Deuteronomy 6:1-9, 7:6-9 | Community of Love

Listen to this week’s sermon, Community of Love preached by Rev. Benjamin Kandt from Deuteronomy 6:1-9, 7:6-9.

Transcript

Welcome And Service Opening

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 0:06

Hello everyone. This is Pastor Benjamin. You're listening to Sermon Audio from New City, Orlando. At New City, we long to see our Father answer the Lord's Prayer. For more resources, visit our website at Newcity Orlando.com.

Prayer And Scripture Reading

Raquel West 0:23

Please stand and pray this prayer with me. Holy Spirit, open our hearts to hear your word, and through your word, create in our hearts a home for your presence, that we might live for the glory of the Father and the kingdom of his beloved Son. Through Jesus Christ we pray. Amen. Today's scripture comes from Deuteronomy 6. Now, this is the commandment, the statutes and the rules that the Lord your God commanded me to teach you, that you may do them in the land to which you are going over to possess it, that you may fear the Lord your God, you and your son and your son's son, by keeping all his statutes and his commandments, which I command you all the days of your life, and that your days may be may be long. Hear, therefore, O Israel, and be careful to do them, that it may go well with you, and that you may multiply greatly, as the Lord, the God of your fathers, has promised you in the land flowing with milk and honey. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. This is God's word. You may be seated.

Sitcom Families And The Longing

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 2:08

I grew up in the late 1900s in suburban Detroit. And we had some shows that were family favorites. One was Home Improvement, one of which was because one of the reasons why we liked it so much is because it was also set in suburban Detroit. Another reason was my dad was a real-life Tim the Tool man tailor. Another show that we liked, maybe our favorite, was a show called Friends. And Friends is this story about six people who live in Manhattan. Some of them are related, some of them aren't, but but really I think the underlying theme of the show is these six people are trying to rebuild a sense of community, maybe even a new family out of the wreckage of their families of origin. Like if you just look through some of the characters, Ross and Monica, their brother and sister. Ross is the favorite. Monica never can never really live up to him. If you go on, you got Chandler's parents who announced their divorce to him on Thanksgiving, so he doesn't celebrate that holiday anymore. Phoebe grew up without a father and her mom died when she was a teenager. Only later does she find out that the woman who raised her is not actually her mom. The reason why I share all that is because really all six of these friends they meet in 1994 and they they come into this friendship with one another, carrying the scars and the wounds from their dysfunctional families. And over the course of 10 seasons, they begin to recreate a new kind of extended family together. And Friends has this picture of the failure of the nuclear family and a rebuilding of something else that's kind of a cobbled together new extended family, if you will. This show is so resonant with American culture that it fast became one of the most popular shows and actually even had a resurgence recently among Gen Z.

Expressive Individualism And Community

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 3:54

What is it about home improvement or friends or modern family or this is us? What is it that all of these shows are wrestling with? They're wrestling with a question which is what makes a family? What is a community? And the reason why that's a unique problem that we're facing right now is because we live in a society that's been described as defined, characterized by expressive individualism. And what that does societally is it makes you and me basically a bunch of disconnected BBs in a beanbag, if you will. There's nothing that really holds us together, no family bonds, no shared values, nothing like the word covenant that's in scripture. And so if we're a bunch of little babies in a beanbag, then the beanbag actually is probably the state, which is one of the reasons why politics has become a religion in our cultural moment. What else is going to hold us together? And so, in light of that, um, I don't think we want to look to the late 1900s America. I think we want to look to the early 400s Africa to get a better definition of what it means to be a

Augustine On Love As Social Glue

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 5:03

community. I'm thinking of the North African bishop Augustine of Hippo. In his Magnum opus, City of God, he has my favorite definition of a community. This is what it is. A people is an assemblage of reasonable beings bound together. You hear that language? Bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love. Now, the brilliance of this is Augustine's not just giving us a definition, he's giving us a diagnostic. He goes on to say that you can discover the character of any people by just looking at, noticing, paying attention to what do they love. If it's a higher order love, it'll be a superior people. If it's a lower order love, it'll be an inferior people. So let me just make that plain in our current cultural moment. Whether it's the LGBTQ community or the NRA, the Republican or the Democratic Party, or SEC football fans, what all of them have in common is they are bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love. Love holds them together. Now you decide whether or not it's a higher order love or a lower order love, but some of you in this room right now are beginning to say to me, Well, bring me a higher love. Where's that higher love that I keep thinking of? And you, I'm telling you, you are getting to the heart of this sermon.

