The Bible is really a great book which teaches us about this one thing: how can a man love his neighbor? It's a textbook of life; it's the manual of the soul. Don't imagine for a second that the Bible is just a great textbook of dogmas and theology and nothing. It's the most practical book in the world. [00:11:07] Making vertical captioned clip



The order in which these things are placed is crucial. In other words, there is nothing more important about any problem than the way in which you approach it. The great trouble in the world tonight is that people don't know how to approach problems. They think impulsively, intuitively, emotionally. There's no order; they jump to conclusions. [00:13:30] Making vertical captioned clip



The Bible's teaching is that all the troubles in the world and amongst men tonight are just due to the fact that we don't put these things in the right order. We always start with men and we end with men. We are interested only in men. How can I have peace? How can I get into a position in which I'm no longer upset? [00:16:37] Making vertical captioned clip



The first answer is because God is God. That's the biblical dogma concerning the being and the nature of God. Why should we start with God? The simple answer is because God commands us to do so, and that's enough. This is the first and chiefest commandment: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God. [00:20:09] Making vertical captioned clip



Man only discovers the truth about himself when he is in the right relationship to God. I've told you the order: God, myself, my neighbor. I am to love my neighbor as myself. How do I love myself? Well, I can't love myself without knowing the truth about myself. What is the truth about me? [00:27:24] Making vertical captioned clip



The only way I say in which men can ever know the truth about himself is when he comes face to face with God. That's why in order to understand your neighbor and to understand yourself, you must start with God. And what are we told? Well, here it is: man, this is the truth about men. [00:33:25] Making vertical captioned clip



There is a way whereby men can be brought to love his neighbor, and there is only one, and it is the way that is taught here by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. It isn't Lee Hunt's way of Abu Ben Adam. You remember what he tells us there, that this man woke up from that wonderful dream. [00:39:39] Making vertical captioned clip



Man can do nothing about it, but God can, and God has done it. God so loved the world, the world that had treated him like that, that he gave his only begotten son. God in his eternal love has loved men in spite of his sin and has provided a way of forgiveness and of reconciliation. [00:41:22] Making vertical captioned clip



Before we can love our neighbors, we need this new heart. My friend, you can try to be nice to your neighbor; that isn't loving him. There will still be the feeling, and you'll hold it down for years perhaps, then suddenly it'll flare. Haven't you known it? You need a new heart. [00:46:22] Making vertical captioned clip



It is only God in Christ who can give you a new heart. It's doctrine again, the doctrine of the rebirth, the doctrine of regeneration. Thank God for it. If I didn't believe the doctrine of regeneration tonight, I'd have no hope for men. I'd say you'll never love your neighbor. [00:46:22] Making vertical captioned clip



The Jew and the Gentile came together and embraced one another. Jew and Gentile, Jew and Arab. You see, the old problem is still with us, isn't it? Until Christ and his gospel came, the Jew regarded everybody else as dogs, and those Gentiles, especially the Greeks, despised the Jew. [00:47:20] Making vertical captioned clip



Thank God for Christian doctrine. Thank God for the message about God, about Jesus Christ coming in the flesh, taking human nature unto him. Thank God for the doctrine that tells me that he took my sins upon himself and God smote them in him and thereby can forgive me freely. [00:51:20] Making vertical captioned clip

The words to which I should like to call your attention this evening are to be found in that section that we have read together at the beginning in The Gospel According to St. Matthew, in the 22nd chapter, verses 34-40.

But when the Pharisees had heard that he had put the Sadducees to silence, they were gathered together. Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him and saying, "Master, which is the great commandment in the law?"

Jesus said unto him, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."

I was reading a newspaper report the other day of a gathering of Christian people that was held recently in the city of Glasgow. In the proceedings, on a certain occasion, these Christian representatives of the Christian Church were addressed by the Lord Provost of Glasgow. In his remarks, he said something like this: he begged the churches to communicate. He said that he and many men were not concerned with dogmas; they wanted to know how to love their neighbors.

Now that's a press report which I read to you, and I have read it to you because it does seem to me that there we have a statement which is being made very commonly at the present time. I suppose there is no more typical or representative statement of the average man's attitude at this present hour to the Christian Church and to what he expects from the Christian Church than those words which I have just read to you.

