You Are Not Far from the Kingdom of God

Mark 12:28-34
Gerrit Buddingh’ | Sunday, May 02, 2021
Copyright © 2021, Gerrit Buddingh’

Introduction

Verse 34 of this morning’s text states, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”  A Holy-Spirit regenerated heart is worth more than all the riches of this world, for by it we have entry into the kingdom of God.

The majority of the Pharisees, the Herodians, and the Sadducees have all proved by their opposition to Jesus that they are far from the kingdom of God. Collectively, they are a smart bunch of people who intellectually know the Old Testament perhaps as well or even better than any of us. Yet not a single one of them at that time is in the kingdom of God.

Here, though, we meet a man of whom Jesus says is “not far from the kingdom of God.” But, of course, being “not far from the kingdom” does not mean you are “in” the kingdom. And being “in” is what it is all about.

What is the kingdom of God? What brings a person into its citizenship? Is it mere knowledge about God’s word? It is one’s agreement with God’s law? Is it scrupulously trying to keep God’s law? Or is it something else entirely? And how should a citizen of God’s kingdom then live? These are the issues before us this morning, and may the Lord give us ears to hear what he is speaking to each of us.

As background, it is important to realize that this incident occurs during the Passion Week after Jesus had cleansed the temple and a few days before he is to be crucified. Mark tells us that a Jewish scholar comes to Jesus with this question. The religious establishment were doing their best to entrap Jesus into making some injudicious statement for which they could prosecute and execute him. Earlier, Jesus answered an imbecilic question proffered by some of the Sadducees on levirate marriage and how that plays out in heaven. They wanted to discredit Jesus in the eyes of the common people, but it failed.

The parallel text to our passage in Matthew 22 tells us that upon learning this, the Pharisees got together to plot and plan. They send this scribe, an expert in the law, to question Jesus. Perhaps because this man is an attorney, he puts Jesus on the witness stand, so to speak, to examine him. He asks, “Teacher, of all the commandments, which is the most important?”

Now, probably many or most non-Christians, if asked that question today, would answer with a one-word summary: “Love,” probably meaning, “Love yourself.” Years ago, Whitney Houston sang the hit song, “The Greatest Love of All.” The lyrics say, “Because the greatest love of all is happening to me, I found the greatest love of all inside me. . . . The greatest love of all, it’s easy to achieve. And the greatest love of all, learning to love yourself, is the greatest love of all.” Less self-absorbed people may even say, “Love your neighbor.” Certainly, they would not respond with, “Love God supremely and your neighbor as yourself.”

Although this question about which biblical commandment is the greatest, which is the most important, is largely ignored today, it was a hotly debated issue in the first century among the religious people. It would have been the trending theological topic on Twitter, if they had had Twitter then, with all the seminary professors, pastors, and lay people weighing in with their own opinions.

Back then, the first-century Bible scholars had identified 613 laws of God from the books of Moses, also known as the Jewish Torah, which constitutes the first five books of our English Bibles. Of these laws, 248 are stated as positive affirmations: “Thou shalts,” while 365 (equal to the number of days in a year) are declared in the negative: “Thou shalt nots.”

These 613 laws (the exact number of which equals the number of Hebrew letters in the Decalogue—the Ten Commandments) formed the basis for orthodox Jewish belief and practice in that day, especially for the Pharisees and the scribes. It is they who spent much of their time debating and ranking these 613 laws and their applicability to people’s daily lives. Like the Pharisaical lawyers they are, these Jewish theologians divided the commandments into great and small, trying to rank the more important and the less important, the heavyweight and lightweight. Some rules given greater weight were such commandments as relating to the Sabbath, circumcision, sacrifice, fringes, and phylacteries. And they did not stop with these, but descended into other trifling minutiae.

Some of their hairsplitting distinctions were of a harmful kind, such as preferring the ceremonial to the moral law, the oral to the written law, and the trifles of the legal scribes to the teachings of the prophets. They also taught that obedience to certain commandments atoned for the neglect of the others, in a sense just like people in our day who emphasize those commands of God they like while ignoring or undercutting those they dislike.

But whatever the scribe’s motive, it is Christ’s answer to this man that is of supreme importance. So this morning we will look at, first, the command to listen up; second, the first imperative of the Great Commandment; third, the second imperative of the Great Commandment; fourth, the cohesiveness of the Great Commandment; fifth, citizenship in the kingdom of God; and, finally, the cost of the Great Commandment.

