Loving God with All Your Strength

God loves the smell of your sweat.  You might stink to high heaven from hard work but for God it is a sweet aroma and sacred incense.  God loves it because it brings him glory when we break a sweat loving him with all of our energy (Mark 12:30).  Love isn’t primarily measured by words spoken, but by calories burned (1 John 3:18).  We are to use all of our strength to love God.  Using our hands and our effort is as valuable to God as using our brains.

 

            We should feel free to go hard after God with all our strength.  We need not have any hesitation about using our very tangible efforts in work as loving God.  But because we only have so much strength and energy, we need to make sure we are not wasting any of our energy on sin.  Too many of us waste our energy on things we can’t have and stuff that we can’t control.  If we spend a bunch of energy on things like pride, anger, and selfishness then we only end up wasting even more energy on guilt, shame, and regret.  Nothing saps our strength more than sin.  So, then, we need to keep busy doing the right things.

            Loving God with all our strength requires limits and healthy rhythms of life.  If we understand the importance and value of hard work, we much too often wrongly think that the answer to most things is to work harder.  You don’t do that with your car.  You don’t see a red light come on the dash and automatically say, “Oh! there is a problem with my car – I will drive it harder and longer and the problem will go away.” 

            Some Christians have a bent toward working themselves into the ground, not using their God-given brains to tell them that this is not loving God.  Many persons feel the pressure of responsibility, the fear of failure, the obsessive need for perfectionism, and the just plain stress of dealing with people and conflict.  So, we ignore our better judgment and put our foot to the accelerator.  It is no wonder, then, that people have crack-ups and breakdowns, both emotionally and physically.  Some individuals find the shame of failure too unbearable to let up on the gas pedal, and so keep going day after day worried that they might be letting someone down.  Wise and rightly ordered priorities come from well-rested Christians.  So, it must be remembered that keeping the Sabbath affords an opportunity to put all our energy into loving God in ways that we cannot on the other six days.  

            On the other extreme, laziness can easily creep in because the classic spiritual disciplines of Bible reading, solitude and silence, prayer and fasting, and giving rarely clamor for our immediate attention.  We may have so many other irons in the fire that the very relational activities that help us connect with the Lord Jesus get squeezed out.  Tyranny of the urgent is a harsh taskmaster, and we rarely slow down long enough to realize that we have drifted far from God and are in danger of ignoring Christ and his salvation out of sheer neglect (Hebrews 2:1-4). 

            Let us, then, put all our strength into loving God, rather than simply loving the idea of loving God.  All relationships take work.  So, if we claim to be Christians it only makes sense to use the best time of our day each day to relationally connect with Christ and seek to connect with other Christians in fellowship.  Now is not the time to feel guilty for what you have not done, but to accept the grace that is in Jesus and enjoy his presence and his Church.  Blessed are those who hunger for righteousness, for they shall be filled.

Loving God with All Your Mind

“What do you have in there worth living for?” That is just one of many quotable lines from The Princess Bride.  Miracle Max was trying to find out if he could rescue the young Wesley from certain death.  Turns out he was only “mostly dead.”  What came out of Wesley when Miracle Max pressed on him was “true love.”  It is always a great story:  true love is never satisfied; true love conquers all. True love has an insatiable desire to know more and more about the object of its affection.  To love God with all of our minds is to want to learn more and more about Him, to know Him better and better.  It is to have a constant curiosity about God.  And the really cool thing about this is that God has given us the brains to accommodate this curiosity about Him.

            The average brain is only the size of a softball and weighs about 3 pounds, yet neurologists estimate that we have the capacity to learn something new every second of every minute of every hour of every day for the next 300 million years.  We have the mental equipment to love God.

            So, then, to just want to know the right answers about God and Scripture without putting any thinking behind it is to miss the whole point of Christianity.  Simply wanting the Cliffs Notes to the Bible and/or perusing God For Dummies is to miss the entire direction of love.  Loving God is about curiosity and learning, a desire to know the object of my affection.

            Since we are to love God with our minds, we ought to invite questions and curiosity rather than shutting it down.  Adults of all stripes:  kids and teenagers and college students who ask questions is a good thing; let them flex their brains.  There are too many adult Christians in this world that feel threatened by healthy robust questioning.  We are not just to fill up with correct information, as if the sheer accumulation of right doctrine is all there is to it.  We are to have a deep experiential knowledge of God that leads to learning about him more and more.  It is never satisfied, and the learning never ends.  Our minds are like muscles – they must be used and exercised on a consistent basis because if we stop learning we stop loving.  And I’m not talking about Sodoku puzzles.  I’m talking about stretching our minds with reading Scripture and good Christian books.  I’m talking about getting into discussions about God, Christ, and the Bible that broadens our understanding and deepens our faith. 

