Ogden Essential Commandment

1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8308-6943-5
Verlag: InterVarsity Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 204 Seiten

Reihe: The Essentials Set

Is it really possible to live out the Great Commandment?When an expert in the law asked Jesus what the greatest commandment is, Jesus gave a clear and simple answer:''Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these.'But what does the Great Commandment look like on the ground, in our day-to-day lives? And can we even come close to living it out?Jesus, Greg Ogden believes, has a simple answer to that too. He writes, 'Jesus didn't follow [the Great Commandment] up by saying, 'I know I'm asking a lot, but do the best you can. I know you'll never fully approximate this high and lofty goal, but it's still worth striving for.' . . . Jesus thinks this is possible.' And with Jesus, Ogden has found, it is possible--and essential.In this practical, in-depth handbook, Ogden draws from his years of pastoral experience training and discipling others to help us truly be changed by Christ into people who love God and love others with all that we are. Following the format of his bestselling Discipleship Essentials, each chapter includes: - a core truth - a memory verse - an inductive Bible study - a reading on one aspect of the Great Commandment Thoughtful questions will also help you examine your heart and life and move you to open yourself to God's transforming work.Above all, Ogden helps you see that the Great Commandment is actually a great invitation to join God in bringing his kingdom to earth. And as you learn to do so, you'll find that the greatest commandment leads to the greatest life possible.

Greg Ogden (DMin, Fuller Theological Seminary) recently retired as executive pastor of discipleship at Christ Church of Oak Brook. Prior to that he served as director of the doctor of ministry program at Fuller Theological Seminary. Now based in Monterey, California, he lives out his passion of teaching about the disciple-making mission of the church.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ogden, Greg

Leseproben

Introduction

Jesus Believes It Is Possible!

Would Jesus ask something of us that couldn’t be done?

At the center of all the biblical commands and at the very core of “everything I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:20), Jesus declares that we are to love God with everything we’ve got and love our neighbors in the same way that we cherish ourselves.

Really? Is this possible?

The energy behind the writing of this curriculum comes from an insight that is quite frankly embarrassing. It is embarrassing because I should know better. At first, the insight doesn’t seem very dramatic. In fact, every time I have shared this personal “revelation” with others I have been sheepishly apologetic. But here is the amazing truth: Jesus actually thinks we can become like him. Jesus actually believes that it is possible for frail and deeply flawed human beings to focus our complete affection on God and others.

The key word here for me is possible. I had unconsciously given up the possibility of actually doing what Jesus commanded. No, I had never consciously thought or said, “Jesus, I think you’re an idealistic dreamer,” or “Jesus, you can only expect so much from flawed humanity.” I was not even aware that I had dismissed Jesus’ belief in me. But what had taken over my spirit in my attempt to be authentic was a focus on where I had fallen short of Jesus’ call. In my desire to make sure that I was not deceiving myself about my capacity for sin, I had given up the upside possibility that the character of Jesus could actually take over my life.

The Impossible Possibility

Because of this insight, I have come to realize that we need to hold two truths in dynamic tension. On the one hand, we need to be rigorously honest about our shortcomings. Part of what it means to live in the light of Christ is allowing him to shine that light in the hidden regions of our soul. Yet at the same time we need to hold to the compelling vision that this same light illumines our path so that we can live into our potential of being God- and people-lovers. There is a Hasidic saying that advises us to go around with a piece of paper in each pocket, with one piece reading “I am dust and ashes,” and the other, “For me the world was created.” Yes, we are finite and broken people as well as those who have been redeemed to reflect the Redeemer. Jesus would not ask us to be and do something unless it was possible. We can become the bodily dwelling place of Jesus who lives his life out through us.

The vision that Jesus has placed before us comes in the form of his summary statement as to what our life agenda is to be. In response to one of the “teachers of the law” seeking to know which commandment was most important, Jesus responded with what we have come to call the Great Commandment: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these” (Mark 12:30-31). He didn’t follow this up by saying, “I know I’m asking a lot, but do the best you can. I know you’ll never fully approximate this high and lofty goal, but it’s still worth striving for.” No, I added that part myself. In my spirit I washed out the possibility that this could actually be, saying, “I know the guy dwelling in this body all too well. Not a chance that this weak and feeble individual could ever approximate Jesus’ expectation.”

