Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Church. We are thrilled you decided to listen to our teaching on your favorite podcast app. If you made a decision to follow Christ today, would you let us know by visiting? Yes.newlifegeillette.com Here is this week's teaching.
[00:00:27] Speaker A: Amazing. Thank you so much for that.
It has been really exciting. We have we flew in, my family and I flew in into Rapid City a couple of days ago and we got to drive through the Black Hills and see just absolutely gorgeous country. And we're really excited to see more of Wyoming and just the beauty of this part of the country over the next week before we go back home. But so excited to be with you and have the privilege of opening scripture with us, with all of us together this morning. To those watching online, to those at the jail, at the prison, and online at Church 307, wherever you are this morning, it's so, so sweet to be part of this time with you guys.
This morning we are going to be looking at Matthew 22, and this is a verse that I know Pastor Mike actually taught from a few weeks ago. I've had the privilege of getting to watch some of the sermons or listen to them through the podcast in the recent weeks and just being where you guys are and hearing what you're hearing, if you've been attending New life or been here for the last few Sundays. And to study love, to study four different ways love is translated in Scripture. And so we're going to look at Matthew 22 again in a new way this morning. So we're looking at beginning in verse 34, it says, but 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 is the greatest commandment in the law? And he said to him, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.
And this is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. And on these two commandments depend all the law and prophets. Would you pray with me, Father? I'm thankful for your word this morning, thankful for your message to us this morning. God, I pray that as we study the scripture, as we sit in what you have for us, God, that you would meet each of us exactly where we are, and that you would form our hearts more into the likeness of Jesus, and that you would help us rid the things that are not of you. And I pray that you would, that your words would be planted Deeply in our hearts this morning. In Jesus name, Amen.
Amen. How many of you guys have a favorite movie?
Anybody? Movie people? Yes.
I'm not going to ask you what it is. You might be embarrassed to say it out loud in front of your neighbor.
But I have favorite movies in categories or genres of movies. So I love, I love a drama, I love a story, a full story, an action movie, a little rom com. I also have a favorite Disney movie. So maybe you have favorites and categories. I think sometimes movies are like music, where when somebody asks you your favorite if you're a music person or a movie person, how could you ever choose one, right? You have all of these that you love so much. How could you ever just pick one?
Think about why that's your favorite for a second.
What is it about that movie that you love so much? Does it make you laugh hysterically? Does it make you cry hysterically? Does it make you just feel something? Does it move you? Do you love the characters?
Maybe you hate the characters, but you love how it ends. You know, we love movies for different reasons.
And I think one of the things that's so wonderful and beautiful about storytelling in some way is that it does move us. We feel something in it.
One of the things that makes a great movie great is that it captures every part of us in some way.
It really takes us on a journey we start. Maybe you love a really long movie, a Lord of the Rings type movie. It's three, three and a half hour long situation.
Or maybe you like a quick little, you know, little 90 minute Disney flick. But it takes us on a journey, right? It makes us feel something. We start one place, we end another.
And I think that it's from this place that we are fully engaged, that we get to see a start to a finish. And it's from this place that we can truly love something, that we're truly moved to. To love something is when it engages every part of who we are.
Um, so let's talk about our scripture this morning. Um, if we're looking at Matthew 22 in context. So this is toward the latter half of Jesus ministry.
And here Jesus is teaching to a large group of people at this point, nothing is hidden about what Jesus is doing. And a lot of people know his name and a lot of people are really excited about him and a lot of people really hate him.
And here we see Jesus being questioned by groups, different groups of religious leaders.
So the Sadducees, the Pharisees, these were respected groups of either religious political leaders. Those are More the Sadducees, kind of on the political side of things, Pharisees, and more of the Jewish teaching side of things. They were the. The top dogs of the law at the time.
And both of these groups, all of these groups have. They've really had their authority challenged.
And they don't like it. We don't like that. They didn't like it very much. And so they're coming to Jesus to trap him.