            We are to love God with all our minds; loving God with half your brain isn’t going to cut it.  Some people are dominantly left-brained people, that is, they are bent toward being logical, analytical, practical, and think mostly in concrete black and white terms.  There are other people who are heavily right-brained, that is, they are much more artistic, intuitive, creative, imaginative, humorous, even sarcastic, and tend to speak more poetically with lots of satire and metaphors.  If we are to love God with all our minds we will seek to use all of our brains, both the right and the left parts of it.

            One of the problems we run into is that the mind of sinful people is death (Romans 8:6).  Death means separation.  They are separated from God in their minds.  To have a sinful mind is to have a small brain.  The sinful mind isn’t interested in genuine critical thinking – only in stubbornly expressing opinions.  Sinful people aren’t using their brains, or only a small part of them.  But God wants to sanctify our whole brains.  That means we are to be transformed by the renewing of our minds (Romans 12:2).  We are to use all our minds to love Him.  That means we will value the left brain orientation of desiring to know the bottom line and being results driven.  We will embrace order and discipline, and use all the tools of reason and logic, learning critical thinking skills that can serve us in growing and knowing and loving God and God’s people.  But it also means we will value the right brain orientation of embracing mystery, paradox, and gray areas, enjoying the process of discovery and probing the deepest issues of scripture and humanity - all the while being comfortable with asking questions and not always having the answers.

Loving God means we will tap into all our minds, not just half our brains.  The Bible itself engages us in a mentally holistic approach.  We have, for example, the linear arguments of New Testament epistles, as well as the creative and poetic approach of the prophets and the psalms.  We are to combine the right brain value of viewing the Christian life as a road in which we journey along, and the left brain pursuit of the goal to win the prize for which we are called heavenward in Christ Jesus.

Do you love God with all your mind?   How can you engage all of your brain to love God?  What contribution can you make to God’s people with your intelligence and creativity?  Will you seek to have your mind renewed?  May your mind be so flooded with God’s grace that the thoughts and words that come out of it is true love.

Loving God with All Our Soul

God sees so much more than we do.  Sometimes we forget that.  We don’t see like God does, so there are times we wonder where he is.  But God does see every obedient act done in secret, each prayer uttered in the privacy of our closet, and all the places where his people have selflessly given themselves to love and compassion.  We have a need to see God’s glory.  We need to not just see the muck of the world in all its awful muckiness; we equally need a newfound sense of God’s wonder and beauty, to reclaim the soul of Christianity.

            To love God with all my soul means the deepest parts of my life are flooded with God’s glory, awed by His majesty, mystery, and beauty.  We are to perceive the glory and wonder of God that is all around us.  It is to be thankful, deeply thankful for everything – even for the personal hardship and suffering that I face.  I’m thankful for it because it is one means by which I can better know God and see His glory.  Peter said, Dear friends, do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you.  But rejoice that you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed.  If you are insulted because of the name of Christ, you are blessed, for the Spirit of glory and of God rests on you (1 Peter 4:12-14).

            Apart from Christ we don’t see this perspective, we don’t see the world as it is; we only see the world as we are (and so we think that how we understand things is the way things really are or, at least, should be).  Being full of God’s glory makes life, even if it is hard, wonderful because then we see with spiritual perception.  The human eye can only perceive light waves between 0.000004 and 0.000007 centimeters long.  In other words our visual range is the equivalent of one playing card on a stack of cards stretching halfway across the universe.  But God sees the entire range of light, and to love God with all our soul is to see life and reality from His perception of things.

            The best way to cultivate a love for God with all my soul and see His beauty is to meditate on Scripture and on creation.  Literally take time to smell the roses.  If you walk or drive the same route every day, make a commitment each day to see one thing you have never seen before.  Then, praise God for it.  What is more, every one of us has the privilege and opportunity to read or listen to God’s Word every day.  It needs to be as much of a routine as getting out of bed.  Each time you open your bible, determine to read it slowly and carefully seeing one thing in Scripture that you have never seen before.  Then, praise God for that perception.

