FOLLOW | Loving

If you could remain standing for the reading of God's word tonight. If you could remain standing, our teaching text is from Matthew 22. And we stand to honor scripture as more than just human words and wisdom, but as the very word of God. Matthew 22, verses 34 through 40 say this. Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. 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, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it. Love your neighbor as yourself. All of the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. Can you guys, there we go. Downtown, how you guys doing? You guys ready to go tonight? Honestly, that AC is cranking in here. You got the fans going? I think we're ready to roll. I just wanna start with a personal story.

I became a follower of Jesus while I was in college around the age of 19. And early on in my Christian walk, I was given an NIV message side-by-side Bible. Now, if you're not familiar with the side-by-side, what it is is it's two Bibles inside of one Bible. And to be honest, I read the message more than I read the NIV, the Eugene Peterson version, because there was less words that I had to Google afterwards. Started reading the gospel of John for the very first time. And I remember coming across these words of Jesus. Jesus says in John 14, if you love me, keep my commands. If you love me, keep my commands. My first thought as a new believer was, okay, that seems important. And so I did what any type A, slightly neurotic new Christian would do, which is I made a list. I made a list of all of the commandments that I could find in the gospels. And I began to rate myself on a scale of one to 10 of how I was obeying those commandments. Now, you're probably hearing that and thinking, hey, Tim, that sounds a little bit legalistic, to which I would say, yes, it totally was. But I was new and I was 19 and I was very serious. And I genuinely wanted to love God. And I still have this note on my phone.

And so just to give you a flavor, here are a few of the commandments from my list. Number one, do not steal, 10 out of 10. Easy win right off the top, real confidence builder. I would go back to that one on the tough weeks. Number two, do not cast your pearls before swine, 10. Never owned pearls, also did not know what that meant. Number three, wash one another's feet. Gave myself a four, which raises the question, what did I mean by four? Who knows? And then finally, number four, do not judge. I think I was honest on this one, three out of 10, mostly because I was judging everybody else who didn't make a list like I did. Now, here's the thing about that list, is the problem wasn't my obedience, because honestly, on paper, I was doing just fine. The problem was my heart posture behind the obedience. I genuinely wanted to love God, I just did not know how. And I think that this is exactly what Jesus came to speak to in this text. And so this evening, we're continuing forward in our follow series, where we're paying attention to how Jesus lived, and we're asking this simple question, what does it actually look like in New York City in 2026 to follow Jesus and to model a life after the Son of God? And so today, we'll be in Matthew 22, and we're looking at how Jesus loved. Now, the context of this passage matters,

because here we find Jesus in the final three days of his life, he's standing in the temple courts, and things are heating up, he's in argument after argument. argument and test after test, and in Jesus's mind, he knows that the cross is coming in a few days. He knows that this is the end of his public ministry where he is going to die as the atoning sacrifice for all the people, and I just believe that there is a level of conviction and seriousness with which Jesus speaks in his final days. He's approached by a group of religious scholars that were called the Pharisees. Now, if we were to call someone a Pharisee today, it would be an insult. To call someone a Pharisee means to call them self-righteous and hypocritical and legalistic, but to call someone a Pharisee in the first century was a high compliment. It meant that they were zealous for God and that they had done the serious work of applying the Bible to their daily lives. In many ways, these religious leaders were disillusioned because they were God's chosen people, and yet their country is occupied by Rome, a pagan enemy, and they are fasting and they are praying and they're wondering, has God left us? Has he abandoned us? Has he forsaken us? And so what they do is they double down in strict obedience to the law,

and essentially they're saying if God's not there, then it's on us, and so we have to earn his favor and so they literally make a list. The Torah, the first five books of the Bible, had 613 commandments, each one carrying relatively equal weight, and they are obeying with such strict obedience that they're literally tithing their kitchen spices, like mint and dill and cumin, down to the teaspoon, and I just want you to imagine for a moment the type of pressure that that would put on the human heart to obey God in that way, and what we're gonna find is just like me, these Pharisees, the problem wasn't their obedience, the problem was their heart behind the obedience. I believe that they knew how to be Pharisees, but they did not know how to love God, and I mention this because I think there's a similar risk for us today in New York City in 2026. I don't know about you, but the reading of the Bible, when I read the word, I often find myself putting some distance between me and the Pharisees. Like, I wouldn't be that way, but the more and more that I follow Jesus, the more and more that I realize that my heart is prone to the same tendencies. I used to think about the Israelites in the book of Exodus, and this is when God the Father literally parts the Red Sea, and back in the day,

