Mark 12:28-34 | The Greatest Commandment | Alex Culpepper

Well, church, you can open up your Bibles to mark chapter 12. Mark, chapter 12. We're going to be in verse 28 this morning. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Alex Culpepper. I'm the lead pastor here at Renovation Church.

It is one of my privileges and my joys to open up Scripture to go to the word of God and to teach all that it has to say. We open up the Bible here because we believe that we don't just have the rights to kind of make this stuff up on our own, but that God has revealed who he is and what he wants to us. And now we're just going to open up God's word to see what it is that he has to say. And so every week we spend some time here to come under the authority of God's word. So if you've been following along with us, we have finally finished with the Book of Deuteronomy.

So maybe you can cheer for that, maybe not. I got some people who are excited. That's a good thing. Kind of, though we haven't totally finished with it. So today we're starting a new series called it has been written because of all of the times that Jesus quoted Scripture.

The book of Deuteronomy happens to be the book of the Bible that he most frequently referenced. Like far and above any other container of scripture, this is what Jesus quoted. And the purpose of this series is to look not just at what the Scriptures say, but specifically at the things that Jesus emphasized in these ancient writings and how he interpreted and applied them. Because here's the thing, like when we go back to the Old Testament, we can get caught up in this idea. The Old Testament is kind of like the first set of books, like the ancient writings that the Hebrews had.

And then. And then the New Testament is like everything since Jesus, right? And we go back to the Old Testament and we can read stuff that relates to the Hebrew people and kind of their relationship with God and we can get caught up in this. Well, that was for them, and maybe it's not for us, and that's unclear. But the interesting thing about Jesus is when he teaches on the Old Testament, he's pulling out principles that transcend covenants, right?

That transcend time, that transcend, like God's people were over here and now we're over here and now we're one people in Jesus. Jesus is saying, no, these are God's commands for all of time. This is what God has to say and how we deal with that and sit with that. And because, you know, there were some things that Jesus with the Jewish people of the day, there were some things that he had to bring clarity to that over time, the people had come to misunderstand, right? There were some words that were written in the scriptures that had taken on a particular meaning to the surrounding culture, but that meaning was actually at odds with the original meaning that God intended.

So Jesus is essentially, what he's doing is he is restoring understanding to writings that people had not only misunderstood, but actually abused for their own purposes over the course of a long period of time. The good illustration of this is in discussions about, like, just public life and how we as a society work together, somebody might make a comment and say, well, you know, like the principles of Christianity teach us, fill in the blank. And then somebody will respond to them and say, well, you can't really say that because we believe in this country in the separation of church and state, right? So you've heard this phrase, the separation of church state before. And the way that people use that today is that they will say, well, no, religion shouldn't really have any role in informing how public life works.

And you know, that that phrase, separation of church and state, that. That was not the original intended meaning of that phrase. The original intended meaning of the phrase was to keep the state out of control of the church so that the state wouldn't control the church. And in the same way that the church itself would not have authority over the state and thereby be telling people how to worship. That was the point.

But it wasn't to say, oh, you know, religion should never influence how we relate to each other. Right? Because there are some foundational moral principles inside of religions that could inform and be helpful to telling how we relate to each other. But there are these phrases that take on a life of their own over time and time and again. We have to bring clarity to what they say.

And Jesus did that with the writings of scripture, right? The meaning had become cloudy and he brought clarity. And I just want to say, maybe the meaning has become cloudy to us too. And so we just need to give Jesus space to speak with clarity as to what scripture says. So mark chapter 12, verse 28 says this.

1 of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another and seeing that he, I.e. jesus answered them well, asked him which commandment is the most important of all. So let me just explain what is going on here. It is like, let's. I think it's like Tuesday or Wednesday.

It's unclear exactly what day of the week it is in this story. Let's say it's Tuesday. Just on the previous Sunday, Jesus has rode into the city of Jerusalem on a donkey. And all of the crowds of people have gathered up alongside the road while Jesus was riding in on a donkey and they were waving palm branches and they were saying the words hosanna to the son of David, which you may not know what that means, but it's a way of those people saying, praise the Lord, Our King is here to save us. See, the Jewish people were under Roman rule and Roman authority, and they were looking for a Messiah, a king who would come and save them from Roman rule.

