LOVE GOD WITH EVERYTHING

Mark 12:30 “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”

I remember a Peanuts cartoon in which Charlie Brown was talking to Lucy. He remarked about the tragedy of so much apathy in the world today. And Lucy responded, "Yeah, it’s terrible. But who cares?"

To love the Lord with all your heart means to love him with pure devotion. It’s not enough to give Christ a place in our hearts. We are called to love him with all of our heart. When you love someone with all of your heart, you think about them almost all of the time. You long to be with them. They’re the priority in your life. And to love God with all your heart is the same. It means that your heart is devoted to him. It means that you are faithful to him. He becomes the most important thing in your life. But the love we are to have for God has another characteristic. You are not only to love God with all your heart; you are to love him with all your soul. To love God with all our soul means that our love for God ought to be full of passion. And we are all people of passion. Some people are passionate about sports, some people are passionate about their work, some people are passionate about hobbies, like art, or music. People are passionate about all sorts of things, but how many of us have the same passion for God that we have for these other things?

We cannot afford to be apathetic about our love for God. We must be excited about our relationship with Jesus. We must be passionate. In the Song of Solomon, we hear about the passionate kind of love we ought to have for God. Song of Solomon is a pretty racy book, if you think about it. But it’s describing a passionate, all consuming love. And about giving everything you’ve got to the one you love. And it’s a perfect example of how our love for the Lord should be. Real love is passionate love. To love God with all our soul means that we must be involved with all our emotions in our relationship to him. When you’ve really given Jesus all of your heart, then it’s easy to become excited about following him.

Our love for Christ begins with a pure devotion and expresses itself by being full of passion, but there is another element. Jesus says that you are to love the Lord your God with your entire mind. This is a love that is thoroughly considered. Today it seems that some Christians are so open minded that their brains are falling out. Emotionalism is a big problem in the body of Christ today. In Romans chapter one the apostle Paul said, “For I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation.” The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the power of God unto salvation. Loving God is not an emotional expression that bypasses the mind. It is true that when people rely on their own intellectual capacity to figure out God, they always come up short. Because God is too big to be totally figured out by human minds. But we can learn and know what God has revealed to us. It is clear from the Scripture that God fully intends for our minds to be involved in our love for him.

Do you have a passion for God? Is that fire burning within you today? Make the conscious choice to ignite and maintain your passion.