They're coming to Jesus to test him, to really trap him in his words. And if they can trap him and they can prove him wrong or prove that he's not telling the truth in some way, then they are right and we can get rid of this guy named Jesus. That's not what happens if you know the story of Scripture. And so here we see that the Pharisees, earlier in the chapter, they've already come once, and Jesus put them in their place.
And so they find their logger. This is the top dog, the expert of the law. And they send him. And he comes to Jesus and he says, teacher, can you hear that sarcasm? A little bit. Teacher, teacher, what is the greatest commandment? Because how could anyone ever have. How could anyone ever say, there's one greatest commandment? How could there be one that's better than all the others?
And how does Jesus respond? He says, love the Lord your God with all of your heart, with all of your mind, all of your soul.
In Mark and Luke's accounts of this, in their Gospel accounts of this, they also say strength. So if you hear that and you're Maybe you're familiar with that passage and you're thinking, wait, isn't there one more here? Matthew doesn't say strength. It's not translated here. But it's really this idea of total devotion.
Love the Lord your God with complete, full devotion.
This is not new news to the people he's talking to.
This is not something that they're hearing for the first time. These people know the law.
Not only do they know the law, but this, this specific chunk, the first greatest commandment that Jesus is pulling out here is actually based in Deuteronomy 6. 5. That's where it is in the law.
And it is called the Shema.
So Shema really means. It's a Hebrew phrase, and it means to hear, to listen or obey. And it's really this idea of response that I'm not just hearing and learning, but there's a response that comes.
This is something that the people would have said every morning and every night. Jewish people, people who were trying to follow the law and obey what God had told them to do, they would have said this twice a day, at least every single day.
So for Jesus to say, this is it, this is it.
Everything hinges on this is a really big deal. And if you keep reading in Matthew 22, you'll see that Jesus actually is the one that asked the next question. And he kind of turns the script a little bit and he's inviting them to think about something rather than to test him from that place. But Jesus is saying, you have heard this, you know this well, but you're not understanding it. There's something we're missing. There's something you're not getting about this.
I think what Jesus is trying to point out to the people, specifically all of them, they were all listening, they were all anticipating his response here. And he is saying that you've been following these rules and you've been trying to do this really well, but there's something that you've been missing. And it's me.
Jesus is saying, it's me that you're called to love the Lord, your God in this way with complete and total devotion. That's what heart, soul, mind and strength means. It's full devotion to the Lord.
So how do we do that?
How do I. What does that even mean, to have myself fully devoted to the Lord?
I think it means that we're loving God with everything we are.
Every part of who I am, everything that I have to give, is surrendered to him and devoted to Him.
But in order to do that, I have to understand who I am.
I can't attempt to love something well or care for something well, care for someone well, devote my life to something.
If I don't know how to do that, if I don't know what's going on here.
To align that, to devote that to the Lord.
Loving God with everything I am requires. I understand who I am. Would you guys say that with me? We just, like, have a moment of little. A little back and forth interaction. Here we go. Loving God with everything I am requires. I understand who I am.
It requires I get me right. I have to know how God has created me and purposed me in his creation to devote that to the Lord. And so this morning I have the privilege of talking about that from really this overlap of spiritual health and emotional health.
And I think they gave me the emotional one because I'm kind of transient and I'm not here to. You're not. They're not the ones teaching on emotion.
To have to hear the Backlash of that. Because that's our least favorite thing to talk about, isn't it? How I'm feeling. How are we feeling?
We don't want to have to ask that question or answer that question even more so.
But it matters.
It matters. And God says that it matters because it's part of how he's created us.
From a psychological science perspective, there are really five components or parts of who we are that are generally accepted. Maybe some others that could be broken off of these. But there are generally five parts of how we are created and we function.
And those are emotional, spiritual, intellectual, or mental, social, and physical.
So physical is probably the one that we're most comfortable with. You know, we get that I should be physically healthy. I should be, you know, active. I should be.
I should eat well, I should not do things to my body I shouldn't and do the things I should do for my body. We're pretty familiar with that. We know that. Um, maybe I. We're here for a reason. We want to be spiritually healthy. There's a reason you're here this morning. We want to grow in a deeper knowledge of the Lord and understand how he loves us and how we are to love and serve Him.
