Grace, mercy and peace be unto you from God, our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. Our text is the first seven verses of the Holy Gospel reading which has already been read.

Dear friends in Christ, one of the deficiencies of our English language is that the word "love" is so flexible. We say that we love our parents, spouses, and children, of course, but we also say we love our favorite foods, sports, television shows, and other trivial stuff. Obviously we mean different things by these uses, but I'm afraid that because of the flexibility of the "love," perhaps it is harder for us to completely get what the Bible means when it speaks of loving God and our neighbor.

Yet love clearly is our highest duty, so we'd better know exactly what it means. St. Paul wrote that "love is the fulfilling of [God's] law" (Romans 13:10) and that law of love is spelled out in our Gospel reading when Jesus says, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets."

But what kind of love are Paul and Jesus speaking of? What does God expect of us? When Jesus sums up God's Law of love by quoting Deuteronomy 6, He shows that the love of God and neighbor is multifaceted, involving heart, soul, and mind, but more clearly than anything else, Jesus shows that such love is active love-love shown in actions. Jesus emphasizes that love is a verb, done with the heart, soul, and mind-in other words, the whole person with head, heart, and hands is involved in this active love.

And so the love Jesus is speaking of will involve active obedience to God's Ten Commandments, and it will include selfless service, self-control, discipline, suffering, patience, sacrifice, time, and hard work. As St. John exhorts us, "Little children, let us not love [only] in word or talk but [even more love] in deed and in truth" (1 John 3:18).

And because of the incredible amount of effort involved in this active love, it is no surprise that our culture prefers the easier forms of love, romantic and emotional and sexual "love," rather than active, self-sacrificing love of God and His Word. I think it is safe to say that many of us immerse ourselves each day in movies, television, radio, popular music, and novels, yet most of what passes for love in these media is not the sort of love God requires of us. So if you notice that many people around you today don't know much about active love, don't be surprised, since much of what people think about love comes from our constant exposure to our loveless and perverse culture.

As Christians, our calling is to learn from God's Word what love is. So as Christians, it doesn't matter what our culture thinks, or what our own opinions about love are; our particular concern is to face up to God and examine our lives in the light of His Law and its demands to love Him and neighbor. And we can learn from God's own example, from His own love for us, that our love for Him and others is to be mainly active, since God has loved and does love us through both words and actions. He has lovingly created each one of us, and still sustains our life, which is an ongoing act of undeserved love. And He has revealed His love for us by speaking His Word, the Holy Scriptures, where He tells us that He first showed His love for the world by creating it. Then God showed His love for mankind by speaking to Adam and Eve, revealing Himself and His will to them. In Genesis Moses recorded that "the Lord God commanded [Adam], saying, 'You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die' " (Genesis 2:16-17). God knew what was best for His children and loved them by telling them His rules. Whenever God gives us laws, it is not to spoil our fun, but to protect us from sin and the devil's schemes to destroy us.

Yet when Adam and Eve succumbed to Satan's temptations to reject God's Word, they dove into sin with their hearts, heads, and hands: their hearts loved Satan and his promises, and they hated God and His Word; their heads loved the idea of becoming wise like God and they hated God's will; and their hands carried out the act of rebellion, that first human act of hatred toward God. What is the simple opposite of love? Hate. All sin is hatred of God and of neighbor. And the sin of Adam and Eve has been passed on to all their children, all the way down to us, so that as sinners, we are by nature at enmity with God and one another.

The commandments to love God and love the neighbor might sound easy when we think only in emotional or intellectual terms, but when we realize that they mostly have to do with actions, we are convicted of our great failures. Our terrible sins of thought, word, and deed, what we have done and what we have left undone, reveal our sinful hatred of God and His Word. Dr. Luther sums it up nicely in the Small Catechism (and these words are printed on the back of your bulletin): "God threatens to punish all who break these commandments. Therefore, we should fear His wrath and not do anything against them. But He promises grace and every blessing to all who keep these commandments. Therefore, we should also love and trust in Him and gladly do what He commands."

These words reveal that the task of loving God is far more difficult than it first seemed. We should not only do what our Lord commands, but we should gladly do what our Lord commands. Even if we manage somehow to keep the commandments outwardly (which none of us can do perfectly), that little word "gladly" gets us. Love of God also involves our will and motivation. If we have followed the commandments only out of fear of punishment, then we haven't done it out of love for our Lord. If we have received our Lord's commands as burdens and followed them grudgingly, then we have not loved God. And that's a huge problem. Because God has said, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself." And Jesus said of that commandment, "Do this, and you will live" (Luke 10:27-28). We have not and cannot keep that commandment completely, and so it seems that we are doomed to eternal death.

