Love what God commands
Almighty and everlasting God,
increase in us your gifts of faith, hope, and love,
and, so that we may obtain that which you promise,
make us to love that which you command,
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
I love Psalm 119. In verse after verse the Psalmist pours fourth deep affection for God’s law. It’s a beautiful Psalm, but I always feel like a fraud when I read it. “Oh how I love your law!” he declares in verse 97, “I meditate on it all day long.” If I am honest with myself, I can’t truly claim these words as my own. Can you? This is why the collect has us pray to God, “make us to love that which you command”.
At the close of Matthew’s Gospel, having been given all authority in heaven and on earth, Jesus stood on a mountain in Galilee and gave his disciples our great commission to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” And so his disciples have spread abroad to every corner of his earth and to every nation under heaven executing this command. Baptism is just one part needed in making a disciple, and Jesus provides the second in the Gospel’s closing verse. A disciple is made by being both baptised and taught to obey everything our risen Lord has commanded.
On first read this second part of disciple-making seems very straightforward. As a church minister I have had the privilege of teaching our Lord’s word for nearly 8 years, longer as a layman. But Jesus has not simply instructed his disciples to teach what he has commanded. Rather, he has commanded us when making disciples to teach them to obey everything he has commanded.
In his book, What Jesus Demands from the World, American Pastor John Piper collects, catalogues, and organises all the commands of Jesus from the Gospels alone and finds over five hundred of them. Simply considering this sheer volume of commands we may feel inadequate. But a humble disciple, reflecting on the selfishness of their own will, would recognise that teaching another to be obedient to the commands of Jesus may be an impossible task. Can a mere mortal claim Psalm 119 as their own?
Wonderfully what is impossible for mankind is possible with the help of God. So we ask him, as the collect says, to “increase in us your gifts of faith, hope, and love”. Feeble as we are, our merciful Father has seen fit to bless all who believe with the gift of his Holy Spirit who continues to sanctify us, slowly and patiently conforming us more and more into the likeness of Jesus. As we walk in the Spirit (as Galatians 5:16 puts it in the readings for this Sunday), we are being so transformed that we would come to delight in the beauty of what God commands and so declare our love for his law with the Psalmist. As if our Father wasn’t gracious enough, he has also provided each of us with a new family, his church, to encourage us to obey his good commands.
What our Lord commands is always lovely, and by his inspiration we can be made to love what he commands. And so as we pray, we rightly implore our everlasting God, who is wondrously mighty, to make us to love that which he has commanded.
So pray this with me:
Almighty and everlasting God,
increase in us your gifts of faith, hope, and love,
and, so that we may obtain that which you promise,
make us to love that which you command,
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.