Aiming For A Higher Love

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 6:24

My aim today is I want new city, the communities and the families in this room. I want us to be characterized by a higher love. That is the love of God with all of ourselves and the love of our neighbors as ourselves. So last week we looked at verse four. If you have a Bible, a device, the worship of God, get Deuteronomy 6, verse 4 in front of you. It says this Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. We really focus on just those two verses, and last week I pointed out that we have been called into a communion of love with God. And in order to do that, we have four capacities of love our heart, soul, mind, and strength. And we have four stages of love that I drew from Bernard of Clairvaux. You can go back and listen if you missed it. But this week, I want to talk about how we are formed as a community of love. Formed as a community of

Four Reasons Love Holds Together

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 7:19

love. And I've got four reasons and four rituals, okay? So bear with me. The four reasons are land, lineage, longevity, and the Lord. And so if you have a Bible or device, go ahead and get Deuteronomy 6, verse 1 in front of you. Let's look at the first reason for love. The reason I'm starting with why is because Simon Sinek told me to. And we want to see that there's motivation in the text. Really, what bookends the command to love God with all of yourself is really interesting. Four reasons and then four rituals. Let's look at verse one together. Now, this is the commandment. Notice real quick, that's a singular, the commandment. That's to love God with all of yourself. That's the commandment. But then it goes on and says, Now, this is the commandment, the statutes and the rules. One way to understand all of the commands in scripture is it's simply a working out into all of life, this double love command of loving God with all of yourself and your neighbor as yourself. So Moses says, Now this is the commandment and the statutes and the rules that the Lord your God commanded me to teach you. Now, I'm gonna have you underline the word that whenever it's showing up. So here's the first time that you may do them in the land to which you are going over to possess it. Now look down at verse 3, it says this as the Lord, the God of your fathers, has promised you in a land flowing with milk and honey. Now, flowing with milk and honey is why I drink honey vanilla lattes. It's not because I'm basic, it's because it's biblical, okay? That's the promised land flowing with milk and honey. That's I just want a foretaste here and now, a lineage, okay? Now, this is what I'm saying.

Land And The Promised Fulfilment

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 9:00

The Lord promises a land. Why? Because the people who are lovers of Yahweh with all of themselves, they need a place. They need a place to dwell. But listen, whenever you read the Old Testament, it's really important that every promise, every prophecy, you recognize that they often have a threefold fulfillment. What I mean by that is there's an immediate fulfillment, an intermediate fulfillment, and then an ultimate fulfillment. This is really important for reading the Bible well. So the key to understanding that is that all of those fulfillments are pointing towards and bound up in Jesus Christ. If you read the Bible, apart from Jesus, you will misinterpret the Bible. I get this from all over the place, but 2 Corinthians verse 1, verse 20 says this for all the promises of God, nothing excluded, including the promised land. All the promises of God find their yes in Jesus. So if that's true, we will misinterpret the promised land that we're talking about here in the text if we don't read it in Christ. What do I mean by that? Let me make it plain. The immediate fulfillment of the promised land here and now for the people of Israel, on the brink of entering into the land of Canaan, is that God is giving them a real land with actual boundaries, geography for them to dwell in. But even in the Hebrew Bible, in the Old Testament, it's interesting, the boundaries for that promised land are given about five times. And if if you study those boundaries, they're actually different, a little bit different every time, which I think is a little bit of a hint that the promised land is more flexible than a simple geographical boundary on a map. Because not only is the immediate fulfillment in mind, but the intermediate fulfillment is in mind as well. And I believe the intermediate fulfillment is that we are to be found in Christ. Jesus Christ Himself is the promised land. That's why the Bible regularly is saying to find ourselves in Christ as if we could be located in him. We can. We must. Jesus is talked about in Ephesians 1, it says, In Jesus we have obtained an inheritance. Throughout the storyline of Scripture, that inheritance is the promised land. But not only is there an immediate and intermediate, but there's an ultimate fulfillment of the promised land. And we hear of it from the very lips of Jesus himself. He says this in Matthew 5: Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. This is a big deal. It's a big deal to understand the scope of the promised land. And to make that really plain, even Father Abraham knew this. He knew what a lot of modern American evangelicals miss, and that is that the promised land is not merely a strip of land on the eastern Mediterranean. It's far more than that. It's way grander than that. In fact, in Hebrews 11, verse 9, it says this by faith Abraham went to live in the land of promise. For he was looking forward to the city. Some might call it a new city, looking forward to a city that has foundations whose designer and builder is God. What does that mean for us? It means for us that all of our attempts, all of our attempts here and now, all of the ache that we find within us for to live among a community that is characterized by love will be ultimately fulfilled. Said differently, heaven, the new heavens and new earth is a world of love. Which means our attempts here and now to live in love as a community of love are not in vain. We're living out a dress rehearsal here and now for what is to come there and then when we live in a world, a land characterized by love.

