ARE YOU ALL IN?

 

ARE YOU ALL IN?

Matt. 22:37-40 Jesus replied, "You must love the LORD your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. A second is equally important. 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the other commandments of the Lord are based on these two commandments." NLT

Have you ever loved the Lord with all of you? Can you honestly say that He is so powerfully wonderful to you that you desire nothing else in life but to love and be loved by Him? Let's face it. We rarely love the Lord in that way. We may have momentary flashes of such intense love for Him, but it soon fades away amid the many happenings of our lives. We try to love Him as we should, but we find ourselves acting in an unloving way. So, are we excused? Should we resign ourselves to being failures at love? I don't believe so. I believe we should continue to strive to love Him; we should continue to do those things that would feed the flame of love: daily devotions, faithful worship, faithful involvement in the life of the church, and faithfully serving the Lord in all we do.

We struggle with loving the Lord as we should and fail to love others (and ourselves) as we should. We fail mainly on an earthly plane because we first fail on the heavenly plane. We can't love others as we should unless we first love God and then ourselves as we should. Love requires respect. Until we respect the object(s) of our love, we will never really love. There are many infatuations that we think are love, but they aren't the real deal.

Love is best defined by God because He is love. Check out what He says love is in I Corinthians 13:4-8a. Love is not an emotion we feel at the moment, it is a life we live every moment. It is a connection with God that never comes unplugged. It is letting the Lord be the source of all we are. It is striving to be more and more like Him as we journey through life.