1. The Command to Listen Up

Jesus responds to this scribe by reciting what is called the “Shema.” This quotation of Deuteronomy 6:4–5 is something that every good Jew knows by heart. For thousands of years, every morning and evening, Jewish people have recited these well-known words.

The Shema begins with a call to love God; “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one.” In Hebrew, the first word of this passage, “Shema,” means “Hear” or “Listen,” from which the prayer gets its name. Shema was and is a very common word in the Hebrew Bible. Hearing is a universal activity unless you are deaf.

“Shema” is spoken commonly in the Bible. Proverbs 20:12 states, “ears that [shema] and eyes that see—the Lord has made them both.” But Bible scholars use the word shema to mean more than just sound waves playing upon your eardrums. In Hebrew, shema means “pay attention to” or “focus on.” When Leah, who wasn’t loved by her husband Jacob, had a son, she named him Simeon, or in Hebrew, Shim-ohn, because, she said, “The Lord has sham-ohd that I am unloved.” It means that “God has heard and paid attention to my plight.”

Even more, the word can also mean responding to what you hear. This is why so many cries of help in the book of Psalms begin with the plea that God listen, shema. For example, Psalm 27:7 says, “[Shema] my voice when I call, O Lord; be merciful to me and answer me.” In this case, the psalmist is asking God to shema, to act, to do something on his behalf.

But more importantly, shema is also used when God tells his people to listen. When the people of Israel come to Mount Sinai, God says in Exodus 19:5, “If you [shema] me fully and [shema] my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession.”  Here in the Hebrew the word shema is repeated twice to give it emphasis. It means to listen carefully with the purpose of doing what you hear.

When God asks people to shema, what he means is that they “listen and obey,” or, as Pastor Mathew would say, “hear and do.” The New Testament NIV correctly translates this: “Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all the nations you will be my treasured possession.” Obey and keep.

This is also why, later in the Old Testament, when the people of Israel were breaking their covenant promises to God, the Jewish prophets would say things like, “They have ears, but they are not listening.” The Jewish people, of course, could hear just fine, but they were not actually listening, or they would have obeyed God.

In the New Testament, Jesus himself would frequently say, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear,” thus calling upon his hearers to pay close attention to what he about to say. We see that in Matthew 11:15; 13:9, 44; Mark 4:9; and Luke 8:8. God the Holy Spirit demands the same of us in Revelation 2:7, 11 and elsewhere, where it says, “Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.”

Thus, “listening” in the Bible is about giving reverence and respect to God when he speaks to you by hearing and doing what he tells you. Real listening requires action. Real listening responds immediately, exactly, and joyfully to God’s commands.

2. The First Imperative of the Great Commandment

There was a rabbi, Hillel, who taught twenty plus years before Jesus’ earthly ministry. He is the man after which Hillel House, across the street from the old UCD athletic field, is named. Hillel answered the question about the greatest commandment this way: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. This is the whole Torah. Everything else is mere commentary on it.”

But while this was a decent restatement of the Golden Rule, his answer is hugely wanting. It does not answer how we should live towards God. Jesus thus gives a far, fuller, and better answer in this morning’s text: “Love God first and foremost, and love your neighbor as yourself.”

In these verses, Jesus begins by telling people that they are commanded to love God above all else in the world, including their own lives. That is how we are to love the Lord, that is, with every faculty of our being. Another time, in Matthew 10:37, Jesus said, “Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. Anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”

This is foundational to being one of Jesus’ disciples, for supreme love for God is what it means to be a Christian. We begin with love for Jesus as our God and King, as our Master and Commander. This charge is rephrased in question 1 of both the Westminster Shorter and Larger Catechisms: “What is the chief and highest end of man? Man’s chief and highest end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.”

But it does not take a genius to figure out that most people do not live this way. In their heart of hearts, most people live to glorify and entertain themselves for as long and as well as they can. They are rebels toward God and his rule. They look for ways to avoid the sharp point of submission and obedience to Jesus as Lord. They embrace the comfort of carnality, of self-love, of living for one’s self-perceived, selfish best, thus making God’s word of no effect. Read their minds, and they are thinking, “Christ simply could not have meant what he said.” Thus, they make Christ as though he is small, even though he is God. They may sing worship songs and hear sermons about him, but they will not allow him to interfere with how they live their lives.