You see the position: he says that he and many other men are not concerned with dogmas. What they want to know is how can we love our neighbor. In other words, there are so many who are probably saying something like that this evening. They put it like this: why doesn't the church come down and answer this great question? How can we get rid of war? How can men be brought to love one another?

I'm sure that on this night there are thousands of people who are making a statement like that, similar to the statement of the Lord Provost of Glasgow. My interest is not in him as such, but as he has voiced and expressed, I think very perfectly, what so many think.

Now let's look at this statement. We all, I think, see exactly what he has uppermost in his mind. He says this is no time for arid and sterile discussions about mere dogmas and doctrines, and there I think in general we can sympathize with him. It is no part of the preaching of the Gospel, as I understand it, to take a mere theoretical and intellectual interest in doctrines and theology and stop at that.

I certainly am not here to defend that you can be theologically sound and spiritually dead. So if he merely means that, well, I'd have very little to say about his statement. Not only that, there are other aspects of this statement which must of necessity appeal to us.

It is good, is it not, that he didn't simply, as so many do, denounce the Christian Church and say that the church is played out or that the church is useless? That isn't his position at all. He seems to look to the church and to expect something from the Christian faith and the Christian message. This, again, I say, is excellent and most commendable.

Indeed, we can go further. Clearly, here is a God-fearing man who genuinely seems to want help. Now there is the statement as we look at it on the surface. But unless, unfortunately, this statement, which sounds so right and so good and so essentially practical on the surface, turns out, when we come to examine it, to be full of the most glaring and the most vital fallacies.

And that is why I'm directing your attention to it. It sounds so good. I say here is a man who says, "Now what I want to know is this: how am I to love my neighbor? That's the way to get rid of war."

Now I haven't got time. I'm a practical man of business and of affairs. I can't read your great books. I can't listen to your great discussions on your doctrine and your theology. What I want to know is this: can't you tell me something? How can I love my neighbor?

Now it sounds so good, I say, so essentially practical. But I want to try to show you that it's not only altogether wrong but is exceedingly dangerous.

Now let's look at it like this. Let's examine it ourselves for a moment before I come to tell you what our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ has to say about such an attitude. On the surface, don't you see what this man is doing? He comes to us and he tells us that he wants to know; he wants help, and he is quite genuine about that.

He confesses that he, at any rate, is a complete failure. That's why he asks this question: how can men love their neighbor? That's what he wants to know. How can it be done? He's confessing that he doesn't know, that he has failed, that others are in the same position. He comes, therefore, to ask for help, and then he immediately goes on and dictates the answer.

Now you can't have it both ways. If you really are a poor and are admitting that you don't know and that you are craving for help, well, you mustn't at the same time say, "Now I don't want any of your dogma," because there you're asserting that you do know something.

If you really are helpless, well then, I say your business is to put your hand upon your mouth and come as a suppliant and ask for help without dictating anything with respect to the answer. He contradicts himself.

But he does something much more serious, and it's to this I want to call your attention tonight. He sets up this fatal antithesis between what he calls dogmas and practical life and living. He says, "I and many men are not concerned with dogmas; we want to know how to love our neighbors."

This fatal antithesis between dogma, theology, and practical life and living on the other. Now this is the attitude that I want to discuss with you because, as I say, it's so common today. It's the thing that is being said, I've no doubt, by millions.

They say actions speak louder than words. We don't want words from you. We don't want you to tell us all about your Christian doctrines. What we want, as practical men, is what am I to do to love my neighbor? Not this, but that; they're opposites.

Now it's amazing to me how many practical men of affairs and many businessmen tend to say that sort of thing. They say that sort of thing when they come to the realm of religion, but they'd never say it in their own business.

Do you think a man would be likely to employ someone as his confidential secretary or clerk who'd never been taught how to type? Will a man let anybody who comes along and offers to go and work in his factory? Will he allow him to do so if he hasn't been trained in machinery and how to use that particular machine? Of course not!

Yet you see, when we come to the realm of religion, we say, "No, we don't want any of your teaching. Tell us practically," as if these two things can be divorced. And yet, as I say, is it not obvious at once that the whole thing is something that is not rarely true in any realm or department whatsoever?

Would you allow anybody to walk into a hospital without giving any knowledge or instruction about atoms and about explosions and the possibilities? The thing is patently ridiculous on the very surface. Before you come to practice, there must be theory. There must be a certain amount of understanding before you can begin to operate and to put things into operation.