I would read those passages with judgment because I would think to myself, okay, so you just witnessed God Almighty part the Red Sea, come in a pillar of fire and smoke, and then two or three days later, you run into a food problem and a water problem, and all of a sudden, you're looking back to Egypt where you were enslaved for 400 years, and you're saying it was better in slavery, and the truth is is that we are prone to the same tendencies that these Pharisees and these Israelites were prone to. So we pick up in Matthew 22, verse 34, and it says this. Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, which was just a group of another set of religious leaders, the Pharisees then got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested Jesus with this question. Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law? In other words, of all 613 of the commandments, which one, Jesus, is the most important? Now, we have to pause there because some of you might be thinking, 613 commandments, isn't that a bit much? Like, what's up with all of the rules and the regulations? And now, keep in mind, if we go back in our Bibles to the book of Exodus when the Israelites were enslaved, for 400 years, they are oppressed by a tyrant, genocidal leader. They didn't know how to live free or to be free. Their whole lives, all they had known was slavery.

And so, God moves towards them in kindness, and he's trying to rehabilitate their view of themselves. He's trying to restore their identity and teach them how to flourish under his loving care. And so, God gives these 600 laws and regulations, and all of these laws ultimately serve one purpose, which is to teach God's people how to live and how to love him. Now, this matters because some of you, you're in this room, and you're newer to faith, you're newer to the Bible, and maybe you're reading through the Bible for the very first time, and you get to the book of Leviticus or Deuteronomy, and this is your experience. You can throw that picture up. I thought it was funny. This was my experience. I'm reading through the religious laws, the temple rituals, the food laws. And the important thing to understand is that the great cosmic story told by the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, is a story of a God who desires to dwell with his people. The Bible at its core is a love story, from Eden to the tabernacle, to the temple, to Jesus, Emmanuel, God with us, to the Holy Spirit, indwelling believers, all the way through to the new creation. It is a story of God as a jealous lover

trying to restore relationship with a people who do not love him back. And I think that we feel this in Jesus's reply to the question. He says this, verse 37. Love the Lord your God with all of your heart and with all of your soul and with all of your mind. This is the first and the greatest commandment. And the second is like it. Love your neighbor as yourself. Now, here's the question that I just wanna build this talk around. What does it mean to love God? Like, what does it actually mean? Like, is it some ethereal thing? Is it like an emotion that descends upon you during worship? Is it a checklist of commands? Like, does God want me to read my Bible and pray more? Is it more spiritual activity? And not to mention, how is it that I love God with all of my heart? Is that some sort of emotional connection? Does that mean that I have to keep some type of low-grade spiritual zeal alive in me at all times? And how is it that I love God with my soul? How do I love someone who is invisible with a part of me that I cannot locate on a biology diagram? And I just wanna say this because this stuff is not necessarily intuitive. And so I wanna share with you guys a framework

that comes from a seminary professor, Gary Brashears, who spent much of his academic journey studying literally this question. What does it mean to love God? So we'll just go through these in order. Number one, loving God means being loyal and committed to him, even if it costs you. I think that one of the biggest challenges in our modern moment for Christians in New York City is the pressure to conform. Easily one of the most common pastoral questions that I run into in this church when I'm praying for you guys in the lingering prayer line, this comes up all the time, and it goes something like this. I'm here on Sunday. I'm in the prayer room. I'm at youth group, encountering the presence of God, enjoying the company of God's people. And then I go to school or work on Monday, and by Tuesday, I can't find God anywhere. The pressure to conform is enormous, to conform to investment banking culture, to conform to the shadow sides of the arts world, to the group chat. I mean, it's summertime, which means that people are getting married, and there's bachelor parties, and there's bachelorette parties.