Who, then, is it that has all authority to command all people to put God first in their lives? Certainly not you or me or any other human being on his or her own authority. Only God can, and Jesus is the God/man. He is the second Person of the Trinity, and he has the right to command all people, and especially the right to command his covenant people.

Unfortunately, the idea that Christ Jesus has absolute and final authority over every detail of our lives, over every aspect of his covenant citizens’ lives, is simply not accepted as true by the majority of today’s rank and file evangelical Christians. They are autonomous, and they will not suffer anyone, not even King Jesus, to tell them, how to live. They are rebels who will find themselves publicly excluded from Christ’s kingdom on the day of judgment. Despite their avowals to love and serve Jesus, they are the ones that Jesus will plainly tell, “I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!” (Matt. 7:23).

But God’s true people hear and embrace who God is, that he is the one and only. In reciting the Shema, Jesus is giving the redeemed elect of God, in a shorthand version, a teaching about the nature of our God. By this, he is declaring the unique oneness of God in opposition to polytheism. He is telling us there is no other God but Yahweh, the God of the Bible, and that anyone else that occupies first place in our life is, in essence, an idol, a false God.

Indirectly, Jesus, without mentioning it, is also declaring the unity, or the oneness, of the Trinity. God is one God, consisting of three co-eternal, co-substantial Persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. These three Persons, while distinct, are of one substance or essence, each uncreated, each co-eternal, each equal in majesty and glory, each infinite and equal in being, wisdom, power holiness, justice, goodness, and truth. So it follows that it is only right and proper that God’s people should love him supremely. We must not have any divided allegiance.

But whence comes this love for God? Certainly not from our ordinary human nature, for by nature we are “alienated from God,” “hateful and hating God and one another.” This love comes only from the new birth when God gives us a new heart. First John 4:19 says, “We love because he first loved us.” Second Corinthians 5:17 says, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation: the old has gone, the new has come!” Because a Christian is the object of God’s covenant love, the Christian is to love God with the entirety of his being.

The word “love” that our Lord uses here in Mark is from the verb agapaô. It involves the love of our intelligence, the love of the will, the love of purpose, the love of choice, the love of self-sacrifice, and the love of obedience. Thus, it follows that we are to love God in this way with all our heart.  The heart is the core of our being, the seat of our thoughts, emotions, words, and actions. What Jesus is saying is that we are to love the Lord without pretense or reservation. We are to be genuine in our love for him and not just say, “We love the Lord,” and then live as though he does not exist. We are to be genuine in our love for God and not hypocrites. We are not to say, “I love you, Lord,” and then love something else or someone else more than God.

In a sense, the Shema prayer is saying to God, “Cross my heart and hope to die and go to hell if I don’t love you first and foremost, even more than my family, property, or even my own life. Otherwise, I am not worthy of being called your disciple or kingdom citizen” (see Matt. 10:37 and Luke 14:26).

Jesus is also saying that God demands first place in all your soul. This idea contains the thought of emotions. We are not to love God with some kind of dry, antiseptic love, but we are to be passionate in our love for him. Our love for God should touch us in our innermost being. We are to love the Lord with all our emotional self. God hates tepid worship. That is why Jesus, in Revelation 3:14–16, charged the senior pastor of the church of Laodicea, “These are the words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the ruler of God’s creation. I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I could wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth.”

God also demands first place in “all of your mind.” Jesus demands to be the focus of your thought life. Your intellect is to be subject to the Lordship of Jesus. Your love for God is not to be mindless and emptyheaded, but you are to love God because you have studied and meditated upon his self-revelation in the person of Jesus Christ and upon his written word, the Bible. And based on this, you have made a conscious decision to submit to and love Jesus as your Lord. In other words, you shouldn’t just love God because your parents say so, or your pastor or anyone else says so, but you should love him because of who he is and what he has done for you.

Next, you should love God with “all your strength.” This implies that your love for the Lord is not to be a thing that is done with words alone, but you should express your love in life, in physical actions, in deeds. If we love the Lord, then our bodies are his as well. His Lordship will now affect how you eat and sleep, how you entertain yourself, how you go about your work. You have no right to divorce the physical from the spiritual. Nothing we do is outside the purview of Jesus as our Lord.