Well now then, there I say is just a superficial analysis of this statement that sounds so plausible and so right and so good on the surface. But come, let us see what our Lord has got to say about it.

That's the very thing which he treats of here as he answers this catch question that was put to him, you remember, by that lawyer representing the Pharisees. Indeed, there is a sense in which we can say that this is the message of the whole Bible.

You know, the Bible is really a great book which teaches us about this one thing: how can a man love his neighbor? It's a textbook of life; it's the manual of the soul. Don't imagine for a second that the Bible is just a great textbook of dogmas and theology and nothing else. It's the most practical book in the world. It's about life and living.

It gives you history, therefore, and shows you ordinary men and women like ourselves. Indeed, you know, the Bible's theme is this great theme which it announces in the very first chapters of Genesis: how can a man love his neighbor? Indeed, how can a man love his brother?

Because the problem confronting the world tonight is the old problem of Cain and Abel. That's when it began, you see, when a man actually murdered his own brother. Now from there on, the Bible is concerned with this problem: why did Cain do that? How can he be stopped from doing that sort of thing? What's the matter? How can it be put right?

That's the whole theme of the scripture. The Bible, in other words, is here to answer the question: how can a man love his neighbor? That's the question our Lord answers here. But you notice that he does so in his own way, and I am very sorry to have to say it; it's a very dogmatic way. It's a very theological way. It is full of doctrine, as I now want to show you.

And therefore I say to you tonight, my friend, if you have come here with that sort of question in your mind, if you say to me, "Now I don't want any of your doctrines, any of your dogmas. I want none of your theology. All I want to know is how can I love my neighbor?" Well, let me tell you at the very beginning, I can only tell you how to love your neighbor by giving you theology, dogma, teaching explicit and clear.

It's our Lord himself who gives it to us. And let me therefore make this quite plain before I go any further: if you don't accept this dogmatic teaching, you will never love your neighbor. But if you do accept it, you'll find yourself loving your neighbor very well.

What is the teaching? Now the first thing we have to notice is this: the order in which these things are placed. In other words, there is nothing more important about any problem than the way in which you approach it.

You don't believe it, I know, but the most important part of most sermons is the introduction. It's there a man shows what little insight he's got, the approach to the problem. The great trouble in the world tonight is that people don't know how to approach problems. They think impulsively, they think intuitively, they think emotionally. There's no order; they jump to conclusions.

This is what I say, and then perhaps try to think afterwards, or somebody makes them think afterwards, and that is why there's chaos. They don't know how to think. The order is of tremendous importance.

You see, the attitude that we are considering comes to us and says, "Now look here, I don't want you to talk about anything but this one thing: how can I love my neighbor?" Men and women have always fallen into that error. They think only one thing matters and only one thing has got to be considered.

They never see that there are many things which must be considered first before their one problem can be considered truly. And you notice how our Lord puts it like this: he doesn't start with a neighbor. He says there are two things you've got to start considering before you can consider loving your neighbor.

What is that? To love God. That's number one. Second, love yourself. Third, love your neighbor. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and soul and mind and strength." That is the first commandment. The second is like unto it: "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."

So you must know how to love yourself before you can love your neighbor. The neighbor is number three, not number one. Now that's dogma, you see. That's biblical dogmatic teaching.

That unless you take these things in the right order, you're bound to go wrong. I'm sorry, but it's dogma. And you know the Bible's teaching is that all the troubles in the world and amongst men tonight are just due to the fact that we don't put these things in the right order.

We always start with men and we end with men. We are interested only in men. How can I have peace? How can I get into a position in which I'm no longer upset? How can we get rid of these possibilities of wars? Always myself, my neighbor, and I; nothing else considered at all.

That's why the world is as it is this evening. That's why this is our miserable day. That is why there was a war in 1914 to 1918 and again 39 to 45. It's always because man starts with himself, ends with himself, and forgets God.

And the whole business of the Bible is just to tell us that that's fatally wrong. I say that the Bible is a great book about men and about life in this world and how to live happily with your neighbor. And yet how does the Bible start facing the problem?

Well, here's the first statement: "In the beginning, God," not man. Then you go to the New Testament. You say, "Ah, but that's Old Testament." Very well, come to the New Testament. Now then, here is the answer. This is what I want. Here I'm going to be given the solution.