I know for me, in my experience, it was always the golf trip with the boys. For most of my life growing up, I didn't become a Christian until I was 19, and so I didn't have Christian friends, and there was this constant pull on my life to live a life apart from God. Now, I just wanna share with you what I learned. Like, if I could go back and talk to myself when I was 22 years old, this is what I would say. And I'm gonna take you guys back for a moment to your eighth grade geology class, okay? Do you guys know what a sinkhole is? You guys remember sinkholes? Okay, so the way that a sinkhole works is underground beneath the surface, the water table dries up. And for a long time, nothing changes on the surface. The grass is green, the house looks fine, the street is stable. You can even drive cars on the street and park cars on the street. And then one day, with no warning at all, the whole thing collapses. You can put that picture up. Now, here's my point. Sinkholes don't happen suddenly, they appear suddenly. The same thing can happen in your life with God. Nobody wakes up one morning and says, I'm not gonna love God anymore.

It happens underneath the surface. Your inner life slowly dries up while everything on the outside looks fine. And then one day, it caves in. Now, my point is this, is that you have to build an inner life with God that can sustain the pressure of the exterior life of the city. Gordon MacDonald, who I think wrote one of the most important books of the last 50 years, he says that the great battleground of our age is the private world of the individual. Think about that, we're in a moment of AI anxiety, a political crisis, there's a new bomb dropping every 10 minutes it seems like, and he's saying that the great battleground of our moment isn't out there, it's in here. And it's for that reason that I just think that much of Jesus' words speak to heart level issues. There was political crises, Rome was oppressing Israel, and yet Jesus comes on the scene, the son of God, and he speaks to the heart. I think another challenge in our culture is that love has largely lost its meaning. I don't know about you, but I hear love and I think of sappy emotionalism, sentimentality, and it cheapens the word because love is primarily an emotion that you feel. It also has become so elastic. The Greeks had four different words to describe love, and in English, we have one.

This really creates a problem because I love my wife, I also love Los Tacos, and I think that we can agree that those are two very different loves, both tender, both exhilarating, but very different loves. So what is this love from God's perspective? Like what does God Almighty have to say about this? And so in Jesus' response, he's actually quoting the Bible, which I love, he's quoting an ancient prayer that comes from Deuteronomy 6 called the Shema. Say Shema. Shema. His audience would have known this very well. We might be unfamiliar, but this was a daily prayer ritual in the Jewish community that has existed through the centuries all the way up until today. It was as common in their minds as the Lord's prayer would be in the mind of the modern Christian. And I just wanna read this to you guys because this was the prayer that they prayed every morning, every night, and it says, hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands

and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates. There's a scholar of Jewish studies at Harvard named John Levinson, and he says this about love. Love in Deuteronomy is a love that can be commanded. Above all, it is a love which must be expressed in loyalty, in service, and in unqualified obedience. To love God is to be loyal to him, to walk in his ways, to keep his commands, to do them, to heed his voice, and to serve him. In the context of covenant, the alternative to love is not neutrality but rebellion. Now, I read this as good news because if love is mostly a feeling, it can't be commanded. But if loyalty, if love is a loyalty and an action in something that we do, then you can love God even on your worst day when none of the feelings are there. That's good news. Ronald Rollheiser, who's a Catholic priest, incredible spiritual writer in our modern moment, he offers an incredibly helpful picture of this. In his book, Insane for the Light, he talks about how love often moves through stages. Now, I know that there's a lot of you in this room this evening who are single, dating, maybe recently married, longing to be married, and this is some of the best relationship advice that I've heard in a long time. So the first stage is the honeymoon stage.

And this is when you fall in love and everything that you think that person does is so adorable, even the annoying things that they do are cute. This is that moment when you're feeling the emotions towards somebody, and every time they text you, it's like a spark goes off in your heart. And you wait to reply seven or eight minutes because you don't wanna be too close to them. And then when you're typing your text messages, you type it in the Notes app and not actually in the message because you don't want them to see the three bubbles for how long it's taking you to write six words. And then you finally build up the courage 20 minutes later to send the text, and the second you send it, you just start rethinking everything that you just wrote. Why did I put an exclamation point? I should have put a period. No, a period feels actually a little bit angry, passive-aggressive. I should have just done emoji, or maybe no exclamation point at all. We just start to rethink and overanalyze every single part of the relationship. And this is a beautiful stage. It's a God-given stage. But if you were to ask.

