Part 3: You Become Like What You Love
Victory Life Church, Central — Sunday, April 26, 2026
Link to a downloadable PDF:
2026-04-26 – Follow Me, Part 3 (Full Notes)
Scripture Reading
Matthew 22:34–40 (NLT)34 But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees with his reply, they met together to question him again. 35 One of them, an expert in religious law, tried to trap him with this question: 36 “Teacher, which is the most important commandment in the law of Moses?” 37 Jesus replied, “ ‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.”
Introduction
Think of a list of things and people you love.
What do you love most?
Think through this deeply. I don’t mean “what do you say you love” — but what do your habits, your fears, your first instincts, your Sunday afternoons reveal? Our loves are revealed by what we reach for when anxious, what we protect fiercely, and what we imagine when we daydream. Here is the reality I want to examine today:
You become like what you love most, but you might not love what you think.
The reality is that you are being formed and transformed. As human beings, we do not remain static in our development; we are ever-growing and changing. This should provoke our awareness of what is transforming us. We will become like what we love most. What or who are we becoming like? What or who are our primary influences that shape what we love? Are we conscious of those influences? Are we even aware of what we really love, what we really desire? You become like what you love most, but you might not love what you think.
We’re in a series entitled “Follow Me,” and we are examining what it means to follow Jesus as His disciple, taking seriously what He says and living what He means for us to. Our text today is Jesus’ famous words concerning the greatest commandment.
Matthew 22:37–40 (NLT)37 Jesus replied, “ ‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.”
This gives us a foundation of all Jesus’ framework for thinking and living; He gives us the essential nature of life as a disciple: Love God with all your being, and love your neighbor as yourself. Easy enough, right? Yet, you become like what you love most, but you might not love what you think. It’s easy to say you love God and people, and think that you do. But do you actually love God like Jesus says we are to? Do you actually love people as yourself?
Foundational Thoughts
Have you ever acted in a way that you later thought, “What was I thinking?” This is because many of the drivers within us that determine much of our behavior are not conscious thoughts or beliefs, but desires and loves. We are not primarily ‘thinking things’ who act on beliefs. We are ‘desiring creatures’ whose fundamental orientation is determined by what we love. We are driven in life by our vision of “the good life,” shaping our desires and loves.
“You can’t not bet your life on something. You can’t not be headed somewhere. We live leaning forward, bent on arriving at the place we long for.” ~ James K.A. Smith
What is your vision of “the good life”? (Where did that vision come from?)
Think of it this way: what you love most is what is organizing your life. You orient and organize your life around a desire for the good life you envision. Regardless of what you say you love and desire, what you actually love is shaping the person you are becoming.
“You are what you love because you live toward what you want.”
Our actual loves are revealed not by what we say beliefs but by our habits and practices: what we reach for when we’re anxious, what we spend our time on without being told to, what we fear losing most. We may say we love God, yet our actual love-organizing-center is comfort, security, reputation, or approval. We have been formed by rival visions of the good life that have been shaping our loves below the level of conscious choice.
This is what frames Jesus’ call to discipleship: to follow Him is to “deny self, take up your cross and follow him.” Jesus’ call to ‘deny yourself’ is the correction of the oldest human sin: the tendency to grasp at images of goodness rather than receive them as a gift, to trust our own eyes and cravings over the word of God, and to make self-determination the organizing center of life. Self-denial is about giving up on yourself as lord. Jesus’ call to deny self is targeted at the “self-as-final-authority” — the deepest assumption that I am the best judge of what is good for me. Jesus invites us to His cross, and instead of taking what we desire, we deny ourselves and consider ourselves no longer the masters of our lives. His invitation is a call to the death of the self that insists on its own agenda, its own security, its own definition of the good life.
“Jesus’s command to follow him is a command to align our loves and longings with his — to want what God wants, to desire what God desires, to hunger and thirst after God and crave a world where he is all in all.”
Let me summarize this like this: You are what you love, and you love what you’re taught to desire. The question is not whether you will be formed, but by what.
Discipleship to Jesus is a call to transformation. You may not love what you think. Because of this, Jesus’ invitation is to actually examine your loves, not just your beliefs. Desire is not bad, but humans are poor judges of what is good and what is not. Our desires easily become disordered. Jesus’ answer to the “greatest commandment” question is for our deepest desires, the ones that are shaping our life and character, to become reordered by aiming them at loving God. So how do we do this?
Loving God
Matthew 22:37 (NLT)37 Jesus replied, “ ‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’
The passage Jesus quotes from Deuteronomy 6:5 was the central and best-known text of Judaism — the Shema, the Hebrew word for “hear” or “listen,” stemming from the first word of this command. It’s important that we read it in full to get the context.
Deuteronomy 6:4–5 (NLT)4 “Listen, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. 5 And you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength.
Devout Jews prayed it every morning and every evening, usually standing, facing Jerusalem, hand over heart. This prayer is not a description of an emotional state, indicating how they felt toward God on that particular day. It was a covenant declaration. Think of this as a “pledge of allegiance,” a daily re-pledging of loyalty to YHWH as the ONE God. It’s a daily confession of “I am still yours. You are still mine. My life is still oriented around you.”
The Shema is a covenant declaration, a pledge of allegiance, not an emotional profession.
Loving God is not a spiritual emotion you either have or don’t. It is a daily practice of returning your attention, loyalty, and life toward the one who first loved you. When Jesus calls this the ‘greatest commandment,’ he is calling for that same covenant fidelity: a whole-person, daily orientation of life toward God.
Extra Notes on the Shema
The God Jesus commands us to love is specifically ‘the Lord your God’ — Yahweh, the God with a history, the God who first loved us. The love commanded is an answering love. We are not commanded to love a distant cosmic principle. We are directed to love back the God who has already loved us first — in Israel, and now supremely in Jesus.