We don’t just need a little soul in our love for God; we are to love God with all of our souls (Mark 12:30).  Middle class white people with Northern European ancestry (my church) are not known for their soul.  There is no Dutch Soul Food restaurant anywhere that I am aware of.  I have never seen a German-American Hip-Hop Club.  Maybe it is time to change the perception that we Christians have no soul.  Let’s not try and domesticate this very basic command of Scripture to love God with all our souls.  Yes, it may look different for us than some other people, but it is no less a command.  We ought to be so filled with God’s glory and wonder that we unashamedly raise our hands in praise, fall on our knees in prayer and adoration, and chatter all the time about Jesus – Deuteronomy 6:7 says to talk about God and his commands when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.  We are to be excited about living for God because God wants us to love Him with lots of flavor!

What moves your soul to action?  David Platt, a pastor in Birmingham, Alabama once spent ten days in China.  His plan was to move around the country, but he first visited some local house church leaders.  He never went anywhere else in the country.  They were supposed to meet for a short bible study.  Instead, it turned into a ten day 8-12 hour a day teaching of Scripture.  After that first day the Chinese leaders asked David Platt:  “Would you be willing to teach us about all the books of the Old Testament while you are here?”  Pastor Platt laughed and said, “All the Old Testament?  That would take a long time.”  Here was their collective response:  “We will do whatever it takes.  Most of us are farmers, and we work all day, but we will leave our fields unattended for the next couple of weeks if we can learn the Old Testament.”

The hunger for God by many around the world is huge and immense.  They love God with all their soul to the point of doing whatever it takes to know God better and live for Him.  For too many of us, we are conditioned to simply give God our scraps – some of our discretionary income; whatever time we might have left-over from our work and other activities; showing up for church if it doesn’t conflict with something else, as if God were our pet that we just give the table scraps. 

Will you do whatever it takes to love God with all your soul?  Do you perceive and see the grace of God all around you?

Loving God with All Our Heart

God prefers loving actions that come deep within our hearts more than any religious ritual we might perform.  He wants His will done by not just fulfilling the letter of the law, but the spirit of what is required – and what is required is love, a love for God with one’s entire being (Mark 12:28-34).

            I love my three girls with all my heart.  I think God made them all beautiful to compensate for all the ornery things they have done so that I wouldn’t go crazy.  Once Sarah (the ringleader of the three hoodlums) was at the top of the stairs with two year old Mikaela in a laundry basket and pushed her down with Charissa at the bottom to catch her.  I love my wife with all my heart.  Yet, Mary always thought it would be a good idea to have an open door policy for the girls to come into our bed at night whenever they needed us.  I’ve been puked on, peed on, kicked on and pushed out of bed; it’s like living with a bunch of drunks….  And that’s not to mention things like the hundred times I’ve been way-laid before going out of the house with “you’re not really going out in public looking like that are you!?”

            I have dealt with it all because I love my kids.  But larger than that, God has children all over this planet earth, and he loves them.  To begin to love God with all our hearts is to begin to see what God’s heart is – a big expansive heart for people all around the world.  God’s heart is close to the broken-hearted, near to those in need.  His heart is a heart of compassion.  God’s wrath is actually a response of his love to make things right in this fallen world.  His heart yearns for his creatures to love Him.  As early as the book of Genesis, just a few chapters in it says, The LORD saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time.  The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain (Genesis 6:6).  So God sent a great flood and wiped out nearly all of humanity.  It bothers God and He is not okay with the sinful and idolatrous hearts of people.

            We cannot just have a Disney-style follow your heart.  Trusting in our own hearts is a mistake, for they are, apart from God, desperately wicked.  Jeremiah said:  The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure (Jeremiah 17:10).  The heart is beyond repair and the only way to deal with it is to have a heart transplant.  God spoke through the prophet Ezekiel and gave a promise:  I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh (Ezekiel 11:19).  A stony heart betrays not knowing God.  A soft heart of compassion toward others reveals loving God.

            Does your heart break for the things that break the heart of God?  God is concerned for suffering, injustice, and death.  To love God with all our heart means that our hearts beat for the things that touch the heart of God.  It means that God’s heart of compassion is the driving motivation of our lives.  It means that we will love people.  Hear what the Apostle of Love, John, said:  We love because Christ first loved us.  If anyone says, “I love God,” yet hates his brother, he is a liar.  For anyone who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen.  And he has given us this command:  Whoever loves God must also love his brother (1 John 4:19-21).  The reason sins of the tongue get listed alongside things like murder and adultery in the New Testament is that they are offenses to God’s heart.

            God’s heart is with the children of this world.  Every year 15 million children die of starvation.  That’s more than 40,000 children a day.  Today over 8,000 people will die from AIDS.  The numbers are staggering not only of hunger but of war and disease not to mention other great problems of humanity including illiteracy and the sex slave trade.  My goal is not to depress us.  What I want us to see is a very small glimpse of what God sees every day.  And, what is more, God knows each one of their names.  When it comes to us, people need to move from being numbers to being names.  God is not okay with all the brokenness on this earth and his heart breaks over the sin of the world that causes such evil to go on day after day.  God wants His Church to champion causes that are close to His heart.  If we love God He wants us to aim that love with all our hearts toward people who need the compassion of Christ.