How does it begin? "The generation of Jesus Christ, Son of God." Still, you see, it starts there, not here. "Ah," but you say, "that's still too far back. What I want to know is about the activity of the Christian Church. I want to go to the book of The Acts of the Apostles where the Christian Church really begins to function."

How does that start? "The former treaties of Theophilus I wrote with respect to the things that Jesus began to do." It doesn't start with men again. The Bible never starts with men; it always starts with God. It always goes back to the beginning.

And I say this is absolutely essential and vital. And the approach which says, "No, look here, I don't want to listen to all that. I'm a busy man. I'm a practical man of affairs. Come and tell me how can I love my neighbor?"

The answer is, my dear friend, I cannot answer you by starting there. I must go back. This is the end of something else, and if I don't start at the beginning, I can't arrive at the end. The world is as it is this evening because it forgets God, and there is no hope for it.

And it'll never learn how to love its neighbor until it starts with God. Well, says someone, "Why should I start with God? Why is this order which you're emphasizing absolutely essential?" Let me try to answer the question.

The first answer is because God is God. That's the biblical dogma concerning the being and the nature of God. Why should we start with God? The simple answer is because God commands us to do so, and that's enough.

This is the first and chiefest commandment: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God." Why? Well, there are many answers given to that question in the Bible. Here are some of them: he deserves it; he is worthy of it, and he alone is worthy of it.

How inconsistent we are! We believe in honoring one another, don't we? We believe in honoring great people. Oh, they never dream of drinking any toast at their great banquets until first of all the toast of the queen.

Why do they do that sort of thing? Why don't they start with themselves and their neighbors? Why don't they toast one another to get right with your neighbor? No, no, nothing must be said about the neighbor until the toast of the queen, because she is the queen.

We recognize the importance and the priority of greatness. Well, in the name of God, begin to get logical, my friend. Work it out to the end and start therefore with God before you begin to talk about your neighbor and your problem, whatever it may chance to be.

God, because of his greatness and his majesty and his eternity, the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. I want no other reason for loving the Lord my God first; he's God.

Another reason is this: that he is the Creator and the sustainer of this world in which we find ourselves. Everything that is in this world was made by God. You were made by God; so was I.

And it is he and he alone who knows all about the world. We are in the world, and we are concerned about the problems of the world. Well, very well, I say, start with the one who's made it all and who knows all about it.

And because he is the maker and the Creator and the sustainer of the world, he has a right to say how we should live our lives in this world and what we should do in it. He has made us in a given way. He has revealed how we ought to live and how we ought to conduct ourselves.

He's given it in his law. You know, if men only observed the law of Moses, the world would be in a perfect condition. He told us; it's there. The man asks, "Tell me how to love my neighbor." Go back to your Ten Commandments.

If you didn't covet your neighbor's wife and his goods and his possessions and all these things, if you didn't kill and steal and commit adultery and all the rest of it, why, the problems would have been solved. There it is.

He says, "Tell us. You've been told. God has told you." And God indeed has put it very plainly like this: that he has so made the world and so made men that they can only function truly and harmoniously as long as they live according to his laws.

Now you can't run a machine without knowing something about it. If you don't give it the oil at the right time, if you don't put your petrol in, if you don't put the water in, something will go wrong. Machines have been made to function in a given way. Yes, but you've got to attend to them.

You've got to grease them. You've got to put these things into them that they need. And if you don't, the machine will stall; it'll stop. And the great designer of the world and of men has made him on a pattern, and he has said plainly and clearly in the book of words that you've given with the machinery that it's got to be handled and used in a given manner.

If you don't, things will go wrong. God has said it; he has the right as the Creator to do so. But I'll give you another reason for starting with God: we are all utterly dependent upon him, whether we like it or not.

We are, you know. If he withheld the sun or the rain, we wouldn't have any food to eat, and it would soon be the end of us. Our very lives are in his hands. As the Prophet Daniel put it to a king long ago, "The God in whose hand thy breath is and whose are all thy ways, thou hast not glorified."

My dear friend, have you ever stopped to realize that your times are entirely in the hands of God? Don't tell me you control it. Science doesn't control it. Science cannot conquer death. There are diseases it still cannot conquer. You're in the hands of God. Every one of us is.

That's a good reason for starting with God. We are entirely dependent upon him. Yes, and in another sense, we are in his hands, and that is that we cannot escape from him. His wrath is upon all sin and upon all evil.