The ‘heart’ (lev; Greek kardia) is what we today call one’s ‘center’ — encompassing heart, will, and mind together. Jesus, according to all three Gospel writers, wanted to accent believers’ mental, critical, and rational (dianoia) love of God: “Good thinking loves God as much as does good feeling and good willing, and this thinking deserves equal time with these usually more celebrated faculties.” In Hebrew psychology, the ‘soul’ (nephesh) is the instinctive or primitive faculty, more interior than the thinking and willing center. Thus, the command asks for even our physicality and psychology, our total energies, in our love of God.
“Thought is the greatness of man. Let us endeavor to think well.” ~ Blaise Pascal
The Deuteronomy text Jesus cites portrays love of God as a summary of the entire law: “one who loved God would fulfill the whole Torah”. Jesus is not merely selecting a commandment from among others. He is identifying the wellspring from which all other obedience flows. Love of God is not one duty on a long list; it is the source that generates all genuine keeping of God’s law.
“Can love be commanded? Yes, since in Jesus’ definitions, love is more than a feeling; it is a way to act.” ~ Frederick Dale Bruner
Defining what “Love” is
Our culture defines “love” primarily as feeling, emotion, and attraction — something passive that happens to us. This is not how Jesus, or the rest of Scripture, defines love. The word ‘love’ in Deuteronomy 6:5 carries the freight of khesed — covenant, steadfast love, the kind associated with faithfulness and fidelity rather than feeling. When Jesus cites this prayer, he is not calling for a spiritual emotion. He is calling for covenant loyalty: to organize your life around God the way a faithful spouse organizes their life around their partner — not because of how you feel today, but because of who you belong to.
Love is far more about faithfulness and fidelity rather than feeling.
If love is primarily a feeling, then this command to love becomes hostage to emotional states — we love God on good days and lose access to him on hard ones. But if love is loyalty and fidelity, then it is something that can be practiced, trained, and renewed, even when the feelings are absent. This is also what makes the love command possible.
Why does this distinction matter so much? Why is this important to understand? Why does it matter that love is not a feeling, but a commitment to be faithful and loyal?
You become like what you love most, but you might not love what you think.
This is why Jesus, citing one of the most essential Jewish prayer practices, elevates loving God above all else, as the “first and greatest.”
Matthew 22:38 (NLT)38 This is the first and greatest commandment.
Our desires and loves are being shaped by the culture around us. Whatever is shaping our love is shaping our lives. What we love most shapes who we become. Scripture says:
Psalm 115:8 (NLT)8 And those who make idols are just like them, as are all who trust in them.
We are not just shaping an idol; the idol (the object of our worship) shapes us. Jesus’ command to love God is not primarily intended to simply guide our ethics. It is a promise of transformation:
The greatest commandment is simultaneously the greatest invitation to transformation. If we love God with our whole person, we will gradually become people who love the way God loves.
2 Corinthians 3:18 (ESV)18 And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.
Loving Neighbor as Self
Matthew 22:39 (NLT)39 A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’
The second is “just like it.” “The first is first and the second is second, but the second is equally as important as the first. Only together in a nurturing mutuality is either love kept pure.”
The second command does not run on human willpower. The ‘just like it’ of verse 39 is not merely a moral obligation added to the first — it is the natural overflow of the first. Love of God and love of neighbor are not parallel duties running on separate tracks. Love of God gives to love of neighbor “the fuel, warmth, resources, motivation, and purpose that neighbor love so constantly needs.”
When love of God is real — when it is loyalty and intimacy with the living God — it overflows into the capacity to love others as God loves them. Self-giving love of neighbor is the fruit of abiding in God’s love.
Matthew 22:39 (NLT)39 ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’
Jesus says to love ‘your neighbor,’ which is singular. This protects the command from two distortions: sentimental humanitarianism (‘love the whole wide world as yourself’) and enthusiastic romanticism (‘love your neighbor even more than yourself’).
“Neighbor” is singular, protecting against sentimental humanitarianism and enthusiastic romanticism.
“He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars. General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer.” ~ William Blake
The normal way disciples love the world is by giving each member of that world their loving attention as they pass by on a typical day.
The Whole Law Hangs
Matthew 22:40 (NLT)40 The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.”
The Greek krematai (‘dangles’ or ‘hangs’) pictures two pegs at equal height from which a great bundle hangs, like a door on its hinges. Where Israel had seen the Torah as a massive bundle on high with hundreds of commands hanging down in almost equal lengths, Jesus inverts the image: he suspends the whole Bible from its two main commands. This is Jesus’ hermeneutical key: read all of Scripture through the bifocal of his Double-Love Command.
The distinctive primacy that love plays in virtually all early Christian ethics would not have been possible had Christians not derived it from the mouth of the one Teacher who united them. Paul, John, James — their convergence on love as the supreme virtue traces directly to this moment. Only Jesus wielded the moral authority among his followers to focus their ethics so profoundly around a single theme.
Conclusion
Jesus sums up what it means to follow Him, to love God with your whole being and to love your singular neighbor, one at a time, as you love yourself. This is not based on feeling, but on a daily commitment to act in a way that is loyal and faithful to God’s love for us, to orient our lives around His love. This transforms us into the kind of person who loves the people we encounter.
You become like what you love most, but you might not love what you think.
What do you really love the most? What is your life organized around? What idol has taken the place of your most important love? How might loving God replace that central desire and orientation? In essence, Jesus is saying that love is the very purpose of living.
“The purpose of living is the adoration of God and the cherishing of human beings.”
Who is your singular neighbor this week? What would it look like to love them specifically and individually, not because you feel like it, but because love is what you do?