Loving God

Matthew 22:37-39, "Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. 38 This is the first and great commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’"

On Monday and Tuesday of this week I was given the awesome opportunity of sitting with two young men and listen to them describe what God was teaching them during their times of prayer, mediation and devotion. It was both challenging as well as inspiring as I listened to these brothers in Christ describe the revelation of Christ that was taking place in their lives. The scripture passage that I shared with you today was a part of my devotional reading this morning and I felt impressed that I needed to write about our need to "love God" more fully and completely. After all, we have no trouble (in most situations) believing that God truly loves us but do we believe that God desires for us to love Him with all of our might, passion, desire, energy, etc.?

I shared these words in an earlier tweet this morning; "Insecure times are great times for the Gospel." Listening to the early morning news as they review the trouble that took place in the world on Tuesday brings a sense of insecurity. We soon realize that our "world" as we once knew it is in serious trouble in so many areas of our society. This blog post today is not necessarily aimed at identifying these areas as much as it is aimed in asking each of us this question; "Where are we looking to combat these feelings of insecurity?"

It certainly appears that no one individual or even a group of individuals have answers to the problems that we are facing around the world. But does not reality teach us that people have never really had the answers? Humanity may have created or prepared "stop-gap" measures that alleviated some of the concerns/problems/anxieties we face but they never really provided a complete resolution to these matters. EX: How many wars have been fought just in my lifetime? Our human response only brought a temporary relief but it never fully resolved the situation that we were facing.

Isn't it easy for these words of Jesus found in Matthew to get lost in the discussion about the challenges of life? We "love" so many things and we "love" so many people but do we truly love God and do we truly love our neighbor as we should? Those questions can only be answered by each of us as we allow the Spirit to examine our hearts!! The message of the Gospel still provides the answers that we need!!