Anyone in the room who's been married for any period of time, what they would tell you is that one day you come home from the honeymoon. And this is the second stage when disillusionment sets in. And this is when you realize that they're an actual person with flaws and they load the dishwasher wrong and they make obscure noises that no human being should make when they sleep. And they take the toilet paper and they put it on top of the roll without actually changing out the roll, which is just crazy to me. And the feelings change. At this moment, you start to feel like something is wrong. And this stage is so critical because disillusionment is actually a positive thing. It literally means the loss of an illusion. And this is the moment where your love is put to the test and you discover if you are in love or if you are simply in love with being in love. Many people in our modern culture, Rollheiser would say, aren't actually in love with a person. They're in love with how the person makes them feel and thus they are in love with themselves. But here's the thing. If you stay and if you remain loyal and committed and you keep choosing that person day in and day out, even when the feelings aren't there, eventually something deeper develops, something far better than the honeymoon. And I love this word, home, home.

And this is the most mature stage of love. This is when there is a deep sense of ease and joy and lightness that comes over you because you are finally at home with the one that you were created to love. This is why I love spending time around older married couples, couples who have been married for 20, 30, 40 years, couples who have seen some pain and some trials and some difficult stuff, but there is just a lightness and an ease and a joy with which they relate to each other and love each other because they're finally home. And I share all of this, guys, because the same thing happens in our relationship with God. Some of you guys can remember the honeymoon stage when like every worship song made you cry and you're reading the Bible for the first time and you're like, have you guys seen John 3, 16? Why is nobody talking about this? Do you know about this? God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son. It's like the Bible itself is reading you and then one day disillusionment set in and the feelings changed and you felt like something was wrong, like maybe God's not there, maybe he wasn't real, maybe he abandoned me. And the truth is is that nothing is wrong.

He's been there the whole time, you're just maturing. And this is a beautiful stage because if you stick with it and you hang on and you stay loyal and committed, something incredible happens, which is that you find yourself at home with the creator of the universe in the most loving, most secure relationship that you could ever imagine where you are fully known and you know him and there is an inexpressible joy. So how do we cultivate this kind of love? I just felt led to share this with you guys. This is a daily practice that I do. It's kind of like my version of the Shema to remind myself of the love of God every single day. And so we're gonna just put these words on the screen. I'm gonna pray it. It goes something like this. Eternal God, creator of heaven and earth, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Israel, the God and the Father of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, the true and the living God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, have mercy on me, a sinner. Most merciful God, I confess that I have sinned against you in thought, in word, and in deed by what I have done and by what I have left undone. I have not loved you with my whole heart.

I have not loved my neighbor as myself. I'm truly sorry and I humbly repent. And for the sake of your Son, Jesus, have mercy on me and forgive me that I may delight in your will and walk in your ways to the glory of your name, amen. Now, I don't pray that prayer to be a spiritual superhero. I pray that prayer because my heart is so forgetful and every day I have to pick up the yoke of the Lordship of Christ and put it on my shoulders and remind myself of the grand story that I'm living in. So first, to love God means to be loyal and committed to him and number two, loving God means trusting him even when it doesn't make sense. Loving God will require you to trust him in ways that on paper will make zero sense. You will be misunderstood by friends, by family members, by coworkers. And I just really believe that one of the most important questions that's being placed in the body of Christ in this hour is do I trust God enough to obey him even when I don't understand? If fear is what keeps God's children from experiencing God's best, I believe that trust is the key that unlocks the door to the spiritual blessings that already belong to you in Christ Jesus. Isaiah 55 matters so much here. This is the Lord speaking.

He says, for my thoughts are not your thoughts. Neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord, as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. Now, at the risk of being a heretic, I'm gonna add a couple words to the end of that text. I know you're not supposed to do that, but I think that you will find that this is true as you read through scripture. And my timetable is not your timetable. Some of you guys are in this room tonight and you are in a season of waiting and God is doing something deep inside of you and patience is required, but you have to trust that what he is forming in you is preparing you for your future. From this text, we also see that things not making sense is promised, it's guaranteed, which means that if you wait to obey until you fully understand, you will miss out in some form or fashion for God's best for your life. In Genesis chapter 12, God gives this incredible promise to a man named Abraham. And one of the things that I want you to notice is that what God doesn't give Abraham is he doesn't give him a map, he doesn't give him a timeline, he doesn't give him a five-year plan. Abraham has no financial security or relational security.