We even might, you know, socially, mentally, these are things that we have a familiarity with. But when it comes to emotions, there's something that stops for us. I think it's something that kind of grips us in a way, is where when we think about. When we go to think about even this idea of emotion kind of shuts us down, doesn't it?
If there's some discomfort in thinking about how I'm feeling, we don't like it, and we try to avoid it, or we try to numb it out, or we try to get away from it. We don't. We don't like that idea or concept.
But loving God with everything I am requires I understand who I am or how he's created me.
I want to tell you a story about a couple that came into my office one time. They were coming in for marriage counseling and really struggling in a lot of the things that are challenging in our marriages and communication.
They were struggling in parenting. They were struggling to understand each other.
And what I will often do when I have a new couple in my office is that the first time we meet together, we're all together, the three of us.
And then from there we will meet. I will meet individually with each partner so that I hear their perspective in a way that maybe they're not able to share yet with their Spouse.
And so I'm sitting with the husband, and I'm going to call him Charlie.
I'm sitting with Charlie in my office, and he's not really able to tell me anything about what's going on in his marriage.
Not anything that's good, not anything that's hard, not anything he can give me a little bit of the history, but he's. He's really not having a conversation with me, and that's okay. That takes some time to feel comfortable with.
If you've ever wondered about counseling, what really goes on in that crazy room, it's really just a way to have a conversation in a new way.
It's just a place to sit with somebody who's not in your circle and have new perspective and walk through.
So I'm sitting with Charlie, and it comes out that he lost his mom two years ago, two days before Mother's Day.
And his grief was so overwhelming to him that he could not acknowledge that he needed to grieve losing his mom. They had a great relationship.
They had a wonderful relationship. They were very close.
And the longer it went on. Two years ago.
So Charlie got through her service and basically said, that's done. I lost my mom. I have to move on with my life.
That's not how grief works.
If you've ever lost someone, you know that. That's not how grief works.
That would be great if we could just put that away, tuck that away, avoid that feeling, but we can't.
And Charlie tried so hard. His whole life was just an effort to put all of that grief in a box. But the box began to fall out all over the place, metaphorically speaking.
And so what we came to realize is that Charlie's grief was impacting every other part of his life.
He was physically sick.
He had spiritually shut himself off from the Lord.
He couldn't access any of the emotions. He couldn't tell me how he was feeling or how he was doing. It was just, I'm all right.
It's fine. Things are fine. And the longer that went on, the worse it got. Because we have a timeline on grief, often we think, well, if I just, you know, it's been three months or it's been three years, I shouldn't be feeling this anymore. But again, that's not how grief works.
It takes up space in our minds, in our lives, and it impacts all the other parts of who we are.
So if I don't acknowledge some of that in my life, this emotional part of my life, this emotional part of my life, that God created created in me.
Then it's influencing my ability to know God, to love him in total devotion and to love the people around me he's placed in my life.
I want you to think of an iceberg for a second.
One tenth of the iceberg is what we see.
Nine tenths.
The iceberg is what we don't see. So if you're familiar with the story of the Titanic that made an impact.
One tenth is what we see.
Nine tenths is what we don't see.
I want you to check out this video clip.
[00:18:23] Speaker C: We'll get to know your emotions when things go wrong.
Anger is there.
This is anger.
He will make sure the world knows anger is in control.
But what you really need to watch out for is when he's out of control.
Get to know all your.
[00:18:47] Speaker A: So if you've ever seen this is from the movie Inside Out. Inside out is a Disney Pixar movie and it is about emotion. It's about a girl named Riley who is experiencing these emotions and we see these emotions interact in her life and they are joy, sadness, anger, there disgust and fear.
And they have also made a second one, Inside out two, which features anxiety that we love so much.
And other emotions start to show up on the scene as Riley becomes a teenager. If you haven't seen those movies, they're amazing. You don't have to be a kid or have kids or anything to actually enjoy them. They're pretty funny, just as is and very relatable to us in a lot of ways. Anger is what we call an iceberg emotion. It's one of the ones that people who would say they hate feelings or they don't do. Emotions are not really my thing. They will get angry and that's kind of what you see.