And all of the Jewish people had stood out on the road while Jesus rode in on a donkey. They had said, he is our king. He's the king who's come to save us. And so now Jesus is walking through the streets of Jerusalem during the highest holy day of the whole Jewish calendar, or this. This period of time that we call Passover.

And there. There are all of these people. There's a lot of busyness. There are people making sacrifices in the temple. There are literally at this time, millions of people in Jerusalem.

And Jesus has taken it on himself to go into the temple courtyard, and he has spent some time teaching the people in the temple courtyard. He's gathered crowds of people around him as he's speaking about the Scriptures and what they teach. And so in the midst of Jesus teaching, where he has all of this influence over all of these crowds of people, the religious leaders send some representatives of theirs because they don't like the influence that Jesus has. They're really concerned that he has, like, too much power over these people. And so they're trying to trap him in weird theological arguments.

They get him caught up in these discussions, and that's kind of setting the stage for the scene. So what will happen is that their goal is that they're trying to take away Jesus influence. And so they'll send one person in to try to get him to say something that will offend all the crowds of people. And that person will fail. And so that person will come back, and then they'll send somebody else in to try to get Jesus to say something that will make the Roman government mad so that they'll call him an insurrectionist.

And Jesus doesn't fall for that trap. And so that person leaves and somebody else comes back. And they'll. They'll try to get Jesus to say something that will cause him to blaspheme God to speak against God's name. And all of their efforts have been failing.

Jesus hasn't been falling for it. And so there's this pattern. They leave, they go get reinforcements. And this scribe comes onto the scene. One of the scribes came up and saw them disputing and saw that Jesus answered them well.

And so the scribe has a question for Jesus. So I just want to talk about who a scribe is real quick. Scribes are experts in God's word. Sorry, in God's Word and its interpretation. Experts in God's Word and its interpretation.

Scribes had very likely memorized, at the very least, the entirety of the first five books of the Bible. On top of that, they had very likely memorized a number of the prophetic texts because their job was to spend all day writing and rewriting God's Word. Because we didn't have printers then and we didn't have hard drives then, right? So there had to be some way to preserve the text of Scripture. So scribes wrote this stuff down.

They daily committed themselves to the preservation of. Of God's Word. They knew the history of rabbinical teaching on every single passage of the Bible, right? All of the rabbis that had come before, they knew everything that every rabbi had to say.

They knew what the right thing to do was. And when somebody else didn't know what the right thing to do was, they would go and talk to the scribes, because the scribes knew. Scribes resolved all the legal disputes that existed from. For the Jewish people. They were like religious lawyers, in a sense.

And so when this guy comes into the fray after all of these disputes, you could think of this, like, okay, they're bringing out the big guns now. Like, that's the idea that's being presented here. That's what the scribe is. And the scribe puts Jesus to the test to see if this carpenter from Nazareth really understands the logic behind God's law. And so in verse 29, Jesus answered.

He asked, what's the most important commandment? Jesus answered, the most important is, hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. Now, if you were with us last week, we talked about this particular passage. Jesus is quoting the Shema, right? And we talked about what the Shema means and the role that it played for God's people.

But I want you to note, Jesus doesn't just stop here. He goes on, in verse 31, he says, the Second is this. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these. So what Jesus does is he quotes this passage, this scripture, which comes from Leviticus, chapter 19, verse 28.

So this is what Jesus is doing. He's taking two different commands from two different parts of the law, and he combines them together as one commandment. This is why he said there is no other commandment. He doesn't say there are no other commandments. He says there is.

There's one commandment and it is bringing these two aspects of the law together. He's essentially saying, you cannot separate these two things. They. They belong together. You cannot love your God and hate your neighbor.

Right? It's just not allowed. And of course, if you were to look at the ten Commandments, you would see that they are built on this kind of thinking. The first four commandments are about love for God, and the last six commandments are about love of neighbor. And Jesus is going kind of right at the heart of religious tradition with this, because you know what these people do, these religious leaders, they dress up all of their activity and their false piety of loving God and appearing to be those devoted to God while they neglect their neighbors.

And so Jesus is saying, you can sum up all of the moral teaching of our scriptures like this.