He gets a command and a covenant promise. This is what the Lord says, Abraham, Abraham, wake up. Go from your country, your people, and your father's household to the land. I will show you. And here's the promise. I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you. And all peoples on earth will be blessed through you. So Abraham leaves his family, he has to trust God with his deepest relationships. Abraham is called to leave his land, which means that he has to trust God with his daily work. Abraham has real dreams for the future, but he's trusting God with those dreams. Now Abraham, I believe, has an idea of how life should go and he has to trust God with how his life will turn out. Years ago, before I became a pastor, I was working in private equity. I wasn't always a pastor. And through circumstances that I could only describe as the kindness of God, I received my dream job at the age of 28, the job that I had always hoped for, thought about, dreamed about, prayed about, that maybe I would get when I was 40. And around that time, God's doing a work inside of me and I'm developing a heart for God and for people. And so me and a buddy,

we start a ministry in Denver, Colorado, and I'm working bivocationally. And I don't really know what it was about that ministry. I don't really feel like we knew what we were doing. We were just throwing stuff against the wall to see what stuck. But I think God loved it and he just breathed on it. And so we started to grow and we hired staff and we started partnering with other local churches around the city of Denver. And one day, one of those churches gave me a job offer to be a pastor. And this was such a wrestle for me because I'm asking God, why? Like, God, why would you do this at this moment? Around this time, he had also given me a covenant promise from Isaiah 55. And I'm just wrestling in prayer, like, God, what am I supposed to do? I feel this call to be a pastor, but I'm in my dream job. It's the best it's ever been. Are you asking me to leave this? And so I wrestled it out in prayer and I flew to a different state and I went on a prayer retreat with a bunch of random pastors who I'd never met in my entire life, just go by faith. And on that prayer retreat, I happened to meet a pastor named John Tyson. And John and I, this is our first conversation that we had

and I'm processing this situation with him. And I'll never forget this moment. John leans in, he grabs me by the shirt with his right hand. John's a pretty intense guy. And he says, mate, you live in the safest country at the safest point in history of any human being that's ever existed. Take a risk, live by faith. What's there to lose? Go back to your job in private equity? And I stood back. Yes, sir. And so I get on an airplane back to Colorado and on the airplane I type my resignation letter. There's a board meeting on Tuesday morning a few days later and I meet with the board and I slide that resignation letter across the table. One of the scariest moments of my life. And I remember the chair, he said to me, Tim, do you realize what you're giving up? And I said, yes, I do, but I have to follow the call of God on my life. And he said, you've got two weeks to come back, but after two weeks, this deal is now closed. And I remember going to my car afterwards, my 2004 black Jeep Grand Cherokee RIP, and I just cried my eyes out. I just cried because I realized what I had left behind, my whole life, my degree,

everything that I'd been building towards. Now, I share that with you guys, not because I think that more business leaders need to leave the marketplace and become pastors, I actually think it's the opposite. We need more business leaders anointed with the spirit of God in the marketplace, but I share it with you because God is going to ask you to do things that on paper will make zero sense and the only biblical response that I see is immediate, radical, costly obedience. For some of you, you're in this room tonight and you're in a similar position and God is asking something of you that makes no sense. He might be asking you to end something that you know is pulling you away from God. He might be asking you to start something that you don't feel ready to start. He might be asking you to be patient when every instinct in you says, go and grab control. And he's asking you to trust him when it doesn't make sense. Some of you guys are in this room tonight and you're asking, why? Why, God? Why did this happen? Why are you making me wait? And I actually think why is the wrong question. What is actually the question that you should be asking? Let me give you a dangerous prayer. Not why, God, but God, what would you have me do

and what would you have me know? That's the question that a trusting heart asks and if you ask God that question, you should expect an answer from him. So the second point is that we, the first is that we remain loyal and committed to God. Number two is that we trust him when things don't make sense. And number three is loving God means expecting him to be good even when life falls apart. Now there's a phrase that pastors say in churches a lot. I've come to hear this from time to time and it goes something like this. God is good all the time and then the congregation says back. All right, let's just try that one more time. God is good all the time. Now I love that and I love positivity, but I think that we as New Yorkers probably have just a tad bit too much cynicism to say that all the time because here's the reality. God is good all the time. I believe that as a biblical truth, but what happens when life falls apart? What happens when things aren't going as you expected them to go, which inevitably will happen because Jesus tells us in scriptures that in this world, you will have trouble, which means that suffering is promised. Years ago, there was a close friend of mine named Mike