Did you know that the Bible teaches us that the world is as it is tonight partly because of the wrath of God? In other words, it means this: God has said quite plainly and quite clearly that if men and women do not live according to his laws and his ways, he will punish them.

And you know one of his ways of punishing men in sin is just to let them reap the consequences of their own actions. Rather startling, isn't it? Put your finger into the fire, and you burn yourself. Get drunk, and you'll get a headache. Defy God as a world, and you'll get your modern world.

God gave them over, says the Apostle Paul in the first chapter of the epistle to the Romans. God gave them over to a reprobate mind. He withdrew his restraints; he allowed sin in men to manifest itself uncontrolled.

And you're getting what you're getting in modern society: men burning in their lust towards men and women towards women, putting aside the natural, becoming perverted, unnatural. God has given them over to that.

The wrath of God—here are reasons for starting with God. And God has said, "There is no peace," saith my God, "to the wicked." You know, you can say you don't like that; you can say you hate that. But you know the world is proving it right.

There is no peace to this modern wicked world in spite of all our arrangements and all our devices. There is no peace. Why? God has said, "If you don't come back to me and be reconciled to me and live according to my laws, there shall be no peace."

You see what the Lord Provost, I imagine, wanted and what we all want is this: we are not interested in God, but we want to have a happy little world. We want to make money and drink and eat and dance, and so world wars upset us.

We are not interested in God, but we want peace. But you can't have peace without God. Man is made for a relationship to God, and he understands nothing about the whole of life until he's in the right relationship to God.

That's the first reason. But come, let me bring you to a second reason as to why this order which our Lord indicates here is so vitally and essentially important. It's rather surprising, this second one.

It is that man only discovers the truth about himself when he is in the right relationship to God. I've told you the order: God, myself, my neighbor. I am to love my neighbor as myself. How do I love myself?

Well, I can't love myself without knowing the truth about myself. What is the truth about me? The Bible answers by saying that man never knows the truth about himself until he comes into the right relationship to God.

I'm sorry, but it's dogma again—the biblical doctrine of man and man in sin. "I don't want your doctrine and dogma. How can I love my neighbor?" How can you love your neighbor if you don't know the truth about yourself nor your neighbor?

You must have doctrine—the doctrine of man, the doctrine of sin. There is nothing, I think, that is so futile as to imagine that we know all about ourselves and that we know all about our neighbors.

For the fact is that man is as ignorant about himself as he is about God. Did you know that man by nature is as ignorant about himself as he is of God? Let me prove my attention to you.

Man thinks that he really knows all about himself. He says, "Of course, I'm a man. And because I'm a human being, I must know all about myself. I know it intuitively; I know it instinctively."

Let me call a somewhat strange witness into my witness box tonight: Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis. What is his evidence on this question? Does man know himself?

Well, there's no doubt as to Freud's answer to that: man, he says, is profoundly ignorant about himself. He's a creature of forces beyond his own control. There are a thousand and one things that are determining him, and he doesn't realize it; he doesn't know it.

Freud simply ridicules this idea that a man can know himself. But that's only his theory, and there are many other psychological theories, and they cancel one another out. So it comes to this, you see, that man doesn't know himself at all.

But because he thinks he does, he's always making certain grand mistakes about himself. Here are some of them: sometimes he tends to think too highly of himself. Ah, he says, "Man is a wonderful creature. He's got a great mind and a great brain, and if you only feed that with great knowledge and information, there's nothing that can stand up to him. Man has split the atom; man has harnessed the oceans; man can write poetry. He has his brilliant imagination; there's nothing he can't do. Man, he's got it in him to be a god almost, and he can make a perfect world."

There were many who have thought that for many years. But as I was trying to say this morning, history begins to make that look rather silly, doesn't it? And our friend Freud again has made it look rather ridiculous, hasn't he?

He shows us the operations of lusts and passions, these drives, these desires—things that happened to you when you were in the womb, he says. Things that happened to you when you were an infant sucking your mother's breast, those are the things, he says, that determine you.

So man doesn't seem to be so wonderful after all. I'm not accepting Freud; I'm just showing you what he has to say to this false optimism. But there it is: man sometimes thinks too highly of himself, and then he switches right over and at other times thinks much too lowly and unworthily of himself.

There are many men and women in the world tonight who think of themselves as animals. They behave as animals, so I take it they think as animals. They say, "If I want something, I'm entitled to have it."