And so we needed a Savior from sin, and God out of love did not respond to our sinful hatred of Him by destroying us (as He could have). As we learn in the Old Testament, God promised that a Savior would come out of Eve, Abraham, and Israel. Out of love, the Lord chose the people of Israel to be His beloved people. He rescued Israel from slavery in the Exodus in order to have a dwelling place on earth, a people set apart to be holy unto Himself. He showed His love for Israel through the Tabernacle and Temple, and by His Word of promise spoken by the prophets. He wed Himself to Israel like a faithful husband to a bride, and in spite of Israel's faithlessness to Him, He did not forsake her: He maintained a remnant of His people, who continued to hope in the Savior-Messiah He would send.

And finally, as God had promised, He took decisive action to love not just Israel but all the world by sending His only-begotten Son into the flesh. "For God loved the world this way: he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him." (John 3:16-17)

Although we sinners have rebelled and hated God, He sent Jesus to keep the commandments perfectly and then go the cross to take the punishment for our sins, to bear the wrath of God in our place. "Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world" (John 1:29). Jesus loved us to the end, when He cried out on the cross, "It is finished!" After a life of practicing what He preached, after perfectly loving God and neighbor in our place, the spotless Lamb willingly laid down His life to spare us from eternal death. He loved us so that we might know the love of God poured out on us in the forgiveness of our sins.

And then, on Easter Sunday, Jesus rose from the dead and came to the disciples, breathed His Holy Spirit on them, and commissioned them to proclaim His forgiving love to the ends of the earth. He ascended to the Father so that He could pour out His Holy Spirit upon the nations, gathering sinners into His body, the Christian Church. He has called you to repentance and faith through His Word, and has shown His love to you by making you partakers of salvation through Baptism into His Son's death and resurrection, as St. Paul explains in Titus 3 that God's goodness and loving kindness toward us is shown in Christ and in our Baptism into Him, "so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life." (Titus 3:3-7)

So you can see that God's love for us is not simply a warm and fuzzy sort of emotional love, but it is shown in His actions-in His sending of His Son to live, die, rise, and ascend to rescue us from sin and death. And with all of that in view, with all that our Lord Jesus Christ has done for us to bring us into the Father's loving arms as His chosen people, we come again to these words from our Gospel reading. Jesus said, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind…[and] your neighbor as yourself." That passage is not all Law, but there is Good News in there, Gospel, because Jesus says that the Lord is your God-He has claimed you as His own in Baptism and chosen you to be His beloved child. Since you have been adopted by God in Christ Jesus, the Lord is your God, your Father.

So that sets the context for God's commandment to love Him and our neighbor. What sort of a child would return a parent's love and kindness with hatred? Don't children of loving parents love them in return out of gratitude for their parents' love? And what sort of child hates and abuses his brothers and sisters? Doesn't a good child realize that he has been placed into a family to love and serve?

If even sinners know that they are supposed to love their parents and siblings, then how much more should we children of God, after being loved into eternal life by God's grace in Jesus Christ, love Him by gladly doing what He commands and by gladly serving our neighbor? As St. John explained, "We love because God first loved us" (1 John 4:19). So by the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives, we are enlivened and animated by the love of Jesus to love God and one another.

Now, think about what sort of active love will flow out of that. Think about all the things that we do for others when we truly love one another. When we love each other, we gladly, a) spend time with each other; b) listen to each other carefully and take each others' words seriously; c) talk to each other; d) serve each other; e) and sacrifice and suffer for one another. These are loving things that even unbelievers do for their loved ones.

Even more so, then, the love of Jesus move us to love God so that we will gladly: a) spend time with Him in church, hearing His Word, and coming to be embraced by Him in Holy Communion at this altar; b) we will gladly listen to God carefully, and take His words as precious gifts as they come to us in the Scriptures, in preaching, and in Bible study; c) we will gladly talk to God our Father in prayer each day, as dear children of the heavenly Father, placing before Him all our needs and wants and complaints; d) we will gladly serve God through our various callings at home, at work, and in church; and e) we will gladly and generously sacrifice our time, our talents, and our treasures for Christ's holy church, the Kingdom of God; we will gladly suffer persecution for the sake of the name of Jesus when we are called upon to do that.

This is the active love Jesus intends when He says, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets." And since "We love because God first loved us" (1 John 4:19), then we will only be able to love God and gladly do what He commands when we keep these words first and foremost in our hearts and minds: "For God loved the world this way: he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him." (John 3:16-17). In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

And the peace of God which passes all understanding will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus unto life everlasting. Amen.