Loving God

We are told that Jesus said the greatest commandment is “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.” And the second is, “to love your neighbor as yourself.” I think we take this commandment for granted. How often do we really try to love God with everything we have? What would it look like if we loved God with everything we were? Recently, I have realized that our culture accepts loving God but putting other things first. Where do we get off doing this? Where in the Bible does it say love your job, boyfriend/girlfriend, friends, family and then love your God? That’s not something I have read in my Bible but we justify putting all of these things before God. We say it’s ok not to do our Bible study because we had to stay late at work or we had too much homework. We put spending time with our friends ahead of spending time with God. This isn’t the life we were called to live. Because allow ourselves to slip out of spending time with God then allows other sin to creep into our lives. These may not be big things – it usually starts small. A little lie here or there, hanging out with some people we know we shouldn’t, or losing our temper every now and again but if we continue to allow ourselves to live this life then bigger sins start to creep in. We are lying about everything, constantly angry, or spending all of our time with people who aren’t uplifting and who crush our Christian walk because we first let our walk with God slip away.

I have been thinking today what does it look like to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength? While I know I don’t have all the answers I would like to share the ones I do have. The mind came easy – we take our thoughts captive to God. We don’t allow impure thoughts of any kind in our lives. Did you know that most sins begin as just a crazy thought and for a while we might push it away but eventually we let the thought linger for a while and then before we know it we have acted on that thought. And we are thinking to ourselves “How did I get here?” you got there by not stopping the sin when it was just a temptation – a thought. Also, to love God with all of our mind I believe we must be committing scripture to memory. I believe our strength is what I was talking about earlier – doing everything as if we were working for God. To give everything we do all we have. Now our heart and our soul are a little trickier and I haven’t gotten to answer I can share but I would also love to hear other thoughts on this topic. I have been consumed by this thought today of what would it look life if we loved God with all we had? As individuals? As Breiel Church (or whatever church you are a part of)? As the global church? Imagine all we could do if we each committed to loving God with all we have.

I think Shane & Shane say it best in their song Yearn – “Lord I want to yearn for you, I want to burn with passion Over you and only you.” Not only should that be our desire in life but that is God’s desire for us – that we would yearn for Him and only Him. That is my prayer for myself and for you.

Orginally written: September 10, 2009