If you really love God, you'll really love people, right? I mean, that's. That's simple, right? Like, we can't. That's tangible.

We can grab onto that. He's saying, you don't get one without the other. Now, here's the thing. God comes first, right? And this, in this kind of order of priority, God comes first.

And what this means is that God brings definition to what it means to love. Like, we start out in our love with him, and we allow the love that we have in him to overflow out of us into love for neighbor. And we're going to explore what that looks like in a bit. But I think more important is to get to Jesus point, because Jesus is saying, you cannot obey the Shema, right? Which, again, for Jewish people, this is the one command that they were committed.

Like, if they didn't get anything else right, they had to get this right, right? And so they said this prayer every single day. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. They repeated this every single day, multiple times a day. This was.

We have figured this out. We do this better than any other nation in the whole world. And Jesus is saying, you can't obey that command that you know better than any other command. You cannot obey it while you're hating and disregarding and dismissing people. Right.

You cannot claim to love God and hate those who bear his image. Right? So you can't say, you know, I love Jesus, but I really hate Trump supporters, or, I love Jesus, but I despise liberals off the table.

If you're gonna say, I love Jesus, but. And then use that as a justification to find some category of people to disregard and dismiss or some category of people that you're gonna hold disdain against in your heart, then hear me on this. You don't really love Jesus if you say, I love Jesus, but. And then you fill in the blank. You don't actually really love Jesus.

The apostle John extrapolates on this, and he says this is the exact meaning of what Jesus was trying to make. Like what he was saying. In First John, chapter 4, verses 20 to 21. He says, if anyone says, I love God and hates his brother, he is a liar. For he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God who he has not seen.

And this commandment we have from him, whoever loves God must also love his brother. See, now, the word brother here, it's referring to. To inside the body of believers, right? These are Christians. Christians are called to, in particular, love Christians.

But here, what John is doing, the reason he's writing like this is he is trying to solve an internal relational strife that has occurred inside of a church. And he's bringing the word of God to bear on this relational strife inside of the church. And so he's taking this broader principle that Jesus gave and applying it to this specific situation where Jesus taught, love your neighbor as yourself. The idea is that we are commanded by our King, who loved us while we were his enemies. Right?

Because that's what we're all told. God loved us while we were still his enemies. We're commanded by him to then love anyone who is made in his image.

Oh, you mean like, even if they believe a destructive ideology? Yeah. Oh, you mean like, even if they've aligned themselves with a blasphemous theology? Yes. Oh, you mean even if they actively hope for our downfall or my downfall?

Yes. Even if they say offensive things to me? Yes. Like, there's no. There's never going to be a no to that.

Even if. Question. So now let's get just a little bit nuanced here, right? Let's. Let's bring some clarity.

You can love a person without giving affirmation to their actions.

You can love a person without giving affirmation to their beliefs. You can love a person and at the same time call them to. To repentance. In fact, isn't that what Jesus is doing? He's loving the scribe by calling him to repentance.

In fact, if you're engaging in behavior that I believe to be destructive, and I give my approval and affirmation to that behavior, then I would. That would actually say that I don't love you, right? So here's why. Here's why that matters, right? Because no matter how much the other person might insist on it, any person is, at their core, a person to be loved, and they are to be loved independent of what they think and independent of the things that they feel and independent of the things that they do.

Those things do not change the reality that they are made in the image of God, right? You cannot do so much that it would unmake you as an image of God, right? So you are not the things that you do, and you are not your feelings, and you are not your shortcomings, and you are not the things that you think. What the Bible says and what Jesus is saying is that you are an image of God, to be loved and known by God, and then to love him and his images. It's that simple.

And like, and so I don't care what any person in the world says, Christians will always be bound by this command without exception, right? There are just simply like, if Jesus is our king, there are no exceptions to this rule. Like, this is what we obey. And it's even to this extent, because. Because In Matthew, chapter 5, verses 43 to 45, Jesus says, you have heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.

But in my kingdom, I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you. So that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven, so that you may be children of your Father who is in heaven. He's saying, insofar as you love the people who hate you and consider themselves to be your enemy, insofar as you do this, what you do is you show the world what it means to be a child of God.