Oh, of course, if Russia or Hitler says that it's wrong, but I as an individual—different private morality and national morality—two different things. Why are they different? Why should they be? What is a nation but a collection of individuals?

Man, I say, thinks of himself as an animal—just a physical organism with desires which must be gratified, whatever the cost, however much suffering is involved for others. It doesn't matter. He thinks of himself as just a biological mechanism.

Others think of him in terms of a mass of complexes, thud and company. Others think of him as just an economic unit—a sort of pawn battled about between capital and labor and supply and demand. That's how many think of men today—just a unit, a cog in a wheel.

And then there is that other very common view that man himself is all right if he were only given a chance. "How good we'd all be if somebody didn't upset the world! All along we've never had a chance," they say. That's the trouble.

Man really is essentially good but never seems to have a chance. Well, who's stopping it? Who's preventing us from having a chance? Men! The fact of the matter is, I say, that man doesn't know himself. He cannot know himself for this good reason, as Jeremiah puts it: "The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked."

A man will never know himself because he's always concerned to protect and to defend himself. He doesn't want to know the truth about himself; he's always camouflaging himself from himself.

The only way, I say, in which men can ever know the truth about himself is when he comes face to face with God. That's why, in order to understand your neighbor and to understand yourself, you must start with God.

And what are we told? Well, here it is: man, this is the truth about men. Man is a creature that was made by God, and he was made in the image of God. I don't know what that means fully, but I do know this: it means that there was an essential righteousness about him.

It means that he was upright. It means that he had reason, that he could think about himself and analyze himself and look at himself objectively. God made man in his own image; he made him a living soul, and he was made for God.

Well, why are things as they are? Ah, it's because men fell. It's because men rebelled against God. It's because men objected to the way in which God had made him and wanted to be a god himself.

It was because men deliberately sinned against God and broke God's holy commandment. That's why things are as they are. Man, as the result of this, lost God. He became lost. He lost his knowledge of God; he lost his fellowship with God; he lost his love for God.

He became a God-hater. Not only that, you see, having turned his back upon God, he set himself up as a god. That's what he wanted. He wanted to run his own life. He became autonomous. He said, "I decide what I think is right is right, and what I think is right, I'm going to do."

He set himself up as a god, and thus he became selfish. He became self-centered, self-concerned, and he began to live a life of lust and passion, a life of desire and envy and pride and malice. He put himself under the dominion of the devil, and there he is this evening.

And you see, the trouble is this: that he is now a creature who is governed by desire and by lust, not by his mind, not by his brain. If men were governed by their brains, you know, there would be no war, because war is utter madness. There's no question about that.

To go and kill one another to settle a dispute is sheer lunacy. Why do men do it? Well, because they're not controlled by their minds. It's something else: it's desire, it's jealousy, it's envy, it's this hatred and malice, it's this acquisitiveness that is the result of sin, you see.

Now there is the biblical analysis of men. That's the way to understand men. And of course, this is the further thing that gives us rare light on the problem of my neighbor and myself: that is how I am in sin.

I come first. I must have what I want. I decide everything. Yes, but the other man is exactly the same. And here you see you've got two gods, and they both want their own way. They both want the same things, and they both say they must have it, and they're so determined that they fight one another. Hence, war.

That's the business. Now, my friends, you say at the beginning you didn't want dogma. This is biblical dogma—the dogma concerning men. Do you deny it? Am I romancing? Am I drawing on my imagination, or am I describing you and every other individual in this world at this hour?

Can you say that you're not selfish and self-centered? Isn't this the cause of all the misery in the world at this hour? It's true of the individual; it's true of groups; it's true of classes; it's true of countries; it's true of blocks of countries.

It's the whole explanation tonight. One group behind a certain curtain says, "We want to be dominant." The others have been dominant too long; it's our turn now. "No, it isn't," says the other on the other side of the curtain. "We still are the great people."

And so you see, in this selfishness and self-centeredness, in this pride and arrogance, we are all after the same thing, and we go at one another's throats. We must have it, and so man's world is as it is this evening.

And so man is a mess of contradictions. He still has a memory within him of what he once was. He doesn't know it, but it's there. He feels he was not made to die. There is something still in man which cries out for something different.

He knows he ought to be different, and yet he's dragged down by this other element. And there he is, warring within himself and fighting everybody else in his misery, and he's frustrated and unhappy and dissatisfied.