and Mike was an incredible human being. He was my roommate in college and early on in the pandemic, Mike was diagnosed with COVID, 28 years old and it became severe quickly. He was admitted to the hospital. He was there for a few weeks and I just remember like text after text, the news just kept getting worse and worse up until that it became so severe that he was placed on a ventilator and ultimately he was placed on life support and for weeks, his family, his parents, his wife were just at the hospital nonstop and I remember feeling like this was my big moment as a young, zealous follower of Jesus, soon to be pastor, to petition God for the miracle. This was my moment to pray the prayer of faith and to bank my faith on the goodness of God and so I start rallying the troops and I'm sending out text messages and I'm going on social media and we have hundreds and hundreds of people from around the world praying for Mike's healing. A few days later, I get a phone call that Mike is gone, that he passed away and just to be honest with you guys, it was devastating. I lost some of my first love that day. I said the right words afterwards, I did all the right things but I put the prayers of healing

and the prayers of faith on pause. us for a season, because I had experienced my first big no from God. And that disappointment planted this question in my heart for the very first time, which is, is God actually good? Does he actually care? Is he actually there? Because we were praying so hard, and we didn't get the answer. And I know that there's people in this room tonight who know exactly what this feels like. Maybe it wasn't a death, but it was a diagnosis. Maybe it was a relationship that fell apart. It was a dream that died. It was a betrayal from someone close to you. There's some people in this room who have been praying a prayer over and over and over for years, and you haven't gotten an answer from God yet. Some of you might be in a position where you're suffering as self-inflicted, and in many ways, it's the most difficult form of suffering because you're covered in shame and guilt because you feel like it could have been prevented. Now, the great danger in all these circumstances is that just like me, you will start asking the question and doubting God's goodness, like maybe he's not actually good, or maybe he is good, but he's just not good to me,

or he's forgotten me, or he's abandoned me, or God forbid, he's punishing me, none of which are true, but we start to think that way. And I think that the Lord brought some of you here tonight just to say, hey, I understand what happened. I understand what's going on in your life, but you can trust my unfailing love and my unchanging character even when you don't fully understand the whole picture. And so what I'm asking you to do is just to keep coming back to the throne of grace. Keep bringing me your pain. Keep bringing me your disappointment because I promise you I'm still here. I haven't left you, and I haven't forsaken you. Maturity in the Christian faith is not living a sin-free life. It's not pretending everything is okay or some form of false positivity. Maturity is learning to take your pain and your disappointments to God instead of away from him. And here's why. No one, no counselor, no coach, no parent, and no friend has your best interests in mind more than your heavenly Father. No one is more invested in your long-term flourishing than the spirit of the living God. And so the worst thing that can happen is we turn our backs and we fracture the relationship

that was actually designed to nourish us. I love this in Lamentations 3. It says that the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies never come to an end. By the way, this is written by Jeremiah in the height of his suffering. It's called Lamentations because it's a lament. I just want you to listen to him fighting for the love of God. The Lord is my portion, says my soul, therefore I will hope in him. The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him. This is what it looks like to see a human heart fighting for the goodness of God, to expect him to be good. There's a really well-known pastor, theologian, church leader by the name of John Ortberg. And he has been recently going through a season of tremendous suffering. And he's been on a few podcasts where he's just been talking about what's happening and his family. And one thing he said that just struck me was he talked about how as a leader, he felt like things always had to be okay. And if things were badly broken, he needed to find a way to fix them. But then as he got older, as he matured, he learned that there were some circumstances in life

that could not be fixed and would not be fixed on this side of eternity. And he still had to wake up and live. And I love what he says, circumstances being okay is not an adequate foundation for life. Circumstances being okay is not an adequate foundation to build your life on. And what the good news of the gospel says is that I can be in a place where circumstances are not okay, and they may never be okay, and I can still joyfully serve God. I can still love him and have this hope that no one can ever take from me and this inexpressible joy because my hope is in him. He's the treasure. He's the reward. You show me a person walking through suffering, fighting for their first love, and I will show you a vessel through which the power of God will flow. I truly believe that this is one of the most resisted places in the Christian walk by the evil one, attacking the character of God. We know that's true because he does it in the Garden of Eden. We know what his playbook is. It's obvious. And friends, I just believe that nothing scares Satan more than a child of God willing and able to save. suffered, he's seen that play before.