So we don't get, like, a pass on this. Now, this doesn't mean that we won't fail. It doesn't mean that we won't fall short. And when we do, we have to own our failure.

So check this out. What's happening with the scribe right now is he's on the edge of his conversion to following Jesus. Like he is about. Like, he's like at the line, right? And he's really hearing what Jesus said.

He has been told by everyone in the religious elite, look out for Jesus, right? Like he's leading people astray. We have to stop him. He's a blasphemer. But this guy knows the word of God.

And he comes to this moment of transparency and he sees Jesus. He's like, hey, he actually knows what he's talking about. He's actually put these pieces together, right? In Isaiah chapter 1, it clarifies things in the same way that the scribe clarifies things here. And if you haven't had a chance to read it, just write somewhere in your notes, read Isaiah chapter one this week, right?

Read Isaiah one this week. Because in Isaiah one, the prophet Isaiah is addressing an attitude that exists among religious people. And that attitude says, hey, let's go perform our religious activity and use our activity as a means of appeasing God and paying him off so that God will see our activity and see that either. Well, we haven't totally forsaken him because we're still making our sacrifices and keeping our feasts and that kind of stuff, or so that God will see our activity and think that our religious performance is impressive. That's what these people were thinking at the time.

And you know what they were doing? They were defrauding the widows in the land and they were neglecting the orphans in the land. And so they pretended to love God without actually loving God. And so the whole idea here that this scribe understands, that Jesus understands and that it's all bringing across is that religious activity is not a substitute for a transformed heart. So the point is to say, like, if you're going to substitute religious activity for actually loving God, right, you're going to do things that appear to love God as opposed to actually love God and actually love your neighbor.

Then you need to know that your religious activity is empty and meaningless, has no purpose to it. God's words for it are, actually, I detest it. I have grown tired of it. It makes me weary. I'm tired of you coming and pretending to love me while in your actual life you don't love me and you don't love your neighbor.

Now, that is not to say that there's not space for religious activity. A sacrifice of praise is something that we are called to. Regular engagement and corporate worship. It ought to accompany our word for God. Regular rhythms of prayer and engaging with God's Word.

Again, these things ought to accompany a love for God. Also, good theology ought to accompany a love for God, like biblical discernment ought to do that you should have a commitment to truth. All of that absolutely belongs with a love for God. God. But all of that stuff that I just said can be divorced from a love for God and a love for neighbor.

You can pull it apart and Jesus, and you need to know the implication of what Jesus is saying is if you will divorce all of your religious activity and your religious knowledge, if you will take it and pull it apart from love for God and love for neighbor, then it is not Christianity.

It is an empty spiritual pride that's based in being puffed up in knowledge and trying to prove yourself to God based on your own performance.

The apostle James says it like this. He says, you believe that God is one. And of course, he's talking to people who recite the Shema daily. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. He's saying, you.

You believe that God is one. You say this every single day. Good job. Round of applause for that. You know what?

Even the demons believe, and they tremble before a holy God.

So the most basic question of what it means to love God and follow God and have faith in God is, do I love God as he has revealed himself in scripture, and will I share the love that he has given to me with my neighbor?

And the scribe hears Jesus say this. He goes, whoa, I've never heard anybody else get this before, but this guy gets it. So verse 34.

And when Jesus saw that, he answered wisely. He said to him, you are not far from the kingdom of God. And after that, no one dared to ask him any more questions. I don't think I would either.

What I love here, when he says, hey, you're not far from the kingdom of heaven. What I love here is that Jesus says, keep pressing in. Keep going like you're almost there. In the coming days for Jesus, the tone is going to shift because the crowds are all going to turn their backs on Jesus and accusations are going to start flying, and these guys are going to murder Jesus based on false pretenses. And he's saying to this scribe, hey, you're not far.

And when all that starts to take place, you remember this moment. You hold on to this wisdom and you pursue it and press into it even more deeply. So, yeah, I think we're meant to see this scribe as on the edge of conversion. And we don't get any word after this. Like, what happens to this scribe.

But here's why I think his story is presented to us by Mark in this way. I think the telling of this gospel, it was first produced for a Jewish audience, meaning a people who had a high context and familiarity with. With religion, right? With the things that the Bible says. And it was presented as an invitation to every Jew who recites the shema daily to put themselves in the shoes of this scribe and to figure out for themselves what they really love.