Lineage And Healing Family Cycles

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 12:58

But it's not only the land, it's also a lineage. Look with me at verse 2. Verse 2 says this that you may fear the Lord your God, you and your son and your son's sons. Look at verse 3. And that, underline it again, and that you may multiply greatly. If you look at the last verse on your scripture reading there, uh if you have the worship God, it ends with this phrase, to a thousand generations. You see, since Genesis 12, God's rescue plan for the world was to call a father, to call a man and make him a father. His name's Abram, becomes Abraham, because he has a rescue plan for the world, and it is through a family. But interesting, this is a place of conflict with our modern cultural moment. Our current culture doesn't believe that there's rescue through a family. In fact, it probably believes we need to be rescued from the family. David Brooks, writing, kind of summarizing the changes in family structure over the past century, said it like this. We've made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We've made life better for adults but worse for children. We've moved from big, interconnected and extended families, which helps protect the most vulnerable people in society. We move from that to smaller, detached nuclear families, a married couple and their children, which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options. What I'm getting at here is because of the sexual revolution in the 1960s and the feminist movement before that, and the LGBTQ plus movement after that, all of them have been kind of conspiring together, if you will, to deconstruct the family. And listen, before we challenge that, let's just start here. Who among us has emerged from our family of origin unscathed? Who in this room has not been wounded in family? And so we get a sense of why people might want to say this this is actually a broken concept. One family therapist named Terry Real says it like this Family dysfunction rolls down from generation to generation like a fire in the woods, taking down everything in its path until one person in one generation has the courage to turn and face the flames. That person brings peace to their ancestors and spares the children that follow. Breaking this cycle requires courage, the courage to confront the flames, to face the dysfunctions, and to say, This ends with me. Christians should be the most bold in their unwillingness to perpetuate family dysfunction across the generations. Why? Because God has given us a promise. The text says right here, a promise for great intergenerational families. It says that you may fear the Lord your God, you and your son and your son's son, so on and so forth. This is why one pastor said, No family of origin is healthy enough to transform us into the kind of love we see in Jesus. And no family is dysfunctional enough to keep us from becoming the kind of people of love we find in Jesus. Listen, the nuclear family is not enough. It never was. We need the extended family of Jesus, what the New Testament calls the household of God. That's the hope of the world. That's God's rescue plan, not the nuclear family, the extended family, all the brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ who call God their Father who are filled with the Holy Spirit. That's God's rescue plan for the world.

Longevity And Freedom Inside Commands

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 16:37

And so we have not only lineage, we also have longevity. This is the third one. Look at verse 2. It says this, all the days of your life. And here's the word again, and that your days may be long. Look at verse 3. Hear therefore, O Israel, and be careful to do them that it may go well with you. Listen, whoever you are, however you find yourself here in the room this morning, every single one of us wants it to go well with us. We've got a deep desire for that. That's that's showing up in the influencers you f you follow, the supplements you buy, the podcasts you listen to, all of those are a way that we're seeking. I just want it to go well with me. But the last place we often look is obedience to commandments, statutes, and rules for it to go well with us. Obey is a four-letter word for a reason. Now, when we get to the text here, what it's implying is you are no more free outside the boundaries of God's good commands than a fish is if it thinks it's liberated from leaping out of the lake onto a dock. Said differently, uh a flower that's uprooted from its soil is not liberated, it's not free, it's traumatized and will die if it's not repotted in healthy soil. The healthy boundaries, the flourishing soil of God's good commands are the only place, the only place where it will go well with you. And God wants that for us. That's why He's promising this sense of well-being and longevity here in the text.