And I think that the Lord wants to encourage some of you who are in that season tonight. So my final point here, number four, loving God. Loving God, and this is huge, means loving the person who's right in front of us. In Luke's version of the gospel, this story of the Pharisee and Jesus in this question about the greatest commandment is told in a slightly different way through the lens of a story. And sometimes Jesus would use stories to help us grasp difficult concepts. And that story goes something like this. The Pharisee approaches Jesus and he says, good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life? And Jesus says, well, you're an expert in the law, you're a lawyer, why don't you tell me? And so he kind of perks up his chest, and he says, easy, love the Lord your God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. And Jesus says, that's it, do that and you will live. Awkward stare. And then, and this is the key, it says next in Luke that the lawyer wanted to justify himself. And so he then asked Jesus, well, who is my neighbor? Who is my neighbor? And Jesus goes into a story and he says that there's a man walking from Jerusalem to Jericho. It was a dangerous, rocky road.

And on the way to Jericho, he's attacked by robbers, he's stripped of his clothes, his money is stolen, he's beaten, he's left naked, ashamed, and half dead on the side of the road. And then it says that three people walk past this half dead man. The first is a priest, and the priest we know is returning from his duties at the temple, going back to his home in Jericho, probably was busy, probably was tired, probably had a lot going on, so he walks past the half dead man. The second is a Levite, also a holy man, he skirts around him as well. The third is a Samaritan, which was the perceived enemy of Israel at the time, and the Samaritan kneels down, he looks this hurting man in the eyes, and he tends to his needs. He dresses his wounds, he gives him food and water, he places him on his donkey, and he takes him to the equivalent of a hospital, and he pays the entire bill. And then Jesus looks at this lawyer, and he says, which one of the three men was the neighbor to the one who was hurt? And the lawyer can't even say the word Samaritan, so he says, well, I suppose it's the one who had mercy on him, and Jesus says, go and do likewise. So this is the famous parable of the good Samaritan, and in this, Jesus takes the definition of a neighbor,

and he expands it to include an enemy, so he raises the bar. So you're in here tonight, you're asking, well, who is my neighbor, and I would just say, anyone you come across who's in need, even if it's an enemy. And the way that you love God, and you fulfill all the law and the prophets, which I don't know if you've read your Bible recently, is a pretty hefty chunk, is that you love that neighbor as yourself, but here's what I just wanna suggest to you. Jesus takes us to graduate level loving of our neighbors, and I think that we need to start at 101. I think that we need to start at kindergarten, and we need to start by loving our actual neighbors. And when I say neighbors, I mean literally the people who live around you and in close proximity to you. So if you live in 3B, I'm talking about 3C, I'm talking about 3D, I'm talking about that crazy cat lady in 3F. Your actual neighbors. There's a political scientist named Mark Dunkelman, and he wrote an incredible book called The Vanishing Neighbor, and he says that every person has three rings of relationship. The first is the inner ring, and this is your family, this is like your two or three closest friends. These are the people that you just spend

regular relational time with. The outer ring is the internet. It's your social media followers, it's your network, it's the thousands of people that you sort of know, but if you rode a subway with them, you probably wouldn't recognize them. And then there's the middle ring, and the middle ring is your actual neighbors. It's the guy at your gym, it's the woman at the coffee shop, it's the family that lives across the hall. It's the people that you didn't choose, but you just share space with. And what he says is that over the last 40 years, we have strengthened the inner ring. We have absolutely exploded the outer ring, and we have hollowed out the middle. And I just believe that maybe one of the most radical ways to love God in New York is incredibly. Ordinary. It's not loving humanity in some abstract way, although that's good. It's not serving the general good, although I appreciate serving the general good. It's learning to love the person who's right in front of you. I'm gonna share this story real quick as we close, and I'll actually invite the band to come up and join me. My wife, Riley, who, if you haven't met her, is an incredible, godly woman. When we first moved to New York, she asked this question,

how is it that we love our neighbors? And so she did something crazy, which is around Christmas time, our first year, she handwrites 30 Christmas notes inviting every neighbor in our 30-unit building to an open house Christmas party on a Wednesday night. Now, I work in ministry as a pastor, which means that one of my jobs as a professional is to try to get people in the room to tell them about Jesus. And I remember the night this was gonna happen. I talked to Riley, and I go, sweets, no one's gonna show up. It's gonna be two or three people. It's gonna be awkward. We don't know any of these people. Let's just cancel. And she says to me, Tim, it's four hours away. We're not canceling. And I was like, we could totally cancel. I can show you how to do it. You literally just write the text message. You let everyone know we're not doing great, not feeling good, and you just cancel. And she says, we're not canceling. I show up 10 minutes before it starts, and one person comes in who was the superintendent, have a great conversation. All of a sudden, two people come in. Five people come in.

