Your Best You
Mark 12:29-31
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength…AND…You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There are no other commandments greater than these.
As we have seen, this commandment is a blueprint for the nature of God; the way that His divine love works both within Himself as Father, Son and Spirit, and in the way He has created humankind and included humankind within this eternally bonded unity of self-giving, self-sacrificing, others centered movement of covenantal love.
God is inviting us to move our lives into His patterns of covenantal, self-giving movements, in renewed relational practices of love, so that we become people of Faithful Presence; with God and with others. It’s a call to ‘live away’ from self-interest and self-advancement in practices of the heart that serve others.
This is tough stuff that pulls at the very fabric of our ‘preoccupation with self’ that sits at the heart of our self centredness. But God hasn’t asked us to do this because He is cruel. No actually quite the opposite. He commands it because it is the tonic we are searching for that will bring our hearts alive, heal our inner pain, quench our fears, restore our broken relationships and unite us with our Father is heaven as we flow with Him in a divine partnership of extravagant and unrelenting grace towards humankind.
Simply, to be God’s partners in His mission, you and I need to act like God, as God, and with God. So, it makes sense that the way He does love, the way He is faithfully present with us (with all of His heart, mind, soul and strength), is the way He wants us to emulate, so that we flow too will flow in the same loving power and presence with others in the earth. It’s the way the Kingdom of God comes to earth, operating in us and through us, by the power of the Spirit.
Jesus knows how much we are missing out on.
Jesus knows what is possible for our humanity to experience in our connection to the Father and the sense of purpose and fulfillment that will flood our being when we experience the Father’s light and love and ecstatic life. There is nothing like it. It’s what He experiences constantly and continually, and His extravagant generosity can’t help but want to share what He experiences with us.
The life of the Son before the Father.
The intensity, the quality of life, the consistency of His enveloping Presence, the assurance of the Fathers constant affirmation are just some of the energizing glories of the Father’s embrace that Jesus wants us to know. However, this body of death that we live in seeks to imprison us in a physical, self-focused, self-preoccupied state, bound in an existence that anchors our world to self-interest, defensiveness and fear.
The commandments of Jesus in Mark Chapter 12 are our pathway out of this sin authored prison and into a divine world of life and liberty, where we are re-birthed out of selfish preoccupation and into a deeply fulfilling, re-imagined identity and purpose as His selfless expression of love in the earth. In this place - we are abiding in Him. And…power flows to accomplish the purposes of the Kingdom. Our sense of fulfillment is given wings! We are communing with the nature of God and walking in the glory of His presence and the stunning expression of His power…with signs following! This is the true picture of the self-less, empowered and infilled Church of Jesus Christ.
No wonder Jesus wants to share His life with us. He knows His life is our best life. Hands down.
So, we need to see Mark Chapter 12 as more than just a set of behavioral rules. It’s a call into a powerful revelation of our best selves. Our best life lies in our surrender and obedience to this command. Jesus is wanting to share His life with us, before the Father. But only He knows the way; because He is the author and finisher of faith.
But… He knows the reward for us is great.
Beyond anything we could hope or imagine.
And the way to enter this life is in our movement away from our self-centered perspectives, putting to death (as Paul describes it) the body of death that selfishly wants to convince us to:
Protect what is ours
Put up barriers of grace and love towards others - just in case
Be careful and cautious to not give our hearts too generously to others
To hold onto our grudges and hurts and build walls of protection from the world around us
Jesus says - let me show you another way to pattern yourself.
It’s the way of Heaven.
It’s the way of My Father.
It’s a way that seems counter cultural to the world system.
But it is the only way to be free of the world’s tyrannical and relentless system of struggle, constant fighting, defensiveness, suspicion, power imbalance and pain.
It’s wearing you out.
And it doesn’t work.
He says…
”Come to Me all you are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn for Me. For I am meek and lowly of heart and you will find rest for your souls.”
Sounds like exactly what our hearts and lives need.
