Jubilee Community Church
Sunday Service
  • Do It Again
  • Goodness Of God
  • Worthy Of It All
  • You Saved Me
  • Open The Scroll (Only You Are Worthy)
  • Reigning
  • His Name Is Jesus
  • You Are Holy (Isaiah 6)
  • Made For More
  • Make Room
  • We Fall Down
  • Always On Time
  • God I'm Just Grateful
  • New Wine

  • WHAT DOES THE MASTER REQUIRE? A Study in the Commands of Christ

    Matthew 22:36–40 ESV
    36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” 37 And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

    INTRODUCTION

    If someone walked up to you this week and asked, "What does Jesus actually want me to do?" — could you answer them in one breath, or would you need an hour?
    That's not a hypothetical question. It's the exact question a lawyer asked Jesus in Matthew 22. Look at verse 36 with me: "Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?"
    He wasn't asking out of sincere curiosity. Matthew tells us in verse 35 he asked "to test him." The rabbis of that day had counted 613 commandments in the Torah — 248 positive, 365 negative — and they loved to argue about which ones carried the most weight. It was a trap question. Pick one, and you look like you're diminishing the other 612.
    Jesus doesn't play the game the way it was set up. He answers with two commands that were never disputed individually — Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18 — but He does something no one had done before. He fuses them together and tells us that everything else hangs on them.
    Church, if you want to know what Jesus commands His people to do, this is where you start. Not because the other commands don't matter — I gave you dozens of them a few weeks back, spread across all four Gospels — but because every single one of them is love working itself out in a specific direction. This morning I want to show you the shape of that.
    Matthew 22:40 — "On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets"
    A WORD ON THE GREEK
    Verse 40 says these two commands "depend" on the Law and Prophets — the Greek word is κρέμαται (krematai), from κρεμάννυμι, which literally means "to hang" — like something suspended from a hook. Picture a coat hanging on a peg. If you remove the peg, everything on it falls.
    Jesus is saying love isn't one command among 613 equals. It's the peg the other 612 hang from. Remove it, and religion becomes a pile of rules on the floor with no reason behind them. Keep it, and every other command — every "do not," every "you shall" — becomes an expression of something, not just an isolated rule to check off.
    That matters for how we read the rest of what Jesus commands. He is not adding a burden on top of love. Everything else He says is love, translated into specific situations.

    THE SHAPE OF OBEDIENCE — FOUR MOVEMENTS

    I want to walk you through this as a movement, because that's how Scripture presents it. It doesn't start with you doing something for God. It starts with what God has already done, and it moves outward from there.
    I. IT BEGINS WITH REPENTANCE AND FAITH (Mark 1:15)
    Before any of the commands I'm about to give you can be obeyed in the way Jesus intends, there's a prior word. Mark 1:15: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel."
    This is not one command among many. This is the door. Everything I'm about to walk through assumes you've already gone through it. If you try to keep the Sermon on the Mount without first repenting and believing, you will produce nothing but a nicer, more exhausted version of the Pharisee Jesus is correcting throughout that very sermon. Peter, James, and John didn't clean up their lives and then get invited to follow Christ. He said "Follow me" first (Matthew 4:19), and the transformation came after.
    If you're here this morning and you've never done that — never repented, never believed — hear me: nothing else in this message applies to you yet, not because God is withholding it from you, but because it can't be lived from the outside in. It has to start with new birth.
    II. LOVE GOD — THE VERTICAL COMMAND
    Once that door is opened, the first direction love moves is upward, toward God Himself. Jesus commands:
    "Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness" (Matthew 6:33)
    "When you pray, go into your room and shut the door" (Matthew 6:6)
    "Do not be anxious about your life" (Matthew 6:25)
    "Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation" (Matthew 26:41)
    Notice what all four have in common. Seeking, praying, trusting, watching — these are all postures of dependence. The vertical command isn't "perform for God." It's "depend on God." Even the anxiety command in Matthew 6:25 — the Greek is μὴ μεριμνᾶτε, a present imperative, which carries the force of "stop the ongoing habit of worry," not just "don't start worrying." Jesus is diagnosing a pattern His hearers were already caught in, and commanding them out of it by pointing them to the Father who feeds birds and clothes lilies.
    III. LOVE NEIGHBOR — THE HORIZONTAL COMMAND
    The second direction is outward, toward the people around you:
    "Do to others as you would have them do to you" (Matthew 7:12)
    "Forgive, and you will be forgiven" (Luke 6:37)
    "Love your enemies, bless those who curse you" (Matthew 5:44)
    "Go and do likewise" (Luke 10:37)
    That last one is worth pausing on. It's the punch line of the Good Samaritan parable, and it's aimed directly at a man who tried to narrow the definition of "neighbor" down to something manageable. Jesus widens it instead — the neighbor is whoever is in front of you with a need, regardless of whether they'd return the favor. That's not natural love. That's supernatural love, which is exactly why it requires the vertical relationship first. You cannot manufacture Luke 10:37 love out of your own reserves. It has to be received before it can be given.
    IV. LOVE INWARD — PERSONAL HOLINESS
    The third direction is often overlooked, but Jesus is relentless about it: love turned inward, toward the examination of your own heart.
    "First take the log out of your own eye" (Matthew 7:5)
    "Everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart" (Matthew 5:28)
    "Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Matthew 5:48)
    This is where American Christianity often quietly checks out, because it's the hardest direction to fake. It's easy to look loving in public. It's much harder to deal honestly with what's happening in the secret places of your own heart — your anger, your lust, your pride, your bitterness. But Jesus doesn't let us stop at behavior modification. Matthew 5:48 sets the bar at God's own character, τέλειος (teleios) — not sinless perfection in the sense of never failing, but complete, mature, whole — the way a father wants his child to grow into full maturity, not just avoid trouble.
    V. LOVE OUTWARD — MISSION
    And finally, love moves beyond your own neighbor to the nations:
    "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations" (Matthew 28:19)
    "Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven" (Matthew 5:16)
    "Feed my sheep" (John 21:17)
    This is not a specialized calling for missionaries. It's the natural overflow of the first four movements. A person who has repented, who depends on God, who genuinely loves the people around them, and whose own heart is being conformed to Christ — that person cannot help but want others to know Him too.

