RECOGNIZING OUR DEBT TO OTHERS
LESSON FOR THE JUNIOR CLASSES
STUDY SCRIPTURE:
MARK 12:28-34 JAMES 2:14-17
Key Verse
“Jesus answered him, “The first of all the commandments is;”Hear, O Israel, The Lord your God, the Lord is one.
And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your might, and with all your strength”.
This is the first commandment and the second, like it, is this: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself”.
There is no other commandment greater than these”.
Mark 12:28-31
INTRODUCTION
You have been given a gift by God we call it the gift of salvation which is given to you freely by God. God is the one who made you and He is the only true God and you should trust no other gods but the Father, the Lord God Almighty, and His Son the Lord Jesus.
It is such a great gift that was given by God’s love that it covers all your needs for the best life possible. it is the greatest of gifts and it blesses you completely.
The Scriptures remind us that God has given us all the grace and the love that we need and this is a complete gift of grace.
When you are given a gift you do not want to split it up into little pieces but you want to give it in a complete whole. This is what God has done. He gives you all you need and to make sure of this He gave His only son Jesus to come to earth, teach you how to know Him and what He wants from you. Jesus and God the Father loved you so much that He had Jesus dying on the cross so that all your sins, every single one of your sins are covered, so that you would not be made to suffer any punishment because of the anger of God against people who sinned.
God’s love is so great, and it is so deep it is more than the love you might feel for parents or grandparents, brothers, sisters, family members, and even your pets. God’s love is called divine love and that is the kind of love that He wants from you to have. He has given you the Holy Spirit so that you will develop this kind of love called agape love. He wants you to love Him with all your heart, all your soul all your mind, that is how you think, and all your strength.
This agape love comes from a word for love which is an action word. So this kind of divine love is not just a feeling. It is something that if you have it you will want to do good actions, good works. You will want to help others whenever they have any need. You will want to do good things to help your parents and your brothers and sisters and your friends. You will want to help them keep the place at your home clean. You will want to look after your pets and not leave that work up to everybody else. You will want to do good things at church to make sure everybody in the church knows about the great love of God.
This, Jesus said, was the first commandment and we can see why Jesus called this the first commandment for it was a love that made you do actions that would please God the Father.
But He said that there was another very important commandment that was linked with this first commandment. This very important commandment that God gave us was that those that believed in God must love our neighbours, people around us, as much as we loved ourselves. Jesus even gave the parable of the Good Samaritan to teach us who our neighbours were and to show us the kind of things that we should do to help these neighbours. Sometimes it might even call for a sacrifice from us to do this kind of work and show that we love our neighbours
The scribe, the expert in the law in Israel, was very impressed wi.th this answer for he had asked Jesus what was the most important commandment. Jesus told him that the most important commandment was to love God with everything that we have and in addition we were to love our neighbours as much as we love ourselves. Jesus complimented the scribe and told him he was not far from the kingdom of God. All this scribe had to do to get eternal life was therefore to believe that the Lord Jesus Christ was his Saviour.
We know therefore that we have to carry the Good News to everyone that we meet that Jesus had come to save us from death. We have to be careful how we do that because some will be happy to hear that Good News and some will not be so happy for they don’t want to do what Jesus tells them what God wants from them.
God gave the people that believed in Him two great rules which were the rules that every other commandment rested on. These are good commandments or rules. They were set up so that when we followed them and loved God and loved our neighbours we would live the kind of life God wants us to live. He will there forgive us, keep us, strengthen us, protect us and give us the gift of eternal life. That is a most great gift and we should want others to also receive that gift. So our task is to remind Ourselves and others that say they believe in God that we owe something to others who do not know God and we should make sure that we carry out our responsibilities to tell them about God.