            Love is a deliberate decision to meet a need in another person.  Churches must see the needs and not allow their hearts to shrink.  Leonardo Da Vinci once observed that the average person “looks without seeing, listens without hearing, touches without feeling, eats without tasting, inhales without awareness of fragrance, and talks without thinking.”  Sharing God’s heart for people is to have a heart of compassion that is aware of the great needs of the world and will do whatever it takes to be a part of meeting those needs.  In so doing, the Church follows her Savior who so loved the world that he gave himself for it.

Church Conflict

            Conflict in inevitable.  Put a bunch of sinners together in one place (like in a church building), add a few grumpy old people and not a few know-it-alls and sit back and watch the fireworks happen.  I think every church is about one or two good fights away from being non-existent.  It’s a miracle that more congregations don’t call it quits every year, especially after their annual congregational meetings!  I myself have a long resume of handling ornery folks, family squabbles, and cantankerous curmudgeons that could make your head swim – or just get you down right angry.

            When we peek into the bible, the Apostle James is blunt about where the heart of conflict comes:  What causes fights and quarrels among you?  Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you?  You want something but don’t get it.  You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want.  You quarrel and fight.  You do not have, because you do not ask God.  When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures. 

            All people have things they want and desire.  When those desires go unmet it can begin to be a burr in our saddle that leads to a lack of satisfaction.  The focus then becomes not my own heart but another person or people that are standing in the way of my desire.  Within the church we have expectations, whether they are reasonable or not.  If those expectations are not fulfilled, we ourselves feel unfulfilled.  Someone has to pay.  Thus, passive-aggressive behavior, sins of the tongue, and bitterness begin to consume us.

            Let me entertain a question:  Are your desires and expectations so important to you that they have become your idols?  In other words, is your happiness dependent upon what another person does or does not do?  If so, you have crossed over into that arena of idolatry and conflict is not far behind.  In his fine book on conflict, The Peacemaker, Ken Sande describes the progression of an idol.  Conflict, he says, begins with some kind of desire, and if it is unmet, moves to being a demand.  Our idolatrous demands usually lead to judging other people.  After all, if you really care about me you will meet my desires.  Finally, the progression ends in punishment, typically by simply withdrawing from a relationship with the intent of hurting another.

            The only legitimate and biblical answer to all this crud is grace.  Finding our true and lasting satisfaction in God alone is the only way to deal with the idols that we hanker to bow down to.  John Piper has said that “sin is what you do when you are not fully satisfied in God.”  Returning to the foot of the cross and receiving the grace of God’s forgiveness helps us to not only experience personal contentment, but frees us to give grace to the people for whom we think stand in the way of how we think things ought to be done.

            So, before we point the finger at another person let’s first take a good look at our own hearts.  

Before we jump to interpreting and misinterpreting another’s motives, let’s examine what is going on with our own desires.  A good place to start is looking in the mirror.  Maybe today is the day that you need to leave your religious offering on the altar and go reconcile with that person you have a problem with.  Or perhaps it has been too long since you cracked open your bible, and you need to be reminded again that it is the person who looks intently into God’s Word that experiences freedom and is blessed in what they do.

            May the peace of Christ overshadow us all as we seek grace in all things.

Observing the Sabbath

             At a conference many years ago I heard the late Dr. Howard Hendricks, who was a professor at Dallas Seminary, tell a story of being picked up from the airport for a speaking engagement by a local pastor.  This pastor, in the course of conversation in the car, droned on about how he worked hard for the Lord.  He bragged about laboring seven days a week because, as he put it, “the devil never takes a day off.”  Dr. Hendricks’ was known for his pithy comebacks, and so he calmly replied to the over-functioning pastor:  “Gee, I didn’t know Satan was your model for ministry!”

            Somehow pastors and committed church leaders and servants have gotten the wrong-headed idea that working long hours and doing ministry every day of the week with no break is godly.  Needless to say, burn-out among church leaders is common.  Every day pastors walk away from their churches never to enter vocational ministry again.  Loyal church members might put so much effort into their ministries that eventually they quit, unable to do any more due to sheer overwork.  The pressure of responsibility, fear of failure, perfectionist impulses, and the just plain stress of dealing with people and conflict can all contribute to crack-ups and breakdowns, both emotionally and physically.  Those in leadership find the shame of failure too unbearable to let up on the gas pedal, and so keep going day after day worried that they might be letting someone down.  But the irony is that the constant movement only leads to an eventual and abrupt stop. 