That's kind of what feels predictable or expected is anger.
But that's what we know from a clinical perspective as a secondary emotion, which just means that there's something primary, 9, 10, that's actually driving that anger. I'm not mad at my spouse just to be mad at them for something that they did. But I might be feeling two or three other things and it just shows up as anger. And when anger is in control, I think all of us could agree nothing good happens.
Not a lot of positive coming when anger is in control.
Our emotions cannot be separated from the other domains of our life.
When we feel low, when we're grieving, when we're sad, when it's just been hard, it doesn't have to be grief, it's just hard it impacts other parts of our life, doesn't it?
When there's joy, it impacts other parts of our life.
And these things work together. It was God's good creation of us. So there's a few things I want us to take away from how God sees our emotions in this overlap of spiritual and emotional health. And the first one is that we are created in the image of God, and our Creator is emotional.
God is emotional.
I'm going to read for us just a tiny little speck of the scriptures that describe God as emotional.
Genesis 1:25 and the end of verse 31 says, God saw that it was good, very good. This is his creation of us. This is his creation of mankind. He had created everything else, and Adam was his last. Humanity was his last creation. He said it was not just good, it was very good. The way that he created us is very good.
Genesis 6:6 says, the Lord's heart was deeply troubled.
Exodus 20, verse 5 I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God.
Jeremiah 20:30, 24 says, the fierce anger of the Lord will not turn back until he fully accomplishes the purpose of of his heart.
Jeremiah 31:3 says, I have loved you with an everlasting love, and I have drawn you with kindness.
Matthew 26, 37 and 38 he began to be sorrowful and troubled. And then he said to them, my soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Deep emotion.
Mark3.5 says he looked around them in anger and deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts, said to the man, stretch out your hand. Luke 10:21 at that time, Jesus, full of joy through the Holy Spirit, Jesus felt a wide breadth of emotion.
He felt.
He felt. He wept, he felt, he rejoiced, he mourned, he grieved, he felt.
We rejoice, we mourn, we grieve.
And God says that it's good.
Now, I want you to hear me say a couple of things about emotions, because I think emotions get a bad rep for a reason. But there's some things that we need to know for them to sit in right place.
One of those things is that our feelings are always valid, but they're not always trustworthy.
I might feel something, but that doesn't dictate how I respond to a situation by itself.
That sits. Wisdom says that comes when we hold what we feel and what we know together and we make a choice.
I choose in my emotion, I choose what to do. I choose to yell at my spouse or I don't.
I choose to yell at the other cars around me or I don't. I choose to sit in my emotions and let them consume me and overwhelm me or I don't. And we have to know that they sit in right place.
Another thing we need to know about our emotions is that they're a good gift from God.
It's not just we're emotional and we have to suffer through it and just figure it out along the way. No, God purposed you to feel.
He purposed you to experience emotion for a reason.
Emotions do a couple of things for us. They inform us, they tell us something.
If you ever have a gut feeling or an intuition or an instinct, or there's a feeling that comes with that, isn't there?
I have a feeling. We'll say that. I don't know. I have a feeling. That feeling.
They inform us, they protect us in the most basic sense. We could think about fear, right?
We could think about fear as information.
Emotions are information.
One of the examples that I'll use a lot in my office with, with clients is the example of a bear walking into the room, which does feel much more relevant here than in the upstate of South Carolina.
But I will say, if a bear comes in this room, we have a couple of responses. But they're all driven by fear, right?
I can shut down and I can stop and I can just wait for the bear to go away, hope that the bear goes away. I can run away.
I can try to fight the bear.
Not a great idea. I have some options. But they're all driven by fear and they're all intended to protect me, right? God designed our bodies with survival systems in our brains so that we could make decisions in those moments.
Now hear me say sin has hijacked that system.
When we have been born, we have been born of Adam. And so we are born sinful. And so we have to be very intentional to align those things with the Lord and invite him to change how we see and understand our emotions. And I want to be driven by them.