He cannot love his neighbor because he doesn't know the truth about himself. And there is man as he is tonight, and there is the world as it is tonight—muddled and confused and crying out, "What can I do to love my neighbor?" and failing to do so and under the wrath of God.

Well, say someone, "Is there no hope? Are you here just to damn us and to say that we are to be depressed down to hell?" No, no! There is a way whereby men can be brought to love his neighbor, and there is only one, and it is the way that is taught here by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

It isn't Leigh Hunt's way of Abu Ben Adam. You remember what he tells us there: that this man woke up from that wonderful dream, and he saw this angel, and he said, "What are you doing?" And the angel said, "I am writing down the names of those who love the Lord."

And Abu Ben Adam said, "I pray thee then, write me as one who loves his fellow men." And Abu Ben Adam's name led all the rest. You know, if that were true, the Lord Provost of Glasgow would never have needed to have made his statement.

That is precisely what men cannot do. He cannot love his fellow men for the reasons that I've just been giving to you. Well then, how can it be brought to pass?

Well, here again is dogma—the biblical doctrine of redemption. What is it? Well, just this: men obviously must start by being put right with God. He's forgotten him; he doesn't love him. How can he? He's at enmity against God; he is his own god.

What can be done for him? Man can do nothing about it, but God can, and God has done it. God so loved the world—the world that had treated him like that—that he gave his only begotten Son.

God, in his eternal love, has loved men in spite of his sin and has provided a way of forgiveness and of reconciliation. Man cannot reconcile himself to God, but God can reconcile man unto himself, and he has done so in Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son, who spoke these words and went to the cross on Calvary's hill to bear men's sins in his own body.

And there, man is given a new view, a new outlook, a new understanding of himself. There he sees himself as he is, in all his shame and misery and degradation. There he sees himself as a vile sinner, unworthy of the love of God, with no rights at all, deserving hell, deserving the world he's getting.

He sees himself as a miserable wretch, a failure. Ah, but at the same time, he sees others in exactly the same light and in the same way. You see, this is how the gospel brings men together.

First of all, it brings me down. I need to be brought down. I'm a god; I must be put on the ground, and the Bible puts me down. And seeing myself as I do in the light of this teaching, I hate myself; I abominate myself and all the evil that is within me.

And then I look at the other man, and what do I see? Exactly what I see in myself. He's a victim of the same thing—a victim of sin, a victim of hell, a victim of the devil. And I therefore no longer hate him; I feel sorry for him.

He and I are in the same predicament. We are neither of us gods; we are both miserable worms, vile sinners, grinding in the dust together. We are both equally helpless; we are both equally hopeless.

Do you remember how they used to tell us during the war? I think there was some sort of a play about it which said that in an air shelter with the bombs dropping around them, the duchess and the charwoman forgot their respective stations in life. They were both one, of course.

When the bombs are dropping and when the next moment may be your last, it doesn't matter very much who you are nor what you are. You're on a common denominator. And so the gospel brings us to see that we are all sinners and all vile and foul, that no one is better than another, that it's sin in us all that makes the world what it is.

But thank God it doesn't leave us at that. It brings us to the same Savior, the same forgiveness, the same God, the same everything. Here, this is the way that we love one another.

We are brought to see one another truly. And then what else do we need? Well, obviously, we need a new heart, don't we? Our hearts are cold and hard and stubborn, and we say, "I won't give in. Why must I always be? It's his fault."

The hard heart! Thank God this gospel tells us of a power that can take out the stony heart and give us hearts of flesh. Before we can love our neighbors, we need this new heart.

My friend, you can try to be nice to your neighbor; that isn't loving him. There will still be the feeling, and you'll hold it down for years, perhaps. Then suddenly it'll flare. Haven't you known it?

You need a new heart, and it is only God in Christ who can give you a new heart. It's doctrine again—the doctrine of the rebirth, the doctrine of regeneration. Thank God for it!

If I didn't believe the doctrine of regeneration tonight, I'd have no hope for men. I'd say you'll never love your neighbor. But here is a new heart, a new creation, a new man, a new beginning.

In other words, God pours his own love into our hearts, and as he loved us in spite of our sin, he enables us to love others in spite of their sin. "Love your enemies," he says, "because I've loved you."