The Lord And Covenant Presence

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 18:14

But it's not just lineage, it's not just longevity, it's also the fourth and final reason, which is the Lord Himself. Look again at verse 1, it says this. Now, this is the commandment, the statutes and the rules that the Lord your God commanded me to teach you. The your ness of the Lord your God is a big deal. This is a confession of a deeply felt reality. It's a conviction that that was born in experience of Yahweh's living and active presence in their midst. There's a commentator named O. Palmer Robertson. He says, he calls this the Emmanuel principle. It's it's the defining theme that runs through the whole Bible. It goes like this I will be your God and you will be my people. Everything in scripture is up unto that, from Genesis to Revelation. And so, if that's true, then this phrase, I will be your God and you shall be my people, it's not a religious philosophy. It's not a sociopolitical analysis on Israel's nation state. It's not a cold, abstract concept. In fact, it's alive with an experience and a knowledge of the living God. The reason why this matters is Herman Bobbing says God was a living personal force, a reality infinitely more real than the world around them. They reckoned with him in their lives, they walked as if he was always before them, and they worshiped him in his sanctuary.

Four Rituals That Shape Love

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 19:42

In light of those four reasons land, lineage, longevity, and the Lord, here are four rituals that will cultivate us into a community of love. Look with me at verse seven. You shall teach them and shall talk of them. Verse eight, you shall bind them, verse nine, you shall write them. Teach talk. Bind write. Now, my definition of a ritual is a ritual is a repeated practice that shapes what we love. And just like a diet, a financial plan, a sleep schedule, and exercise habits, we all have rituals. The question is, are your rituals forming or deforming your loves? That's the question. Now, if you're in the room and you're getting a little nervous because the word ritual just doesn't, it's kind of hard to swallow. I get it. In fact, Jesus, the scriptures get it too. Because there's few things more deadly to vital faith than ritualism. And and even God knows the danger of ritualism. That's why he starts with

Heart First And The Risk Of Hypocrisy

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 20:47

the heart. Look at verse 6. It says this, and these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. Notice how that comes prior to these rituals that he gives in a moment. Starts with the heart. Because when there are external demands without an inward reality, our lives just become a show. We become what Jesus frequently calls hypocrites. And he's got some really vivid illustrations. He's like, you're you're like a you're like you dishwashing and you just clean the outside of the cup, but then inside the cup, there's a bunch of food that's just caked and hardened on the inside of the bowl. You're gonna eat out of that? That's gross. Or you're like a tomb that on the surface is like white and clean, it's got like etched in the names and the dates, and it's it looks great, but inside are dead people. Or Jesus, quoting the prophet Isaiah, says it like this: These people honor me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. God can't stand any of that. Ritualism is a deep danger. It's a deep danger in our relationship with God, but also in passing on the faith to the next generation. In fact, Michael Goheen, a mystiologist. Says that in the book of Deuteronomy, there are two threats, two primary threats. The first one, I think you'll guess, which is idolatry. The second one might be surprising. The second thing that we must do to be the people of God in the book of Deuteronomy is to pass on the faith to the next generation. Listen, almost nothing's more threatening to passing on the faith to the next generation than hypocrisy. Children might be easy to convince, but they are hard to fool. If your life is coated with Christian wallpaper, but the architecture of your life is just like anybody else, your kids will see through it. Said differently, if they, if you say that you're following Jesus, but they know that your life is just keeping up with the Joneses, they will know. They will know. So listen, if God doesn't have your heart, your love is heartless. But if that love doesn't get worked out into all of life, your love is useless. And in order to have that happen, Christianity must start with the heart, but it cannot stay there. It's meant to go to the ends of the earth in all of life. And so in order to do that, we need rituals. So let's look at these rituals in turn.

Teach Children With The Church

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 23:07

The first one is to teach. Look at verse 7. You shall teach them diligently to your children. That first word is important. You. You, mom and dad. Not the church, not the government, not the school, public, private, homeschool, co-op, whatever. Not your youth pastor. You shall teach them diligently to their children. You see, it starts here. It starts with us. But while mom and dad are necessary, they are actually insufficient. They're insufficient to pass on the faith because for that we need the communion of saints, the household of God, bigger than the family, bigger than the nuclear family. That's why whenever we baptize babies up here, which is wonderful, we have the members of New City stand and take this vow. Do you, as a congregation, undertake the responsibility of assisting the parents in the Christian nurture of this child? Assisting, coming alongside. If anybody's got a city kid shirt on today, say thank you. Thank you so much for assisting the parents of New City in the nurture and instruction and discipleship of the children here. The next generations matter to the thousands generation. Look at verse 7 again. It says this you shall teach them diligently to your children. That verb, teach them diligently, is translated in Deuteronomy 32, 41, like this. Sharpen my sword. What kind of a word picture is that? I think what's in mind here is that teaching the command to love God to our children is it's less like a lecture and it's more like sharpening a blade through repeated strokes. Why? So that the love of God might pierce into their hearts and they might know the love of God. Maybe my favorite book on this topic is Justin Early's book, Habits of the Household. He says it like this. The most Christian way to think about our household is that they are little schools of love. Places where we have one vocation, one calling, and that is to form all who live here into lovers of God and neighbor. So let me just ask you: who or what is teaching your children diligently? And what are they learning to love as a result? The second ritual here is to talk.

