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Love The Lord!

Matthew 22:37

And He replied to him, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind (intellect).

Jesus gives us the greatest of all His commands – an ideal for life.

An ideal is a model we hold in our minds, a standard we reach for.  Ideals determine our priorities.

Ideals are powerful because what we love, desire and focus our beings on is what we become.

The greatest revelation in the history of the world is that God is love and God loves us.

The sweetest of all human emotions is love.
The greatest of all possible human experiences is love.

God has unimagined blessings for those who fully love Him.

1 Corinthians 2:9
…Eye has not seen and ear has not heard and neither has it entered into the heart of man, [all that] God has prepared (made and keeps ready) for those who love Him.

Our love for Him must be proven by the involvement of our entire being.  It is the highest kind of love for it motivates you to do what is right and noble regardless of what you may be feeling.

This love Jesus commands is the noblest, purest and highest form of self-sacrificing love.

We are never totally right with God until our heart, soul, mind, and strength manifest our love for God.

Love for God must be more than a confession.  Our entire being must manifest that love.  Love like this is manifested through obedience to His commands.

Love is always the first step.  God keeps covenant with those who love Him and keep His commandments.

When we are troubled, when we don’t have an answer, when we don’t know what to do, when our resources are not sufficient to meet our need, when we are frustrated, confused – just start with God and love Him with your entire being.

When we start with our circumstances, our challenges, our lack, and our doubt we are so limited.

Our problems are solved by responding to His love.  Start with God and then go to your need, your lack, your challenge, and your circumstance.

The whole purpose of life is to lead us to the final and ultimate truth that God is the one who loves us and can fully satisfy us.

When we start with God and loving Him with our entire being – presenting our bodies (all of us) as a living sacrifice – then we love our families, we love our neighbors, we even love our enemies, and we lead them to Christ.

We must renounce every competing affection, and be willing to lay down our lives for the advancement of His kingdom.

The Truth of God!

Genesis 1:1
¹In the beginning God (prepared, formed, fashioned, and) created the heavens and the earth.

What is truth?
How can we know truth?

In America, for many years we had certain presuppositions which influenced the way life was lived.

The basic presupposition was that there really are such things as “Absolutes.”

We accepted the possibility of an “Absolute” in the area of “being” (or knowledge), and in the area of “morals.”

If anything is true, the opposite is false.  If one thing is right, its opposite was wrong.

Today our world is in a “mess” because of the rejection of Biblical absolutes.

The greatest absolute in the entire world is found in Genesis 1:1- In the beginning God…

Without this absolute nothing makes sense.

Man can never understand himself by beginning with himself.
Man can only understand himself by beginning with God.

What every man needs to do is to meet God.  God has revealed everything about himself that we need to know to respond to Him in worship.

Worship of God is always limited to our knowledge of Him because we cannot extol Him beyond our concepts of Him.

Many Christians are more interested in the principles of God than in the person of God. They give to God, receive from Him and work for Him, but never enter into a personal relationship with Him.

The purpose, the reason for man’s existence is found in the first commandment of Christ:

Mark 12:30 - And you shall love the Lord your God out of and with your whole heart and out of and with all your soul (your life) and out of and with all your mind (your faculty of thought and your moral understanding) and out of and with all your strength. 

This truth causes me to know what man is and who I am.

What will you do to get to know Him better?

Finding Your Significance

 Proverbs 23:7:  For as he thinks in his heart, so is he. As one who reckons, he says to you, eat and drink, yet his heart is not with you [but is grudging the cost].

Proverbs 4:23:  Keep and guard your heart with all vigilance and above all that you guard, for out of it flow the springs of life.

Proverbs 18:24:  The man of many friends [a friend of all the world] will prove himself a bad friend, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.

A long time ago someone wrote a powerful statement about man and God–

 A person’s purpose is to know God, worship Him, enjoy Him, and serve Him forever.

Our most innate need is the need to be significant – to find purpose and meaning.

This calls for the pursuit of the God who is, rather than the God we want.

To be significant we must answer two questions –
          Who am I?  Why do I exist?

When you discover who you are in Christ, you will understand your purpose. 

When you are contributing to God’s agenda on earth, you become fulfilled. The essence of who you are is found in your identity.

Whoever you are in private determines your actions and decisions in public.

Every person has to deal with four identities:

1.           The person you want others to think you are.

2.           The person you think you are.

3.           The person you really are.

4.           The person God created you to be.

The first three of those identities are determined by the person individually.  The fourth is determined only as the person surrenders to the Lordship of Christ.

The process of becoming who God needs you to be includes: studying God’s Word, intimacy in prayer, and continually practicing righteousness.

The most secure and confident people on earth are those who know who they are in Christ.

The key to your future is found in your daily routine.

• With whom do you associate?
• What places do you frequent?
• What things occupy your time?
• What thoughts permeate your brain?
• What words fill your speech?

What you believe shapes your life.  Where you go determines your relationships. Your relationships affect your character.

One of life’s greatest treasures is a true friend.  Choose your friends carefully since a friend will either add to your life or take away from it.