Contradictions
Hear, O Israel!
The Lord our God, the Lord is one.
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
with all your soul and with all your strength.
(Deuteronomy 6:4-5)
It is hard to live with contradictions. They gnaw at your
soul, wearing you down until you either face them squarely,
admit your hypocrisy, and change, or you silence your nagging
conscience and become a cynical, beaten wreck of a human
being.
Such was the crossroads I found myself at about fifteen
years ago. I had a challenging and lucrative career as a
consultant on the cutting edge of the computer graphics
industry. I was respected as a Christian leader and Bible
teacher. I had a wonderful, faithful, capable wife who home-schooled
our four sweet daughters. We were living in one of the most
beautiful places in the world, waking up every morning to
the breathtaking panorama of Lake Geneva and the Swiss Alps.
I was miserable. 
In my heart I wanted to serve the God of Heaven; in my
soul I was fighting a losing battle with my flesh; with
my strength I was building up the kingdoms of this world.
I was doing the very thing the Apostle Paul said not to
do, “No soldier gets entangled in civilian pursuits,
since his aim is to please the one who enlisted him.”
My life was a living contradiction. I could not obey the
most basic commandment to love God with all my heart, all
my soul, and all my strength.
With All Your Heart
Didn’t I love Him with all my heart? I thought so.
After all, I had given my life to Him the best I knew how.
I prayed, studied the Bible, taught Sunday School, and paid
my tithes. What is love for God anyway? That question always
led me to John’s gospel and letters, which gave me
no comfort?
“If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.”
(John 14:15)
“Whoever has My commandments and keeps
them, he it is who loves Me?” (John 14:21)
“A new commandment I give to you, that
you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also
are to love one another.” (John 13:34)
By this we know love, that He laid down His
life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the
brothers. But if anyone has the world’s goods and
sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against
him, how does God’s love abide in him? Little children,
let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth.
(1 John 3:16-18)
Lay down my life for my brothers? I couldn’t honestly
claim to be doing that in any practical way. See my brothers
in need? I only saw them for a couple of hours on Sunday,
wearing their Sunday best. I didn’t even know where
most of them lived, let alone how they lived. How would
I know whether they needed anything? How could I love them
just as Jesus had loved His disciples? And if I could not
do that, then how could I obey His commandments? And if
I did not obey His commandments, then according to the Scriptures
I did not love Him with all my heart. I was living a lie:
Whoever says, “I know Him,” but
does not keep His commandments is a liar, and the truth
is not in him. (1 John 2:4)
With All Your Soul
As for my soul, well, there was no way to get all of it
to do much of anything. The soul, I’m told, consists
of the mind, the will, and the emotions. My mind was easy
to get moving — in almost any direction. It took every bit
of my will to keep my mind from plunging me into ruin, much
less focusing my faculties consistently on godly things.
And my emotions were rather reluctant to respond to anything
with much passion, including the call to worship. Oh, I
could sing hymns with the best of them, but whatever feelings
they may have stirred up returned to their placid state
moments after the last chord rumbled out of the organ. As
much as my heart wanted my soul to be on fire for the Lord,
it wouldn’t cooperate.
With All Your Strength
Alas, here was the most formidable of obstacles to sainthood!
What was I doing with the bulk of my energy, and the best
years of my life? Making money to sustain my comfortable,
upper-middle-class lifestyle by selling my skills to the
highest bidder. At the time in question, that entailed developing
software for financial analysts in private Swiss banks to
better manage the fortunes of the richest men on earth.
Where did their wealth come from? I dared not ask, nor would
I have been told. But I did wonder. Druglords? Slumlords?
Gangsters? Terrorists? Rock stars? Pimps? Whose kingdoms
were getting the benefit of my strength? One thing was for
sure: it wasn’t God’s kingdom.
The Crossroad
So there I was, saved and going to heaven, or so I was
told. Oh, I had said the “Sinner’s Prayer”
fourteen years earlier, and no one would have guessed that
there was any doubt in my mind about my eternal destiny.
But what part of me was saved? Was it just my heart that
was saved? That was the only part that seemed to be oriented
in the right direction. But if my soul and my strength couldn’t
follow my heart, what good was it? Or was the commandment
in Deuteronomy 6:5 only for the Old Covenant, and now in
the New Covenant it was ok to just ask Jesus into your heart
and live your life much the same as other decent people
who make no claim to be Christians?
In the midst of my turmoil, I happened to stumble upon
some disciples who were living a common life together just
like you can read about in Acts 2:42-47 and 4:32-37. It
was almost as if I had entered a time warp and landed back
in the first century. The simple purity and devotion of
their life shed light on the contradictions of my life and
made it all too clear what was missing. At this crossroad
my life took a radically different direction, releasing
me from the grip of this present evil age and freeing me
to give my whole heart, soul, and strength to build God’s
kingdom.
I have written of how I came to this crossroad and what
happened next in another article, which you can read on
our web site. But now I would like to tell you what I
have learned that eliminated the contradiction I had lived
with for so many years.
The Salvation of the Whole Man
The Apostle Paul seemed to have a more holistic view of
salvation than most Christians have today, as this passage
implies:
Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you
completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body
be kept blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
(1 Thessalonians 5:23)
Somehow it seemed important to Paul that the whole person
— spirit, soul, and body (heart, soul, and strength)
— would be completely devoted to God. In fact, the
word translated sanctify in this verse means “to
set apart from common or profane things and dedicate to
God.” And there is a related word that Paul used a
few verses earlier:
For this is the will of God, your sanctification?
for God has not called us for impurity, but in holiness.