Talk About God In All Life

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 25:31

To talk. Look at verse 7. And shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way. To sit in your house, that's private life. To walk by the way, that's public life. The book of Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy 6, the whole book, the whole Bible wants to tear down a dividing wall between public and private when it comes to your love of God. Let me just share a quick story with you. On Monday, so after last Sunday, where I preached about Bernard of Clairvaux's four stages of love, I got a picture from somebody who works for a construction company, and it was a whiteboard and it had the four stages of love written on it. And they said, My boss began our staff meeting this morning like this, basically, thanks to you, Ben. And I loved it. I was so, I mean, that brought so much joy to my little heart. I was so pleased. But some of you in here are like, does that belong in the secular workforce? That's a question that would be foreign to the Bible, by the way. Instead, the the scriptures, Deuteronomy 6's worldview, if you will, would probably ask it like this. Well, you gotta love somebody in your workplace. Who's it gonna be? It's either gonna be the Almighty God or the Almighty Dollar. Who's gonna rule at your workplace? Especially if you have the kind of authority and influence like being the boss. There's no neutrality here. That's why it's saying whether you are in your house or walking by the way, your public life, your private life, but also it goes on and it says, when you lie down and when you rise. In biblical literature, this is called a marism, which is when the bookends stand for the whole. In the biblical view of the day, the day ends when you lie down and it begins when you rise. There's this, there's the beginning and ending like that. So everything in between, all of life, is to be permeated with the word of God, according to the love of God. Now, this is one of the reasons we need communities and circles here at New City. We need an environment where people are asking and answering alongside us the questions, Lord, what are you saying and doing? And given who I am, how will I respond? What does it look like to love God in all of life? So a question I would just ask simply is what kind of talk fills your life? What kind of talk fills your life? The third ritual here is to bind it.

Bind Actions And Imagination To God

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 27:50

Look at verse 8. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. Your hands in Scripture are what you do, your actions, your effects in the world. Your eyes stand for how you see, your vision and imagination. And this is relevant because your attention will follow your interests, and wherever attention goes, awareness grows. Let me just give you some illustrations. When I was a skater, everywhere was a skate spot. When I was a boxer, everyone I'd be sizing up. When I became a counselor, I psychoanalyzed everyone. You can't help it. Whatever your interests are going to shape your attention, what do you attend to in those moments? This is why one rabbi said it like this we do not see things as they are, we see things as we are. And you are what you love. So if your vision is captivated by the love of God in all of life, you will see things differently. The Puritans had a name for this. They called it occasional meditation, and it was this practice of wherever they would go, they would just be paying attention to how their imaginations were baptized in a world that was just filled with the glory of God. In my own practice, it's looked like this. I'll go for a run in Orlando in August, and I'll run under a tree, and I'll feel the shade and the coolness, and I'll think of Psalm 121. The Lord is my keeper, he's the shade on my right hand. Or when it's pouring down rain like it is about now, uh, I will I will talk to my kids about how the plants are thirsty and God's just giving them drink. That comes from Psalm 104. Or when one of my kids hears a huge thunderstorm and the boom shakes the house, they look at me, it's adorable, they go, Jesus thunder. Because I've taught them from a little, little, little age, I've taught them, don't be afraid of the thunder. Jesus' thunder. Psalm 29 says that the voice of the Lord thunders. You see, this is a whole of life that's lived charged with an imagination that sees the grandeur of God everywhere. Now, some of you, honestly, you might be going, isn't that a little childish? If it is, I don't want to grow up. I don't want to grow up. I want to always see the life, all of life, haunted with the presence of God. In the Chronicles of Narnia, there's a character named Eustace Scrub. He represents the modern, secular, self-absorbed skeptic who relies on cold intellect and pessimism and scientism to make sense of the world. And he was raised by progressive parents, and they scorn imagination and faith, and he always thinks of himself as being right. And there's this moment in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader where he meets a retired star. And Eustace says, In our world, a star is a huge ball of flaming gas. How sophisticated. To which the star replied, Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of. Psalm 19 says, The heavens declare the glory of God, the skies above, proclaim his handiwork. What does that mean? It means the sun is more likely an ancient preacher that just can't help but tell you about who God is. Life-giving and warming and brilliant. That's what a star does. That's what a star is. And so listen, it's called a worldview for a reason. Our imagination shapes how we see the world. And our worldview is to love God with all of ourselves and our neighbors as ourselves. And so what shapes your imagination? The last one here is that we are called to write

Write Love Into Home And City

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 31:32

it. Look at verse 9. It says, You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. I wish I had time to unpack this more, but just in summary, your doorposts represent your home. The gates are the gates of the city. It means that it is insufficient if the love kind of stays in heart and home. Love of God with all of ourselves has to extend to all of life, where you live, where you learn, where you work, where you play. We are captivated by a vision that the love of the true and living God would permeate our world.