Will they love their sacrifices and their cultural practices, or will they love their God and their neighbor?

Okay, so what? So what? Number one, don't let modern filters answer this question. Who is my neighbor? In another gospel, somebody asked Jesus, well, Jesus, who is my neighbor then?

And Jesus tells a story of a Samaritan who loved a Jewish man. And the Jews were evil towards the Samaritans, hated the Samaritans, but the Samaritan loved his enemy who was wounded on the side of the road and took care of him. All right, so we can't let modern filters answer this question for us. There are all sorts of filters that we can inherit that enable us to justify not loving a certain group of people. And so Bears fans, you have to stop being mean to Vikings fans.

And packers fans, you have to stop being mean to Vikings fans. And Lions fans, you have to stop being mean to Vikings fans. This is what it's saying. Like, we don't get to exclude a certain group of people because we've put them in a group or in a category. We don't get to put filters on our love.

But we do have a unique challenge because of the time and place that we live in. We live in a globally connected community in an age of information, meaning we're receiving information about what's happening in any part of the world at all times of the day. And you can give in to the lie that it is now my responsibility to love to the fullest. Every problem for every person, everywhere in every place. Right?

Like, kind of the reality of like, yeah, your social media platform activism. That's what love looks like. Or the way that you vote is how you decide who you love. Right. Or that if you're not solving the hunger problem that's over in Malaysia, then you're neglectful of other people.

Or if you're not solving the homelessness problem, then you don't love your neighbor. And if you're not using your voice for every disenfranchised group, then you're hateful. And that is terribly exhausting. And it is meant to Paralyze you and stop you from ever loving anybody.

And you know what? Jesus cares about far more than your opinion on immigration policy? Do you love the immigrant who lives down the street from you?

You know what, Jesus cares about far more than your perspective on Middle Eastern foreign policy. Would you create space in your home for your Muslim neighbor who lives down the street?

It is far more important to know the names and be invested in the stories of the people in your sphere of influence than it is to get overwhelmed with the onslaught of a 24 hour news cycle. Now, I tell you it is good and appropriate. Like, read the signs of the times, go for it. Like, I'm all for that. But you must do so with discernment so that you don't buy into the rhythm of a new outrage every five minutes and so that people don't become paralyzed to the point that you just don't do anything.

So love the people that God has placed around you in your spheres of influence.

And maybe, maybe God could move you to have a particular heart for a particular people in a particular location, and if so, praise the Lord. That's great. But you have a sphere of influence here and you are called to love the people in that sphere of influence. And so I just want to give us a framework real quick for how do we identify who's in our spheres of influence? This is if you've been with us for a while, I'm kind of revisiting some stuff you're feeling aware of, but if you have not, this will be new for you.

We have this term called Frank. We have to love our franks, or if you're French, we have to love our francs, right? But the idea is there's a sphere of people that were given. And now for those of you who are familiar with this, I'm adding on a couple. So Frank has become Francis for us, right?

But we have to love our Francis, right? Our friends. So, okay, yeah, that's the easy part. Jesus says everybody can love their friends, right? We have to love our relatives.

So those are outwardly spheres, outwardly moving spheres. We have acquaintances, right? So there are people in your life who you see every day or every week or whatever, and you don't know their name. And this, I'm not like condemning you for that, but goodness, you have an opportunity to go and like figure out who they are and learn about them. You have neighbors, right?

I don't. I mean, there are eight houses around my house. I know most of the names of most of the people. But there are a Couple of houses. I don't know the names of those people.

So I'm telling you this as a person who has some work to do. Myself, your co workers, and then here's Francis. So here's the ending part. The E and the S. Francis, your enemies. Do you have people in your spheres of influence who they look at you and they have disdain in their heart towards you?

Jesus says you love them. Right? Your enemies. And then who are the strangers? Yeah.

Who are the people who you have never met, who you've never connected with? This is a framework for us thinking about who are the people that Jesus calls us to love in our spheres of influence? Number two, humility is the pathway toward loving your neighbor. So if this is a problem for you, if you don't love people, I have good news for you. There's no amount of trying harder that will change that.