(1 Thessalonians 4:3,7)
The word translated sanctification (and also
holiness) in this passage means the effect
of being set apart — the purification of heart and
life. Therefore, sanctification (being made pure
and blameless) can only happen as a result of being sanctified
(set apart from the common and profane). Paul puts it together
in his second letter to the Corinthians:
“Therefore go out from their midst, and
be separate from them,” says the Lord, “and
touch no unclean thing; then I will welcome you, and I
will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters
to Me,” says the Lord Almighty. Since we have these
promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every
defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion
in the fear of God. (2 Corinthians 6:17 - 7:1)
Where Salvation Happens
Obviously, to the Apostle Paul, salvation was not just
a matter of saying the “Sinner’s Prayer”
and going to heaven when you die. The promise of being called
God’s sons and daughters was based on obedience to
the call to come out of the fallen society and into the
set-apart, undefiled place where He can father
us — give us the care, protection, training, and discipline
that children need to grow up right. Paul was actually
calling the wayward Corinthians back to the foundation he
had established them on — a community of disciples
who lived a set-apart life together, just like the first
community in Jerusalem.
That is the way Paul addressed his first letter to the
Corinthians:
To the church of God that is in Corinth, to
those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints
together with all those who in every place call upon the
name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours.
(1 Corinthians 1:2)
He was writing to those who were “set apart
in Christ” (not “by Christ”
but “in Christ”). He meant in the
Body of Christ, which to him was not an ethereal
concept but the corporeal expression of the
life of Christ in a particular place where all the saints
call upon the same Lord. That is, they are all coordinated
in all their actions under one head, just like a physical
human body. That is how the church was first established
in Jerusalem, setting a definitive pattern that was replicated
through Judea. In fact, Paul makes explicit reference to
his churches’ adherence to the Judean pattern in his
letter to the Thessalonians:
For you, brothers, became imitators of the
churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea. For
you suffered the same things from your own countrymen
as they did from the Jews. (1 Thessalonians 2:14)
It was the radical, set-apart, holy life that they shared
together that brought the persecution upon the Thessalonian
church, just as it had upon the churches in Judea, because
it exposed the shallow, self-centered, idolatrous lifestyle
of the fallen culture they had come out of. They upset the
social order of their day, just as their Master had
said would be the effect of the gospel:
“If the world hates you, know that it
has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world,
the world would love you as its own; but because you are
not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore
the world hates you.” (John 15:18-19)
The Gospel of Salvation
And that brings us to the crux of the matter. The gospel
Paul preached was the same as the gospel he obeyed —
one that caused him to suffer the loss of all things,
turning his back forever on his former life and occupation
to be immersed into Messiah’s Body. It was the same
gospel as Peter preached on the day of Pentecost, which
caused the 3000 to utterly abandon their old lives and band
together, sharing all things in common out of their love
for one another. And it was the same gospel that the Savior
Himself preached, calling the original twelve disciples
to leave everything in order to follow Him, creating an
intimate brotherhood in which they experienced salvation
night and day.
All these disciples had died the same death to their old
lives, giving up everything in obedience to the gospel
(the very thing the “rich young ruler” would
not do). They all had to leave one place and
go to another where they could lay down their lives
for one another every day, loving one another just as
their Savior had loved them. This is the gospel that creates
community, because it actually calls and delivers people
out of the domain of darkness where they live by and for
themselves, and into the kingdom of the Son, the commonwealth
of Israel, where they can serve Him where He is.
Wherever the Spirit and the Bride are, they say, “Come!”
Come to the place where Messiah lives in His people, where
all who believe are together and have all things in common.
There everyone is cared for through the miracle of self-sacrificing
love. No one needs to be concerned about meeting his own
needs, because he has a hundred brothers and sisters
and mothers and fathers, just as the Master promised,
who look out for him while he is busy looking out for them.
Each one is free to use his gifts and the grace supplied
to him to do the works he was saved to do for the purpose
of building up the Body of Messiah, not his own kingdom
or the kingdoms of this world. And in the process, each
one is purified through the difficulties and circumstance
of their life together, as their hurtful ways are exposed
and healed in the safe environment of love.
Only there is it possible to love the Lord your God with
all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your
strength.
~ David
2 Timothy 2:4 (See our freepaper, Civilian
Affairs, for an in-depth study on this passage.)
Regardless of what the Savior Himself said in Matthew
22:37?
One Man's
Journey
#37 in Strong’s Concordance
#38 in Strong’s Concordance
Ephesians 4:11-16
ethereal — characterized by insubstantiality;
as impalpable or intangible as air.
corporeal — having material or physical form
or substance.
Saints means set-apart ones.
In 1 Corinthians 12:12-27 Paul labors this point.
Acts 17:6
Matthew 10:34-37
Philippians 3:8
John 12:24-26
Luke 14:26-33; Mark 10:28-30
Mark 10:21-22
Matthew 4:19-20; 8:22; 9:9; Mark 10:21
Luke 9:23; 1 John 3:16; Hebrews 3:13
Colossians 1:13
Ephesians 2:12
John 12:26
Revelation 22:17
Acts 2:44
Matthew 6:31-33
Mark 10:29-30
Ephesians 2:10
Ephesians 4:11-16
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