Loved Because He Loved You

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 32:08

And so I'm gonna end where I began, which is from this quote from St. Augustine. He said, A people is an assemblage of reasonable beings bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love. That's true. But this people, this community, the people of God, is unlike any other people on planet Earth today or through all of history, because only this people is actually bound together, not primarily by God as our object of love, but by being the objects of God's love. Look with me at Deuteronomy 7. Deuteronomy 7, verse 6 says this for you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love on you. The Lord set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fused of all the peoples. But it is because the Lord loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers, that the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the fair the hand of Pharaoh, king of Egypt. Know therefore that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments to a thousand generations. According to this text, why does the Lord love Israel? Was it because of their population demographics? No, they were the fewest of the peoples. Was it because of their military prowess? He found them as slaves. Was it because he needed workers? He created the cosmos with the word of his mouth. He didn't need anybody to do anything. Why does the Lord love Israel? Well, the answer in verses 7 and 8 is staggering. The Lord says, I loved you because I loved you. I love you because I love you. That's why. And that's good enough. Not because I looked down the corridors of time and saw that you would have faith in Jesus one day, so I chose you and made my mind. That's what it says. Electing love, chosen, chosen by the Lord to set my love on you because I love you. God doesn't find the love he wants to see in your life, he creates the love he wants to see in your life by going first, by his love always being prior to your love. Your love is only ever always simply saying, I love you too. You don't go first, he does. This is picked up in Ephesians 1 where Paul writes this: God the Father chose us, same language, chose us in Jesus before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love, he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ. Listen, God the Father is making a new humanity, and he's doing it by calling together a new family. And that family is diverse, but it is unified around this. It is marked by the love of God in Jesus Christ.

Two Cities Formed By Two Loves

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 35:31

So Augustine of Hippo in the city of God not only has that great definition I shared earlier, but also he says that they are really in the history of humanity, there's only two cities, two communities, if you will, and they're formed by two different loves. The old one, the earthly, the old city, is formed, characterized by the love of self and the contempt of God. But the new city, the heavenly city, is characterized by the love of God, even to the contempt of self. Let me say that differently. The default is that we would be bound together by a love of me before you. But the church is a people who's bound together by a love that says, me for you. And the only way we can love like that is if we've been loved like that. Let me share your story as we close to illustrate

The Open Door Story And Prayer

Rev. Benjamin Kandt 36:21

that. There's a woman named Lisa Fitzpatrick who was a healthcare executive in New Orleans. One day she was sitting in the passenger seat of a car when she noticed two young boys around 10 or 11 years old, and they were lifting up something heavy. She realized it was a gun, and before it was too late, they shot her in the face with it. You see, it was a gang initiation ritual, and miraculously she recovered from her wounds, and she realized that she was just collateral damage. She was actually not the victim. Instead, she believed the real victims were these young boys who had to shoot someone to get a family, their gang. So she quit her job and she began working with these gang members. She opened her home to young kids who might otherwise join gangs. And one Saturday afternoon, she had about 35 kids that were hanging around her house, and she simply asked the question, Why do you like to spend your day in this house with this middle-aged woman? To which they replied, You were the first person who ever opened the door. You see, the only way that we can have a love that's not me before you, but me for you, is if we've been loved like that. Jesus didn't just open the door, Jesus is the door. And he died and rose to call together a new family, a new humanity, a people of love. And so he's inviting us, he's beckoning us now to come back to the Father through him. Let's pray. Father, we thank you that we can call you Father. That you have called us into your family, adopted us as sons and daughters in the Son, Jesus Christ. Jesus, we praise you as the one who opened the door, who makes a way for us to come back home, to be reformed as a community of love. Holy Spirit, would you do that work in us? Would you exalt the love of God in this people, in this church, in these communities, in these families, such that we would be characterized by this first commandment like that? We pray it in Jesus' name. Amen.