Thus, the intellectual, emotional, volitional, and physical elements of our personhood must all combine to love the one true God. It is to be an intelligent love. It is to be an emotional love. It is to be a willing love. It is to be an active love. And it is to be an obedient love, for there is no love for God where there is no obedience to him as Lord.

Putting all these things together, it becomes clear that God is telling us to love him with singular sincerity, with the utmost fervency, with the fullest expression of a Holy-Spirit enlightened reason, and with the entire energy of our being. Jesus is making a proclamation about the demands of his kingdom rule. True love for Jesus is an all-consuming love which is to manifest itself in every area of life. Yes, you can only come to Christ by grace alone through faith alone. Salvation is in and through him alone, and not by any supposed good works on your part. But having a credible confession of faith without “the obedience of faith” is no faith at all. It is dead faith.

Take warning: Many beautiful churches and cathedrals have been built to God’s glory with no expense spared, but God is now forgotten in them. Those who constructed those buildings probably did so to honor and worship God. Yet today’s generation has forgotten the God and Lord they served.

But it is not just those in other churches who are in danger. You too can grow cold and indifferent. So ask yourself: Is Christ honored by my thoughts, by my desires, by my speech, and by my actions? (GJB) It is impossible for anyone to properly love the Lord until you personally know him as Savior and Lord. First John 4:19 makes this abundantly clear: “We love because he first loved us.” Only after we have been regenerated and effectually called to life can we express repentance and trust in Jesus Christ as Savior. And only then is it possible to love Jesus as Lord, putting him ahead of every other love and allegiance that you could possibly have. Only then can we say with the apostle Paul, “He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy” (Col. 1:18). And if we love the Lord supremely, then it will affect how we relate to one another.

3. The Second Imperative of the Great Commandment

This part of the commandment is taken from Leviticus 19:18: “Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.”

The second commandment is closely intertwined with the first. In fact, it is virtually impossible to keep it without keeping the first. Loving others as yourself flows from loving God. You cannot have a completely right relationship with God and have a wrong relationship with your brother. And you cannot have a completely right relationship with your brother until your relationship with God is right.

In giving us the second commandment, Jesus is ordering that we are to love others with the same love which we shower upon ourselves. If we are brutally honest, we must confess that we tend to think very highly of ourselves. But it is the same high regard that we are to have for those around us. That is, we are to place others in such a position that we are constantly looking out for their best interests, their welfare, their good. Romans 12:9–10 says, “Be devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above yourselves. Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord.” And Philippians 2:3 says, “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves.” The whole idea here is that we are to love others with the same type of compassion and obligation we feel toward ourselves.

How, then, is this love to manifest itself? It manifests in forgiveness, peace with others, patience, unity, kindness, gentleness, and goodness to others, showing mercy and compassion, and witnessing the gospel to others. It also manifests itself in honoring parents, in valuing and protecting human life, in helping and not harming others, in valuing and protecting real truth and not lying, in valuing and protecting property rights and not stealing, and in being satisfied with what you have and not coveting what others have.

Godly love is thus visible. “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). That love is seen in the manger and on the cross. Your love for Christ is to be visible through your obedience to him (John 14:21) and in your love for others (John 15:12).

The Ten Commandments are connected to this greatest of all commandments. The first four are about loving God. You must not have any other God. You must not make a false idol. You must not take God’s name in vain. And you are to remember to worship him in the way and at the time that he prescribes. Commandments five through ten are about loving your fellow man. You are to be respectful and obedient to your parents, and also learn respect for all of God’s delegated authorities. You are to respect human life and not to harm others or murder them. You are to have respect for moral purity and not commit fornication or adultery. You are to respect others’ property and not steal from them. You are to respect truth and not lie. You are to be content with what God has provided you and not seek what the other has.

4. The Cohesiveness of God’s Commandment

In parallel, the first part of Jesus’ statement of the Greatest Commandment has to do with your relationship to God and the second with your relationship to others, so that in that way these two commandments are simply a summarization of the Ten Commandments and the whole of the Old Testament law. This is expressly stated in Matthew 22:40 where Jesus says that all the other commandments hang on these two commandments: to love God supremely and your neighbor as yourself. That is, if you love God as you should, you will not sin against him and you cannot say you love God while hating your neighbor, for loving your neighbor is part of your duty towards God.