Like, you literally can't change it. Because at the core, the problem is your heart. And the only way that you get a new heart, the Bible says, is from the Holy Spirit. So in our denomination, in the Christian and Missionary alliance, we affirm the importance of a moment of time in our walk with Jesus called a crisis. And you're like, well, I'm living in a crisis all the time.

That's not the kind of crisis that I'm talking about. Right. A crisis is a coming to the end of yourself. A crisis is a reckoning with your own inability to change your own heart. A crisis is seeing the distance between where you are and what God desires and being broken over the fact that you're not there.

And the reason God's word is so stinking, convicting to us, the reason it confronts us so often, is to get us to the point of surrender, to get us to see the wickedness in our own hearts and not just be like, thank you, Jesus, for your forgiveness, but to mourn over the disconnect between what God says is good for us and what we keep pursuing. And a lot of people will ask the question when I say that, a lot of people ask the question, well, doesn't Paul say this thing in Romans 7 where he says, like, I don't do the things that I want to do, and the things that I want to do, I don't do, and I want to be something, and I'm not something. And I would. I would just say, yeah, absolutely, all of that. And that is part of the Christian walk.

But do you know what he says at the end of that section? Paul says, oh, wretched man that I am.

Who will deliver me from this body of death. And then you know what he does? He goes into Romans 8 and he says, praise God that life comes from the Holy Spirit, who brings life to our mortal bodies, who teaches our hearts how to love neighbors. And so there is a call in Christian spirituality to allow the Lord to bring us to the end of ourselves where we would actually mourn over our brokenness. James, chapter 4, verses 6 through 10.

It starts with telling you the Lord is kind to you. In this he gives more grace. Therefore it says, God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. Submit yourselves therefore to the one who is gracious. Resist the devil and he will flee from you.

Draw near to God and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hand, you sinners. Purify your hearts, you double minded, be wretched, mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. Why humble yourselves before the Lord that you could be brought low before him, so that he might lift you up and so that he might teach your heart what is right and so that he might teach your heart what to love and what is good.

So hear me. I am not speaking to us this morning out of an evaluation of how I see us as a church loving people. Do you know why? Because I just spent three hours yesterday morning with a bunch of people who are loving two widows in our community and moving them and caring for them, right? So do not hear me looking at you church and pointing the finger and say it's time to get it together.

No, I am speaking to you with an awareness of our sinful natures and our materialistic culture and our suburban lifestyle and our social and political climate and how all of those things incline our hearts towards prayer, pride and selfishness and disdain for our neighbors. And the pathway to a change of heart is to allow God to bring us low so that we could hear the words of Jesus say, neither do I condemn you.

And we can know what it is to be loved in our wretchedness. And we can allow the kindness of God to call us out of our prideful rebell and into the place of humble reliance on Him. And I just have one more for us. What is love?

Inside the church we are called to be the prime example of love in the world. The love that we have for each other ought to reflect something unusual and otherworldly to the rest of the world. And I want you to hear what the apostle Paul says that love looks like.

Love is patience.

It has expectations, but it realizes I'm not going to get bent out of shape when my expectations are met. Love is kind. It goes out of its way to give and care for others. Love does not envy. It doesn't look at the thing that somebody else has and say that's not fair that they have that.

It doesn't boast. It doesn't need to lift itself up. It's not rude. It doesn't insist on its own way. It is not irritable or resentful.

It doesn't rejoice at wrongdoing. It rejoices with what is true. Love bears all things meaning. Love is willing to put up for a long time with things that we find inconvenient. Love believes all things meaning.

Love believes the best in our brothers and sisters. Love hopes all things, looks forward to better days for the people around us. Love endures all things. This is the love that we are called to exhibit and church. If we believe in a God who is one and who loves us, then we are called to exhibit love to one another and to every single one of our neighbors.

Would you pray with me, please? So, Father, we thank you for your goodness and your kindness to us, God. And my ask is that you would bring us low so that you might lift us up by your spirit. That you might lift us up by the beauty and truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Would you allow our hearts to find great rest and purpose and joy and hope and peace only in what Jesus has done for us so that the Holy Spirit might bring us to life and cause us to love each other well and to love our neighbors well. We ask this in Jesus name. Amen.