The religious people of Jesus’ day got together to try to trap Jesus with their questions. They asked him about paying taxes. They asked him about rising from death. We read today that they asked him what was the greatest commandment. The Jewish rabbis liked to distill the meaning of religion into little phrases like the ones we put on our Burma Shave signs. They had 632 laws and rules for the practice of their religion. They tried to break it down into a couple of inclusive commandments.

"Teacher," he asked, "which is the greatest commandment in the law?" Jesus combined two commandments from the early Hebrews and put them together: the shema - Deuteronomy 6:4 and the great command in Leviticus 19:18 were combined. Together they go: "You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind ... you must love your fellow man as yourself" (Matthew 22:37, 39).

For Jesus, religion distilled into three things: love of self, love of God, and love of other people. Let’s look at them one at a time and see their significance for our day and our practice of Christianity.

We must love ourselves.... "You must love your fellow man as yourself" (Matthew 22:39b). One of the messages of the New Testament and Jesus’ ministry we often miss is that we are to have love for ourselves. In the Old Testament we read how God created us like him. "Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image and after our likeness ... so God created man in his own image.’ "

Betty Lombard joined our Lutheran Church in Tiffin when I was its pastor. She first came searching for meaning in her life to my Bible Study group. She had been in and out of Tiffin State Hospital a number of times. I baptized her and became her pastor and counselor. She would tell me how bad she was and what a rotten person she had been. I tried, in my simple way, to assure her that she was one of God’s creations. One day she called me on the phone and told me she had a title for a sermon - I should preach on "love yourself." Five days later, they found Betty dead on her kitchen floor. She had committed suicide by slashing her wrists. She just could not accept the fact that she was good and God-made.

In an average year in the United States, 22,000 people kill themselves, and 100,000 more try. The real cause for such attempts, say the psychiatrists, is a sense of guilt and a desire to punish oneself. G. K. Chesterton calls the great lesson of "beauty and the beast" that a thing must be loved before it is loveable. If we are God’s creation, and if we are created like God, we must think well of ourselves. We are well-made, we are God’s handiwork, we are created like our Creator. There is an important message here - we are to love ourselves. In a day when self-worth is low, in a time when so much introspection is encouraged, and when human nature is looked at with suspicion, we need to say boldly - we are God-made! And let’s remember, God makes us well. It would be blasphemy to hate ourselves since God is our Creator.

You’ve read in the newspapers about a whole community turning out to find a lost child. Hundreds of people gathered around a mine shaft while they searched for a lost miner. A whole nation watches and prays while one policeman is held hostage. We have the same kind of lavish attention focused on us by God.

There is something sacred about life - any life. If people would turn out a whole community to find a lost child, or dig out a lost miner, think how much more concern God has about each of our lives. And think about this: Think what a price God paid for us! We are so important to him that he sent his Son to save us. Think how the great events of our worship emphasize that fact - how at Christmas we celebrate his coming in the person of Jesus at Bethlehem, how we observe his growing up in Nazareth, how during Lent we look towards his going to Jerusalem and Calvary and the cross, how at Easter we celebrate his coming out of the tomb, and how on Ascension Day we observe the way he returned to his heavenly father - all this to demonstrate how important we are.

In dealing with ourselves, we are not dealing with rubbish; we are dealing with precious pieces of well-made machinery, copied after the Creator of the universe. When we finally stop putting ourselves down and respect who and what we are, there are many side benefits: we can much better be able to live with others; we have a new-found peace with ourselves; we can better live with ourselves because we are often our own worst enemies; we can bounce back from depression over divorce or disappointment in a love affair; we can handle almost anything life deals out when we fully realize that we are God-made, and God-saved, and God-loved.

Roy Pearson writes, "He has a work for me to do in the world, and in the doing of that work, you simply have no place. Your talents and assets have no more fitness for my task than mine have for yours, and both my peace of mind and my effectiveness in God’s plan depend not upon my rejecting myself, repudiating myself, hating myself, but upon my accepting myself, rejoicing in myself, using myself."

Shakespeare had his actor say, "Self love, my liege, is not so vile a sin as self-neglecting."

To believe this means we’ll decide things differently. How we treat our bodies takes on great significance. Whether we use drugs or alcohol becomes important. How we neglect or abuse ourselves that God has created is a high priority. Whether we smoke or overeat are other decisions. All these become theological religious issues because we are dealing with a God-made, God-loved body.

Jesus said, "You must love your fellow man as yourself." That brings us to the second element in our text. We are not only to love ourselves, but we are to love God.

We are to love God. "You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind" (Matthew 22:37). This means we give our full commitment to God. It calls for us to have a total love which dominates and directs our thoughts and actions. We are created for love and worship. We are made to pour ourselves into a cause. We are created to give out - to love with whole self. Jesus says, "... with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind" (Matthew 22:37b).