This means when there is a problem between you and someone else—your brother or sister—it is an indication that there is a problem between you and God, that there is a problem with your love for Jesus. What Jesus is telling us is that we can always be assured that we will do the right thing by God and our fellow man if we love the Lord supremely with everything we are and have. Then and only then will we love those around us as strongly as we love ourselves. When you do this, you will please God, and he will shine the light of his face upon you.

5. Citizenship in the Kingdom of God

Jesus’ response in verse 34 is that this man is not far from the kingdom of God, which begs the question for us today: “What is a kingdom?”

A kingdom is not primarily land, the geography over which a king rules, although it must be said that God does rule as the Sovereign over all of creation. More importantly, a kingdom consists of the people who live within its boundaries. But it is more than just that. It is most significantly the sovereign rule of the king over his people.

What, then, is the kingdom of God? It is first and foremost God’s sovereign rule over his chosen and called people. Hence, God’s kingdom does not include those who refuse his rule, however nice they may seem to us. God is not a lackadaisical ruler governing with a laissez-faire attitude. No, he does not let his people run amok. He has rules and laws, and expects them to be fully obeyed.

These laws reflect God’s most holy and righteous nature. These laws then are a measuring rod of the holiness of God’s people. So mere intellectual knowledge of the Bible and God’s laws is not enough. They must be lived out.

Everyone who debated and sparred with Jesus intellectually knew God’s law. Certainly the Pharisees did. They were the religious teachers of the Jews then. The Sadducees knew it well—at least well enough to know what they did not like about it. And this scribe certainly did as well, for he was a recognized expert in God’s law.

Since we see here a bunch of really intellectually sharp people who knew their Bibles perhaps better than you and me, it is interesting to note that not a single one of them is in God’s kingdom. This may be a bit surprising, but mere knowledge of the Bible, even when coupled with mental assent to its truth, did not do these men any good when facing off with Jesus, the Word made flesh.  Nor will it do them nor any of us any good on the last day, the day of judgment, when they and we must stand before Christ the great Judge. Any honest person must acknowledge that he has not kept the Greatest Commandment perfectly, not even for one whole day, much less an hour. James the brother of Jesus would later write, “For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking them all” (James 2:10).

The rich young ruler mentioned in Mark 10:17–31 brashly boasted that he had kept the whole law from his boyhood up. But Jesus quickly poked a hole in his inflated view of himself by proving that he had not even kept the first commandment to love God supremely and exclusively, given that the young man loved his money more than God.

So mere knowledge of the Bible does not translate into being in God’s kingdom. It is possible to know God’s words inside and out, but it does us no good if we do not know Christ personally and are ruled by him. Knowing your Bible clearly isn’t enough. If all you do is acquiesce to its truth, it might be said that you are not far from the kingdom. But you are not in Christ’s kingdom, which begs the question: Who, then, are God’s people, those in the kingdom?

You are probably familiar with the aphorism by Adolf von Harnack: “The universal fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of man.” Harnack and others argue that because God created all mankind in his image, this means that God is the Father of all people and thus all people are one family and kinfolk to each other.

In one sense, that is true. We are all descendants of Adam with God’s moral law being written into our hearts, and we all have the requirement to keep it perfectly. But the events described in Genesis 3 changed all that. What happened? The Fall. Adam as our federal head, sinned and plunged all of his posterity descending from him by ordinary generation, into sin. People began to hate and abuse each other. Especially ungodly people began to hate the godly. We see that when wicked Cain killed righteous Abel. People’s universal brotherhood under God as Father was destroyed by Adam’s sin against God. It places us all under the rule of Satan—a brotherhood not to be excited about.

But God did not leave all mankind to perish in this condition of sin and misery. Out of his gracious and good character, out of his mere good pleasure, God in eternity past elected some people—not all—to everlasting life. He entered into a covenant of grace with them to deliver them out of their condition of slavery to sin and its terrible consequences. And he purposed to bring them into a place of salvation by a redeemer, that is, through Jesus Christ.

Through Jesus’ death and resurrection, God has purchased the redemption of his people. God the Holy Spirit applies it to his people. And he works faith in them, thereby uniting them to Christ through his effectual calling.  The Holy Spirit then applies the Scriptures to them and cleanses them from their sins and gives each of them a new and a new spirit, taking away their old heart of stone towards God and giving them a heart of flesh with which to love God supremely. The Holy Spirit takes up residence in God’s people and moves them to keep God’s decrees and laws as his kingdom people (Ezek. 36:25–28).