Yet something uplifting started to happen when my spirit began to rehearse a different message: “Jesus thinks this is possible.” I found a new energy released in me. A buoyancy of spirit beckoned me with the thought that I could live more deeply into the possibility of loving God with all my heart, soul, mind and strength, and loving my neighbor as myself. With Jesus, it is possible to “love your enemies, [and] do good to those who hate you” (Luke 6:27). It’s not just for that rare person who seems to have tapped into a pool of grace that the rest of us have not been able to find.

The Paradox

Herein lies the paradox of being a Christ-follower. We need to embrace what appear to be two competing truths about ourselves—our deeply corrupted spirits and our redemption through Christ—if we are to approximate what Jesus believes is our potential as Great Commandment people.

On the one hand, if we are not deeply in touch with our dark side, we will miss the incredible grace that claimed us while we were in full rebellion against God and into our own self-exaltation. Like the alcoholic in a twelve-step program who started down the road to redemption by saying, “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol,” the believer has to acknowledge without qualification, “We admit we are powerless over sin.” Left to myself, I don’t love God or my neighbor; in fact, I hate God, who crowds my autonomy, and I don’t really care what happens to my neighbor, as long I am taken care of. Only when we see the extent of how corrupt our spirit is through and through will we rejoice with Paul’s words, “But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions” (Ephesians 2:4-5).

Without an awareness of our need for grace, we will simply turn the Great Commandment into a new law that we attempt to fulfill by our own effort. It’s true that this summary commandment of Jesus serves the dual purpose of the law. On the one hand, the apostle Paul tells us that the law was given to show us how far short we fall before the holiness of God (Romans 7:13). It serves its purpose by driving us to our knees. Just try keeping the command to love God and our neighbors in our own strength. We would not survive our own thought life for the next ten minutes. So in our study of the Great Commandment, we want to avoid making Jesus’ commandment simply a higher-level law that leads only to enslavement rather than freedom.

On the other hand, we don’t want to miss what is implicit in this command. Jesus thinks that living this truth is possible. We walk carefully between the shoals of being in touch with our capacity for self-deception yet at the same time energized by the new capacity that God’s grace gives us to become the redeemed people in whom Christ dwells. Dallas Willard says it succinctly: “Grace is opposed to earning, not to effort.”[1] The apostle Paul helps us with this tension. On the one hand he said of himself, “I am . . . the worst of sinners” (1 Timothy 1:15-16); on the other hand he said that this awareness infused him with an energy and passion fueled by God’s grace that sent him across the known world. Here is how Paul brings these two truths together: “For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me” (1 Corinthians 15:9-10).

What is the relationship then between grace and law? Is the law nullified by grace? Do we not have to concern ourselves with the commandments this side of grace? To echo Paul, “Absolutely not!” (see Galatians 3:21). Dallas Willard states the connection between grace and law: “The presence of the Spirit and of grace is not meant to set the law aside, but to enable conformity to it from an inwardly transformed personality. . . . Law comes with grace in the renewed soul. There is no such thing as grace without law. The law is the structure of the life of grace in the kingdom of God.”[2]

Jesus’ command to love God with all we’ve got and to treat our neighbor with the same regard as we do ourselves is meant to bring us to the end of ourselves. When we hear this expectation we’re supposed to say, “There is no way in the world that in myself I will ever be able to live up to this standard.” This realization should cause us to cast ourselves unreservedly on the grace of God and repent of our sin-sick soul. Then we are flooded with the light of God’s accepting grace. Our heart of stone is massaged back to life as a heart of flesh that begins to beat within. We find within a new motivation and desire to want to become all that God hopes us to be. Because our inner affections are being transformed to love what God loves, we begin to understand that his yoke is easy and his burden is light. The law we hated now becomes the life we have always wanted.

Transformation of the Will

Dallas Willard was again the one who led me to this breakthrough. In his very helpful article “Spiritual Formation: What It Is, and How It Is Done,”[3] he writes that to be fully formed in Christ is to come to that place where our natural impulses come to reflect the feelings, thinking and actions of Jesus himself. Since the will is the primary locus of this formation—the executive center of our being—Willard speaks of three dimensions or conditions of the will (he equates the will and the heart as we’ll see more fully later). He calls the first dimension of the will the impulsive will: it’s “directed or moved by or toward things that are simply attractive.” This is where a baby begins. Babies are simply drawn to what is enticing in their environment. Adults who don’t outgrow this impulse to simply do what is pleasing to them are driven by immediacy and enslaved by their own desires.

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