And when I see what I am, I can't refuse. God has given me all for nothing. How can I withhold from another? I see him, the victim of hell and of the devil. I cannot refuse; I love him out of it.

It's the only way; it is the only hope. That is how this gospel teaches men to love one another. You know, it did it in the first century. In the first Christian century, a thing happened which men said could never happen.

What was that? It was this: the Jew and the Gentile came together and embraced one another—Jew and Gentile, Jew and Arab. You see, the old problem is still with us, isn't it?

Until Christ and his gospel came, the Jew regarded everybody else as dogs, and those Gentiles, especially the Greeks, despised the Jew because he lacked philosophy and learning, and they hated one another. And there was a wall between them.

But Christ demolished the wall. He broke down the middle wall of partition and he brought Jew and Gentile together as brethren in the Christian Church, and they're still there. There are Jews here tonight—Christian Jews—and we love them as brethren, and they love us.

Here it is: the impossible has happened, and it happens, you see, because Jew and Gentile come to see themselves as hopeless, vile sinners, equally guilty before God, dependent upon the same love and the same Savior, having received the new heart together and the new life.

They're living in the same power; they're going to spend eternity in heaven together. They're one. So on they go. That's the only answer to the question of how I can love my neighbor.

It's not a formula that I or anybody else can apply. What man needs is not teaching; it's regeneration—a new outlook, a new heart, a new feeling, a new understanding, a new you—everything.

And that is what is given and offered to him through Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. My dear friend, there is no other way. The world tonight is proving it.

Once they used to tell us that if we only traveled more and met one another, we'd be at peace. We are meeting one another. We can fly from one end of the world to another in a very short time. Never have men met more than they're meeting now.

But look at the world! No, no! There is no other way. Man is so vile; he's so desperately selfish; he's so foul in sin. He must be made anew; he must be given a new heart.

And it is God—God in Jesus Christ alone—who can give it him. But when he has it, he loves his neighbor as himself, and his neighbor loves him as himself.

Thank God for Christian doctrine! Thank God for the message about God, about Jesus Christ coming in the flesh, taking human nature unto him. Thank God for the doctrine that tells me that he took my sins upon himself, and God smote them in him and thereby can forgive me freely.

The doctrine of the atonement! Thank God for the doctrine of the resurrection! Thank God for the doctrine of the Holy Spirit! Thank God for the doctrine of the rebirth! Thank God for the doctrine of the church! Thank God for the doctrine of the second coming! Thank God for the doctrine of the everlasting state!

It's all doctrine! God forbid that there should be anybody in this congregation who should still want to say, "I'm not interested in dogma. What I want to know is how can I love my neighbor?"

You've got the answer: you must be made a new being. Go to God as you are. Confess your selfishness, your sin, your shame. Tell him you believe this message about Jesus Christ. Ask him to give you a new and a clean heart, a new life, a new start, a new beginning, that you may love your neighbor as yourself.

Ask him, and he will not refuse you. Amen.

We do hope that you've been helped by the preaching of Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones. All of the sermons contained within the MLJ Trust audio library are now available for free download. You may share the sermons or broadcast them; however, because of international copyright, please be advised that we are asking first that these sermons never be offered for sale by a third party, and second that these sermons will not be edited in any way for length or to use as audio clips.

You can find our contact information on our website at mljtrust.org. That's mljt.org.

Subject: Transformative Love: God, Neighbor, and Doctrine



Dear MLJTrust,





What a privilege it was to explore the profound truth that we must first love God in order to truly love our neighbor.





In last Sunday’s sermon, we reflected on the essential order of love as taught by our Lord: first, we must love God with all our heart, soul, and mind, and then we can love ourselves rightly, which enables us to love our neighbors as ourselves. This teaching challenges the common notion that we can separate dogma from practical living; rather, it is through understanding and accepting the doctrines of our faith that we find the true capacity to love others. The Bible, as a manual for life, reveals that our failures to love stem from a disordered relationship with God, and it is only through His grace that we can be transformed.





As we move forward, let us not shy away from the doctrines that shape our understanding of love and humanity. I urge you to examine your own relationship with God and consider how it influences your ability to love those around you. Are there areas in your life where you have prioritized your own desires over the call to love? Let us seek a deeper understanding of ourselves in light of God’s truth, allowing His love to flow through us to our neighbors, transforming our communities in the process.





Blessings,

MLJTrust Team