To be true to Scripture, we must affirm the universal creatorhood of God, for all people are made by him (Acts 17:28). However, God is truly Father of only those who trust in his only begotten Son, making them brothers with Jesus Christ as their older brother (Heb. 2:11; Mark 3:34–35).  But while there is a brotherhood of God’s kingdom people, all others are in Satan’s kingdom, under his rule, and they are not your brothers.

Thus, the Bible teaches not the universal brotherhood of man, but the universal neighborhood of all humanity. Our neighbors consist of all people—men and women, Christians, non-Christians, Africans, Asians, Europeans, and so on. From the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:25–37, we learn that we must treat everyone with care and respect, not just those in the church. At the same time, our brothers and sisters are only those who truly believe in Christ, who truly know him by faith. To say otherwise is to deny the unique identity of God’s designated kingdom, the church. Far from the universalism at the core of Harnack’s definition of Christianity, true biblical faith is essentially exclusivist. There is only one God, and the only way to him, and that is through faith alone in the Lord Jesus Christ alone. And only those he rules over as King are his people, and those alone.

Our culture hates to hear this, preferring to believe in a mythical God who disregards sin and who loves unrepenting sinners. If, though, you serve the only true God, then stand firm against those who say all roads lead to heaven.  They do not.

In the purest sense, the church is where God’s kingdom citizens live, and move, and have their being under Christ’s rule. But God’s rule over all people is rejected by most. By nature, they hate God and rebel against his rule. They strive to live autonomous lives apart from God.

There are two kinds of people in the world: saints and ain’ts. Which are you? If you say you are one of God’s people but do not embrace and love him as your King, you are not his people. If you say, “I love him,” but do not do as he commands, you are a rebel and not his people. So I ask, “Can you honestly say, ‘I love God and his kingdom rule over me?’” Or are you a rebel against God and his rule over you?

6. The Cost of the Great Commandment

If you are going to fulfill the Great Commandment, you need to be aware that it will cost you something and, in a certain sense, everything.

If you are going to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, then it means that you will have to place God’s will ahead of your own. It means that God’s will must be paramount in every area of your life. It means that you may have to say “No” to some things that you might want to do. It means that you cannot go places that others go. It means you cannot watch things others watch or enjoy what they enjoy. It may even cost you your reputation, your job, and possibly your life. Either you can live to please yourself and the flesh, or you devote yourself to living for the Lord. The choice is yours.

But do not think that God is some cosmic killjoy. Yes, he has his kingdom rules, but they reflect his good character and beneficent nature. Yes, he expects his children to obey his commands, to yield to them in their lives, but they are for their good, not their harm. It may cost to love him, but it is worth it, both now and on in eternity.

If you are going to love your neighbor as you love yourself, it will cost you as well. You may have to eat some crow and ask the other person’s forgiveness at times. You may have to even seek forgiveness when you feel you have done no wrong in order to keep the peace. You may have to sacrifice something you think you need in order to meet a brother’s need. You may have to unselfishly give up time to help someone. You will certainly have to spend time in prayer for them. You will take time and sacrifice to even just go sit with them and commiserate, if needs be, and to reach out to them in the name of the Lord.

However, when you love others as you should, you are simply proving that you indeed Christ’s, that you belong to him.  First John 4:21 says, “And we have this commandment from him: Whoever loves God must love his brother as well.” And 1 John 3:14–15 says, “We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love our brothers. Anyone who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life in him.”

Conclusion

I began this sermon with the statement of Jesus to this scribe, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” What Mark wants to show us is how dangerous it is just having mere knowledge about Jesus. Being near the kingdom of God is not good enough. You must enter, and you must enter through faith in Christ, trusting in his person and his work of salvation, and surrendering to his Lordship over you.

This scribe was near but not in. So I ask, “Are you in or are you out?” If you find that you are not in, then you need to repent before God, turn to Jesus alone as your Savior, and make him preeminent in your life.

But keep in mind that faith without obedience is dead. True born-again Christians will strive and keep on striving to please the Lord. And the standard of what pleases the Lord is summarized in this, the greatest of all commandments. Love the Lord supremely, and your neighbor as yourself.