"Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might." For a Jew, to pray the Shema was to embrace the reality of God's kingdom not as some abstract other worldly concept but as a deeply personal reality that required a response of prayer, love and faithfulness.
But the response to the Shema required physical obedience as well as spiritual. In Deuteronomy there is a daily physical presence as a reminder of the obligation. It says: "Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the door posts of your house and on your gates." The Shema and the response to the One God who was their God was to be visible no matter where they were.
Paul, searching for a way to establish his Christian identity in the pagan lands through which he travelled declared a new Shema: "Yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist."
"For whom we exist," and through whom we exist." If you believe that then we have no need to explain why we worship the Lord. It is not because of what Jesus has done for us. It is about who our God is and what we owe our God.
Pastor Jim