    THE COMMAND THAT MAKES ALL THE OTHERS POSSIBLE John 15:4-5 — "Abide in me"

    Here's where I need you to hear something clearly before we close, because if I don't say this, everything above becomes a burden instead of good news.
    John 15:4-5: "Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing."
    "Abide" — μείνατε (meinate) — means to remain, to stay put, to stay connected. It's not a command to try harder. It's a command to stay attached to the source. A branch doesn't produce fruit by gritting its teeth and working at it. It produces fruit because it's connected to a vine that supplies everything it needs.
    That reframes everything I just walked you through. Loving God, loving neighbor, dealing with your own heart, reaching the nations — none of that is a checklist you run through under your own power. It is fruit. And fruit only grows out of connection to Christ.

    APPLICATION

    So what does this look like for us, practically, this week?
    First — examine which of the four directions you've neglected. Some of you are strong vertically — you pray, you seek God — but you've let bitterness toward a family member sit unaddressed for years. Others of you are warm and generous toward people but haven't sat still in God's presence in months. Others have kept your outward life clean but you know exactly what's happening in your heart when no one's watching. And some of you have every one of these in order privately but haven't spoken the gospel to a single unsaved person in longer than you'd like to admit.
    Wherever the gap is, that's not an accusation — it's a diagnosis, and diagnosis is the first step toward healing.
    Second — stop trying to produce fruit you weren't designed to produce on your own. If you've been running on willpower, trying to love people, forgive people, and discipline your heart apart from daily abiding in Christ — through His Word, through prayer, through this church family — you will burn out or you will fake it. Neither one honors Him.
    Third — remember that all of this exists because He loved us first. 1 John 4:19: "We love because he first loved us." Every command Jesus ever gave was given by a Savior who was about to go to a cross for the very people He was commanding. That's not a tyrant issuing orders. That's a King who bled for His subjects before He asked anything of them.

    CONCLUSION

    If you leave here today only remembering one thing, let it be this: the sum of everything Jesus commands is love — vertical, horizontal, inward, and outward — and none of it is possible except by staying connected to Him.
    Repent. Believe. Abide. And then watch what grows.
    Let's pray.

    QUESTIONS WE SHOULD ASK RIGHT NOW

    Of the four directions of love — vertical, horizontal, inward, outward — which one has God been drawing your attention to lately, and why do you think that is?
    Read John 15:4-5 again. In your own words, what's the difference between "trying to bear fruit" and "abiding in Christ"?
    Is there a person in your life right now who represents a "Luke 10:37" moment — someone who needs mercy from you that would cost you something to give?
    Matthew 5:48 sets the standard at God's own perfection. Does that discourage you or motivate you — and what does the answer reveal about how you're currently relating to God (performance vs. grace)?

      • Matthew 22:36–40ESV

Jubilee Community Church
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