            There is, however, a very biblical answer:  observe the Sabbath.  And there is a clear theological reason for it:  God himself rested from all his work.  It sounds easy.  It is anything but easy.  Our society prizes hard work and self-sufficient behavior.  To need a day, an entire day of Sabbath rest is counter-intuitive to our current Western cultural sensibilities.  Some months back I asked my church to help me in keeping a Sabbath each and every week by contacting me and calling me, if at all possible, on the six days of the week that I am working.  To be honest, it wasn’t easy for me to say.  Furthermore, some of my parishioners didn’t like what I said.  They mistakenly thought I must not like my job.  People who don’t like their jobs have no problem staying away from work.  But most pastors, including me, love what they do and enjoy being ministers of the Word.  It is hard to stay away.  Yet, if we are to take the Scriptures seriously, all of us, whether preacher or parishioner, pastor or pew-sitter, will avoid loading up our Sabbath day with all kinds of work.  Instead, we will rest – really rest!  We will use the time to restfully connect with and worship God, take leisurely walks with family, enjoy good friends over a meal, and, of course, delight in a well-deserved nap.

            It is time to stop making excuses, engaging in ridiculous hermeneutical gymnastics, and offering crazy rationalizations for neglecting a very clear scriptural command:  obey the Sabbath.  For many a church leader, finding hope in the midst of darkness and seeing a light at the end of the tunnel begins with putting in the planner a weekly Sabbath to the Lord.  The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.  Wise and rightly ordered priorities come from well-rested Christians.  The Sabbath affords an opportunity to know God in ways that we cannot on the other six days.  So, may you rest well and know God better.

On Loving the Triune God

Each year on the Christian calendar there is a Sunday set aside to especially focus on and celebrate the Trinity.  This year Trinity Sunday is May 26.  While every Sunday is a celebration of our triune God, Trinity Sunday helps us to remember the mystery, power, and beauty of the Father, Son, and Spirit – three persons, one God.  Both our identity and mission are completely wrapped-up in who God is.  We are baptized into the name of all three persons of the Trinity.  Our worship together is an expression of the unity and common purpose of the church.

            Everything comes down to God, to the Father, Son, and Spirit.  The distinctive manner in which we are to live is to be an expression of the triune God who exists in perfect unity, harmony, love, and mission.  Whether it is in our families, our neighborhoods, our jobs, or our church, God wants to exercise his very personhood through us.

            The Scripture says that our triune God is love (1 John 4:16).  His nature and purpose is love itself.  The reason we are to love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength is that God himself is love.  As people created in the image and likeness of God, there is within us a deep desire to know and love God.  Yet, it is possible to lose touch with this primal instinct to love God.  We may be so familiar with hearing about God that we go about our days not really knowing Him, going through the motions of Christianity but doing it without love.  Like spiritual zombies we might walk about the earth, but are really dead to what is going on in God’s world.

            As Christians, our first love is Jesus.  We may live moral lives, operate with sound ethical principles on our jobs, and diligently serve family and church but miss the heart and soul of loving God.  Jesus himself said to the church at Ephesus whom had performed good deeds, that they had forsaken their first love (Revelation 2:4).  Paul put it this way to the church at Corinth:  “If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:3).

            We are able to love because the Father first loved us, sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins, and gave us His Spirit in order to display God’s love toward one another (1 John 4:10-13).  As we think about and take the time to meditate on the blessed Holy Trinity, His love takes root in our hearts and then overflows toward others.

            We know from the Lord Jesus that all of Scripture hangs on the dual command to love God and neighbor (Matthew 22:37-40).  This has been understood throughout church history as the Great Commandment.  We also know from our Lord Jesus that the supreme task of the church is to make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:19).  This has been rightly discerned through Christian history as the Great Commission.  We are, then, to have a “Great Commitment” to the Great Commandment and the Great Commission.  Why?  Because our great triune God - Father, Son, and Spirit - exists as a community of love and desires that His love extend to every kind of person throughout all the earth.

            A crucial question for church leaders and committed believers is:  how do we, in God’s 21^st century world, faithfully and obediently live into this calling we have been given by our Lord?  How do we effectively engage this primal quest of loving God, loving one another, and loving our neighbor? Let us all seek to discern fresh ways of being faithful to this fundamental calling.

            May the God who is and who is to come fill all our hearts with faith as we journey together on the way of love.