A columnist writing in the Chicago Daily News commented on a recent interview with the Secretary of the Army concerning the scandal at West Point in which 151 cadets were dismissed for having violated the academy’s moral code against cheating. The Secretary, in discussing the cause of the scandal, reported that "at least two-fifths of the cadets of the classes of ‘76 and ‘77 at West Point when asked what the causes were, brought up removal of mandatory chapel." The Secretary was amazed. "Who among us would have thought of this effect of removing chapel? ... They (the cadets) felt that sanctity was driven out of the moral code." The Daily News writer observed that it is hard for societies to have institutional morality when the individual does not have a personal morality based on some kind of personal belief. We need to love God - our very loving shapes our life-style and morals and gives content to our ethical decisions.

A partial devotion is a miserable way to live. it is destructive to hear one thing in church from Scripture and secretly do another. Some try just worshiping God with their emotions. They are afraid to use their brains. They believe you must check your brains at the church door when you join. Others try an intellectual religion but don’t really feel Christ’s presence with them. They know the facts about our Lord, but do not know him personally. And, of course, this command to love God is only possible in God’s love. "We love because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19).

All religion begins here - loving our God totally - a complete commitment to him - with our energy, our cash, our self, emotions, talents, time, and brains.

To try to straddle life with a double loyalty - the things of the world having equal or more importance than the love of God - causes us emotional schizophrenia. That kind of cleavage in personality is tragic - our mental health is at stake as well as our spiritual well-being. The worst danger is when we try to do a little of each. If we ever, as a Family of God, took seriously loving God with our whole self, we would be something to behold! Everyone in the congregation would be an evangelist - we’d be receiving hundreds into this congregation’s membership each couple of months. Everyone would be tithing - we’d have so much in the offering that we would have to put on extra counters to tabulate it, and find new ways to share it. All decisions and projects and work and activities of each organization of this church would measure and motivate what it did by asking if this is the best way to love God. Four thousand would be in church each Sunday. We wouldn’t have room enough for all the Church school classes to study the Scripture.

As when a teenager falls in love, and everything he or she does revolves around the one he or she loves, so too with us; we love God, we love ourselves.

We must also love our neighbors.... "You must love your fellow man as yourself" (Matthew 22:39b). When this rule was first given to the Pharisees, it came from Leviticus 19:18, and meant that they should love their fellow Jews. Jesus gave this a new interpretation with his story of the Good Samaritan. We are now to love all people, and especially those who need our love. It is surely true that in order to love well our neighbor, we must first love our God, love ourselves, and then we are capable of loving others. The bigot, the racially prejudiced, the hate-monger is always the person who has a low opinion of himself or herself. Religion for Jesus was loving self, God, and neighbor. He would put more teeth in that and said the only way we can show we love ... God is by loving others.

Lewis L. Austin, in This I Believe, wrote: "Our maker gave us two hands. One to hold onto him and one to reach out to his people. If our hands are full of struggling to get possessions, we can’t hang onto God or to others very well. If, however, we hold onto God, who gave us our lives, then his love can flow through us and out to our neighbor."

If you’re one of those church people who still draw color and class lines of human beings, it you’re a member who is holding a grudge, it probably means that you desperately need to grow in your love of God and respect for your own self. Then you won’t need to tramp on someone else in order to raise your opinion of yourself. It is only when we love God that many other people are loveable.

Charles L. Allen, in God’s Psychiatry, tells about a scene from Amos and Andy. "There was a big man who would slap Andy across the chest whenever they met. Finally, Andy got enough of it and said to Amos, ‘I’m fixed for him. I put a stick of dynamite in my vest pocket, and the next time he slaps me, he is going to get his hand blown off.’ Andy had not reasoned that at the same time he would get his heart blown out." When we refuse to love our neighbor, we blow out our own heart. It all goes together. The brotherhood of people can become a reality only when we have the fatherhood of God.

This, then, becomes a test of our Christianity, of our worship and study and program as a congregation. Are we loving God? By being here, has our respect for ourselves deepened? Does all we do as a church and all you do as a Christian show your love of God and God’s love for others?

The psychologist, Ferenizi, recently wrote what he thought was the plight of many gripers and complainers, and cranks. "They want to love their neighbor, but they don’t know how. Never having received love, they cannot give love. They have become hard and cold, relentless and loveless, in their attitude toward life. This attitude has further isolated them from others. Though they are in the crowd, they are not a part of the fellowship." Is there any greater challenge to the Christian faith than to bring the love of God to these so they might love others?

Here is the difference between player and spectator in the congregation, between disciple and griper among us. What a beautiful obituary if it could be said of us as a congregation and individuals, "They respected themselves, they loved their God, and they loved all of God’s people."

At the entrance to the harbor at the Isle of Man there are two lights. One would think that the two signals would confuse the pilot. But the fact is, he has to keep them in line; as long as he keeps them in line, his ship is safe. It is the same with these commands of Jesus: love of self, the love of God, and love others. When we keep them in line, we remain safe and well in the channel of the Christian life.

Jesus answered, "You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind ... you must love your fellow man as yourself" (Matthew 22:37, 39).