide has some passages that support this idea that we can only love more fully as God does a
work of grace in our hearts, if you want to write them down:
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Jer 31:3, 33
Gal 5:22
Eph 1:18
Rom 5:5
2 Cor 3:18
Eph 3:16-19
We have time to look at only one:
2 Cor 4:4, 6
4
The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the
gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God… 6 God, who said, “Let light shine out of
darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of
God displayed in the face of Christ.
V 4 says that Satan works to deceive us so that we can’t see the light of the gospel of the glory of
Christ, who is the image of God. The Devil’s goal is to keep us from seeing God’s glory. Humans
have an insatiable appetite for glory, so if we don’t see God’s glory, Satan knows we’ll pursue it
somewhere else. Maybe we’ll make an idol of the glory of music, or the glory of food, or the glory
of Facebook, or the glory of our phone, or the glory of our family, or the glory of creation, or the
glory of sports. These things have glory, but it’s just a dim reflection of their Creator God. We’ll find
glory somewhere. We have to. We were made to worship.
Think of sports: the way people get so passionate about sports and idolize their favorite athletes,
the way people celebrate wins and mourn losses. Just watch a video of someone passionately
cheering for their team: it’s a type of worship. It’s more passion than we typically have for
worshipping God. I love sports, so this is one I have to be careful of: I don’t want to love sports with
a disordered love. I want to love the glory of God a hundred times more than the glory of sports.
And Satan is trying to make God look boring in comparison so I delight in other things more than I
delight in God.
V 6 shows God’s response to Satan’s work: Just like God made physical light shine into the darkness
at the creation of the universe by His sovereign power and wisdom, He also makes spiritual light
shine into our hearts by His sovereign power and wisdom. And why does He do this? To give us the
light of the knowledge of the glory of God displayed in the face of Christ. For us to delight in God’s
glory, there must be a work of His sovereign grace shining in our hearts. Thus, there’s a spiritual
battle going on in my heart that I can’t see. Carl did a series in October on spiritual warfare, and
this is at the center of the battle: Do I grasp the glory and beauty of God in a way that joyfully
compels me?
So how do we practically activate the grace of God in our lives to complement our efforts to see His
glory? Through humility, repentance, faith, dependence, and prayer.
James 4:6, 1 Peter 5:5
God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.
There is no foolproof technique or formula, but humility is the basic requirement for accessing and
activating God’s grace. God gives grace to the humble. And this humility expresses itself in
repentance, faith, dependence, and prayer. There’s a fascinating story in Exodus 33 where Moses
prays to God “Show me your glory,” and God grants his request. I would encourage you to cry out
to God every day in prayer, asking for Him to transform your heart and show you His glory. And
then confess and pray against the things that are your specific heart idols.
We will close with a three-minute video clip of John Piper. It’s from a sermon about money. In this
clip, he’s explaining his personal strategy for developing his love for God and battling against his
love for money, because if he just coasts, the love of money creeps into his heart and has the
potential to destroy his life.
[video]
So I pray that you will engage your thinking as fully as possible for the sake of knowing God as fully
as possible, that you might treasure God as fully as possible. I pray that you will employ your mind
to provide your heart with as much fuel for the fire of love as it can possibly deliver. And I pray that
the Holy Spirit will, by His grace, enable you to grasp God’s infinite glory and beauty, so that you
would delight yourself in the Lord and that your loves would be rightly ordered.