God Who Tests Our Hearts

1 Thessalonians 2:1-8

You yourselves know, brothers and sisters, that our coming to you was not in vain, but though we had already suffered and been shamefully mistreated at Philippi, as you know, we had courage in our God to declare to you the gospel of God in spite of great opposition. For our appeal does not spring from deceit or impure motives or trickery, but just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the message of the gospel, even so we speak, not to please mortals, but to please God who tests our hearts.

As you know and as God is our witness, we never came with words of flattery or with a pretext for greed; nor did we seek praise from mortals, whether from you or from others, though we might have made demands as apostles of Christ. But we were gentle among you, like a nurse tenderly caring for her own children. So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us.

Matthew 22:34-46

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees,

they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?" He said to him, "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."

Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them this question: "What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?"  They said to him, "The son of David." He said to them, "How is it then that David by the Spirit calls him Lord, saying, 'The Lord said to my Lord, "Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet"'? If David thus calls him Lord, how can he be his son?"

No one was able to give him an answer, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.

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In his first letter to the Thessalonians, Paul speaks of God who tests our hearts. Specifically, he says, we speak not to please mortals, but to please God who tests our hearts. Our Matthew passage today and in the past few weeks has contained many tests. Sometimes the Scribes and Pharisees were testing Jesus.

·      Should we pay the imperial tax?

·      What happens to the woman whose multiple husbands have all died? In heaven, whose wife will she be?

·      What is the greatest commandment in the law?

·      Who is my neighbor?

Sometimes Jesus was the one doing the testing.

·      Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it from human origin?

·      Which son did the will of his father – the one who said he would go work in the vineyard but didn’t, or the one who said he wouldn’t but did?

·      Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.

·      What do you think of the Messiah? Whose Son is he?

The greatest tests of all are whether we can obey the greatest commandments of all – to Love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength; and to Love our neighbors as ourselves. Both these commandments were well known to the Jews during the time of Jesus, and especially to the Scribes and Pharisees, who were well educated in the Jewish law.

The first commandment was the second half of the Shema, because the first two words in Hebrew are “shema Yisroel” – or hear O Israel, which even today is to be spoken twice daily by observant Jews, and is to be a touchstone on the doorpost of their homes.

If you have ever seen a Mezuzah on the doorpost of a Jewish home, rolled up inside that is a little scroll, with the Hebrew words for this passage.

When I was in Sunday School, we made one of these Mezuzahs, just a hand printed sign inside a construction paper frame that I put on my bedroom door and kept there for many years – I can see it in my minds eye even now – it said

“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord,

 and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,

and with all your mind, and with all your strength.”

There in the second half of the Shema is where you hear the greatest commandment, according to Jesus. And then he goes right on to the next – and you shall love your neighbor as yourself. This is a law that is written in the book of Leviticus. That was a surprise to me when I first learned it; I thought Jesus just came up with it first himself.

And I also thought that Leviticus was mostly full of crazy laws about cows and women’s haircuts that  we don’t pay attention to anymore.

[At least aside from the Ten Commandments, which were just a restatement in Leviticus anyway.]

But there it is, right in Leviticus. And of course it makes perfect sense that Jesus would speak commandments from the Scripture, since he came to fulfill the Law and the Prophets.

Now, in Robert’s Rules of Order, the word “Shall” means “must”.

No option. Not “should” or “may”. Shall means Shall. You shall.

So, you SHALL love the Lord your God. Not just a little bit. Not just in your spare time, or on Sunday mornings. Not just once the football game is over. (you knew I would bring up the football game, didn’t you?).

No, loving God comes ahead of everything and everyone else in our lives. It takes up all our heart, all our mind, all our strength.

Shall.

What would it be like to live that way? What would change in our lives? What would change in our churches? What would change in our world if that were a “shall” for each and every one of us?

Seems like God is testing our hearts with this commandment.

And what about loving our neighbor?

You SHALL love your neighbor as yourself?

We all really do want that same clarification as the lawyer asked for, don’t we? Just who is our neighbor, really?

What I was thinking all day yesterday was, Please, God, don’t make me treat those Spartans like my neighbor – not today – please?

And then I read an article about the Rev. Jim McCauley, a member of the Presbytery of Chicago, whose family is a member of the First Presbyterian Church of Evanston IL. He is a medical doctor, trained as an infectious disease specialist, and he has just been sent by his employer from Zambia to Sierra Leone to help with the Ebola epidemic. The details of the article are not well suited to read from the pulpit, but as I read it I knew that he knew what Jesus meant when he said to love your neighbor as yourself. He knows who is his neighbor, and he knows what it means to practice love of your neighbor, self-sacrificing, self-emptying love. And the only way he could possibly do this is because he takes seriously – literally, actually - the greatest commandment – to Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and mind, and strength.

When you shall do this, you shall naturally love your neighbor as yourself. Because you shall see your neighbor - all your neighbors - all the people of the world - as made in the image of God. You cannot help but see them as God sees them.

    

What or whom do we love more than God? What or whom do we love more than our neighbor?

·      Do we love our families more?

·      Do we love our country more?

·      Do we love our possessions more?

·      Do we love our safety more?

·      Do we love our health, our life more?

When we truly ask ourselves these questions, then perhaps it becomes easier for us to see how the religious leaders and the government leaders of those times would see Jesus as such a threat, and would begin to seek reasons and ways to eliminate him.

When we choose to obey these commandments, to love God with everything we are and everything God has given us, and to love our neighbors as ourselves, even when our neighbors seem so much more like “the other” than like “us and our kind”, then God will test us, so that God can use us.

God will test our hearts.

And it’s only by the grace of God that we can pass those tests, that we will let God fully use us. And it is by those actions, taken by God’s people, that God’s kingdom will be fully revealed.

There’s a parable about heaven and hell that goes like this:

One day a woman said to God, “God, I would like to know what Heaven and Hell are like.”

God showed her two doors. Inside the first one, in the middle of the room, was a large round table with a large pot of stew. It smelled delicious and made the woman’s mouth water, but the people sitting around the table were thin and sickly. They appeared to be famished. They were holding spoons with very long handles and each found it possible to reach into the pot of stew and take a spoonful, but because the handle was longer than their arms, they could not get the spoons back into their mouths.

The woman shuddered at the sight of their misery and suffering. God said, “You have seen Hell.”

Behind the second door, the room appeared exactly the same. There was the same large round table with the same large pot of wonderful stew that made the woman’s mouth water. The people all had the same long-handled spoons, but they were well nourished and healthy, laughing and talking. God said, “and this is heaven.”

The woman said, “I don’t understand.”God smiled, and said, it’s really quite simple. Love only requires one skill. These people learned early on to share and feed one another. While the greedy think first of themselves…

By the grace of God, may we pass the tests by which God tests our hearts, the tests of true love.

Amen.