I really like this example that I heard one time.
And it's thinking about it like kids in your car.
You don't want to have your kids in the trunk of your car. Probably not a great option to keep them back there. You don't want your kids driving your car.
Also not super safe. But you want your kids to be where they're supposed to be, properly belted in some way in the back seat, right?
We need to know that they're there. We need to know that they're safe.
We need to know what they need.
But they're not driving the car, they're not driving the ship, they're not in charge.
But we're not ignoring them completely, right?
The last thing that I think emotions do for us in their good gift is that they create connection.
Think about your relationship with your best friend or your spouse or your kids or maybe a family member.
What would that feel like? What would that be like if there was no emotion?
I imagine it would be like a robot. It would just be facts exchanged and there's no emoting happening at all. It's just two robots interacting, talking to each other.
Doesn't really feel like connection, does it?
So you have relationships. We know that connection is a good gift from God. Social right. We're meant for people, we're meant for community. We're meant to live life together.
How can I love other people? Well, how can I obey this command that God has given me that he says, this is. Is it. This is it.
Love me, devote yourself to me, and love the people I've given you around you.
How can I love them? Well, if I don't know how to sit with them and connect, if I don't know how to enter their world, if I don't know how to. To walk with somebody in their pain and their joy.
That's not a lot of connection. You. Connection is a good gift from the Lord.
We often run from what we feel and we run away from those things. We run away from connection, we run away from what we're feeling.
And we miss what God has to say to us because we choose to ignore it.
We numb it in some way.
We try to drink away the feeling. We try to busy ourselves enough to forget the feeling. And that's not what God has for you.
Can I tell you that this morning? Church. That is not what God has for you.
God wants you to live a full, abundant life. In fact, it's actually what Jesus promised to you, is that he in him there is life full and life abundant.
And if I don't acknowledge how I'm feeling, if I ignore that, if I try to push that away, that I am not living in the abundant life that God has.
And the beautiful thing about that is that he meets us where we are.
He has felt, he is emotional. He created us that way and he said it's good. He knows.
He knows what you're feeling. He knows the grief. He knows the thing that you've never said out loud and never talked about and how you feel feeling it.
He wants to be with you there. He wants to for you to know how he holds you in that place.
Acknowledging my emotions is essential to loving God and loving other people. Well, self awareness is great.
You know, I have a lot of people that will come into my office and they will just want to understand themselves and that's valuable.
I want to understand myself too.
But if it's not purposed for something to love the Lord and to love other people, well, it's really pointless because I could understand me all day long. But if it doesn't change anything about how I see see the world around me and how I know myself and because of that, how I see who God is, that's just selfish game. That's just me knowing more about me.
And that is not the point.
That is not the point. That is not God's best for us.
He wants us to surrender total devotion to him because he says that's where the good is.
That's where he is. He is joy. That is where he is, is in surrender devotion.
I have a challenge for you this morning. As we close, as we wrap up, I want you today, not tomorrow. Don't put it off, don't put it somewhere else. Don't say that's not for me.
And I want you to go home today. I want you to find a quiet place.
I want you to find a quiet moment in the day and I want you to ask yourself two questions.
I want you to slow down your day enough to ask yourself two questions.
The first is how do I. How does God want me to see my emotions?
How does God want me to see my emotions?
Just ask the question and how are my emotions impacting how I love God and other people?
What does God want to tell me about my emotions?
And how are my emotions affecting how I love God and love other people?
Church God wants to meet you there.
He wants to heal you.
He has purpose in that place.
If we can sit with him and invite him in.
Will you pray with me?
Father, you are good. Your creation is good. You purposed us well.
And I'm thankful that you've created us in such a way that can be redeemed, Lord, that you have good for us even in what we feel. And so Lord, as we sit in quiet places today, Lord, would your presence meet us there? God, would your voice be so clear and we know that you have good.
Draw us near to you, draw us close to you.
Heal broken places within us and we'll thank you for how you do it. In Jesus name, amen.