10 people come in. And within the first hour, there are 22 people in our apartment. And I got to stand up and just talk to everyone, say, hey, my name's Tim. This is my wife, Riley. We love Jesus, and we literally just wanna tell you and share with you his love. And so this is our home. We wanna welcome you into our home. If there's anything that we can do to serve you, we're here for you. And it wasn't like anything magical happened that night, but just over time, we started to build relationships. We started having people over for dinner. And I think the fruit is still coming from that night. But one of those ladies started attending Alpha at our church. She comes to church to the city now, hearing about the love of God, hearing the gospel. And the young man who lived down the hall ended up coming to faith and got baptized. And it's just a small example of what can happen when we love the people who are right in front of us. There's a famous painting of the Good Samaritan by a Swiss painter named Ferdinand Hodler. And I just, I love this painting. It's so beautiful. You see the tenderness of the Samaritan who gets down on the ground,

and he gets on the level of the man who's been beaten and who's lying there half naked, ashamed, half dead. And the more and more that I follow Jesus, that I walk with Jesus, the more and more that I realize is that I think part of the reason why Jesus gave us the parable of the Good Samaritan is to exhort us to love our neighbor. But I think that there's a hidden meaning in the Good Samaritan. And the more and more that I see this picture, that I read this parable, I realize that I'm actually the one who's half dead on the street, and Jesus is the one who comes down on my level and meets me. Because what the reality of the gospel says is that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. While we were still naked and ashamed and had no pathway back to God, Jesus came and met us in our brokenness. Earlier in our huddle this morning, Pastor Keith and he said this question that just struck me, but he said, can you imagine what your life would be like without Jesus? And I just thought to myself, yes, I can. I totally can, because I lived that way for so long and for so many years, and now I have this love and this hope that no one can take away from me,

and I'm never going back. Because it's the greatest relationship in the world. What we see in the person of Jesus is that he was loyal and committed to the Father, even when that loyalty took him to the cross for your behalf. He trusted God when it made absolutely no sense. He's in the Garden of Gethsemane, he's praying, Father, if you would take this cup from me, but not my will, but yours be done. He banked his life on the goodness of God, even as they were driving the nails into his hand, because he was looking forward to his heavenly reward, and he loved his neighbor until the very end, when he said, Father, please forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing. And I just believe that there is someone in this room tonight who has not yet made that decision to put your trust and your faith in Jesus, and God brought you, and he puts you in this room, because the creator of the universe is. He's calling, He's calling your name. He's saying, Son, Daughter, I didn't just die for humanity, I died for you, for you. And so right now, I just wanna take us into a time of response, and I'm gonna invite you guys all to stand to your feet. Band, you guys can come on up. And just right now, I invite you guys just to set your hearts before the Lord.

I invite you into a posture of prayer. You can close your eyes, you can keep your eyes open, you can take a deep breath. Well, Father, we just come before you right now, and God, we just acknowledge you as the God of all hope and of all life. Jesus, you say in your word, because I live, you too shall live. And so, Father, I just pray over the people in this room right now, those that you call your glorious inheritance, those that you died for, and I just ask, Father, right now, that the power and the presence of the Holy Spirit would rest upon their lives. I just pray, Lord, that those who are suffering, that you would bring comfort to, those who are wavering in their trust, that you would instill confidence in. Father, those who are doubting your goodness, there would be a revelation of your character. Father, I just pray that right now, you would just begin to set people in our neighborhoods and in our lives onto our mind, who you have divinely ordained for us to love before the creation of the world. And so, Holy Spirit, we just expect to encounter you in this moment. We expect to love you, to be with you. We give you the fullness of our attention, of our time, of our hearts, and of our lives.

We love you. It's in Jesus' name I pray, and everybody said amen.