And Love Your Neighbour (Mark 12:28-44 Pt 2)

That’s why loving Jesus shows that we’re saved, but why does loving others show that we’re saved? Jesus gives us two reasons. A positive example in verses 41-44, but first, a negative example in verses 38-40. Let’s read those verses together READ. What do the scribes like? They like honor, they like greetings, they like attention. They like to come first. They can’t put God first, because they are putting themselves first. They want the greetings and the seats of honor. These men want everyone to know who they are, they want to come first. Them. Not God. They can’t love God because they love themselves too much.

Maybe sometimes we’re like that. We want attention, we want the praise, we want the focus to be on us and our achievements. The scary thing is that these scribes would have totally agreed with what Jesus said to the scribe in our first passage, but it didn’t make any difference to their lives, and they were far from the Kingdom of God. They did not love God. They made long prayers that everyone loved, but because they were for show they meant nothing, they fell to the ground like a lead balloon. So will your prayers if they are for show and not for God. They devoured widow’s houses. That doesn’t sound great does it? They exploited widows instead of helping them, making money off their poverty, rather than helping them as they were supposed to do.

This should scare us a little bit. These guys looked great to everyone. They followed all the rules, did their devotions, never missed a youth activity, were always in Sunday School, but Jesus condemns them, because in their hearts they were first, not God. James tells us that faith without works is dead. This is what he means. All the good works in the world mean nothing if God is not first in your heart.

If you come first in your life, God can not come first in your life. real faith, Kingdom faith, saving faith puts God first, and puts others first. It doesn’t think of itself very often, it thinks of God and others a lot.

Saving faith looks like the widow we meet in verses 41-44. READ. The two coins she put in the offering plate were worthless. Together they were 1/64th of a days wages for a builder. They would have made no difference to the running of the Temple, but they would have made a huge difference to her life is he’d kept them. Jesus tells us that she put in all she had to live on. What was she going to do the next time she got hungry? She had thrown away her life for the sake of God, and others.

This is what Jesus wants us to see as a real example of someone who is saved.

She had real devotion, not pretend prayer. She didn’t wait for her house to be devoured, she put God first, and gave everything to Him. can we say the same? We may not think we have much, but do we give to God what we do have? Are our plans different because of Jesus? They should be. This women would have known that her pennies were basically worthless, but she knew that in the Kingdom of God nothing is worthless. Whatever gift, or talent, whatever you can offer, can not be worthless, if you give it to God.

So to go back to our question at the beginning. How can i know i’m saved? You can know you’re saved if your life has a single devotion in it to put God first.

Putting God first means putting others first, and it means putting yourself last. It means that, as we saw last week, we give to God what is His. That means everything.

 

It means that we know faith in Jesus is better than sacrifices and burnt offerings, because Jesus sacrifice is better. It means we have a faith in Jesus that puts others first, rather than ourselves. It means that we have a faith in Jesus that gives Him everything we have, no matter what it’s worth.

It means that the Christian life is always about someone else before it’s about you. The Christian life is about God, and then it’s about others. So what is your life about? What is the focus of your life? That’s how you can know whether or not you are really living in the Kingdom, whether or not you’re really saved.