The Ultimate Love Affair (2) - with all your heart!

We are using a couple of Blogs to talk about the meaning and impact of the Great Commandments:
Love God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ And: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself!
Without a love affair with God, all that we do becomes meaningless. Without a love affair with God, we lack the motivation and the passion to do his work. There is a frantic need for a passionate, hot-hearted, intense, consuming love affair with God in this world.
This is the one and only love affair that will take you to heaven, even before you die!

But how is this love relationship to be worked out? There are many similarities with any other love affair, (yes I know its not exactly the same as falling in love with a partner!)
Jesus gives us four ways to work it out: with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind and all your strength.

Today we hear that we have to love the Lord our God with all our heart.
To love the Lord with all your heart means to love him with pure devotion. It’s not enough to give Christ a (little) place in our hearts. No, we are called to love him with all of our heart.

Remember how it was when you first met that one special person who captured your heart. Remember how you could not hide it and wanted to talk about it to whoever would listen? Remember the look in your eyes when the “beloved” walked into the room? Remember that you were thinking of the loved one all the time, wanted to make phone calls all the time and wrote letters every day? You longed to be with the one you love with all your heart! This person was a high priority in your life. Hope all still remember what we call “being in love" is and how wonderful it is. Being in love is a breathtaking experience. Many would say they were rushed off their feet by it.

Well, to love God with all your heart is a lot like that, and more! It means that your heart is totally devoted to him. It means that you are faithful to him. And it certainly means that God is the most important Person in your life! It means that you cannot stand being separated from him!

Remember the glorious experience of pure devotion when we first became Christians! The Bible calls it our "first love." Hope you remember it — the thrill of meeting Jesus for the first time, and for the first time understanding his love for you as well? You came to him, received his forgiveness and experienced his unconditional acceptance. For the first time you understood why people who know the Lord cannot stop talking about him, working for him, worshipping him, praising him!

How could you help but love him back? Remember the time when you gave Jesus your heart? Your whole heart! The wonder of being a follower of Jesus is, that this amazing love can be fresh every morning. This amazing love for Jesus brings us to love God, who gave us his Son, with all our heart! This love for God is the gift of the Holy Spirit who showed us the precious love of Jesus!
We never have to be deprived of our first love for the Lord. We can love him with all our heart till the end!
Remember the words of the Hymn writer?
Amazing love! how can it be,
that Thou, my God, should die for me?
My chains fell off, my heart was free;
I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.(
Next Wednesday we will share on what it means to love God with all our soul!)

Specialists in trivialities.

In Mark 12: 18 – 27, Jesus confronts the unbelieving Sadducees who were notorious for their lack of perspective. They were too focused on their own social status to focus in on the things which were really important. They had limited vision, were nearsighted, saw only the human dimension. The Sadducees rejected the supernatural, because they couldn't understand it. They didn't believe in the resurrection because it defied human logic. They were mistaken indeed. So Jesus confronts the Sadducees concerning their error regarding the resurrection. And in this passage, he points them to what really counts.

Mark 12: 24. "Jesus said to them, 'Is this not the reason you are mistaken, that you do not understand the Scriptures, or the power of God?"

The Scriptures were given to reveal the power of God, yes, the character of God. It introduces a lost world to the one and only God we should worship and serve – the Creator of all things and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. When we keep this, the main thing in the Scriptures, the main thing of our faith and our lives, we will not be mistaken and we will not be misled, to wrongly follow peripheral issues and loose sight of God’s purpose with his revelation to us. The whole Bible was given to reveal God to us. The Bible testifies of Jesus Christ, who came to this world to reintroduce the almighty God to his people.

Do you find yourself getting sidetracked on minor issues? Did you become a specialist in trivialities? It is so easy to get sidetracked, instead of concentrating on understanding the focused message of the Scriptures and thus experiencing the power of God. If it happens, we will be limited in our vision. We will end up mistaken in our conclusions. And our spiritual life will be constantly frustrated, because we will continue to see through human eyes and perceive through human understanding.

The challenge for us is to shape our thinking in the light of God's truth about God's power, love and the salvation he affords. As we do, a whole new world will open up to us.
We desperately need to be students of God’s Word as followers of Jesus Christ. Nothing less, and nothing more!

The ultimate love affair

Love is not easy to define! It may be the topic that is the most thought about, written about, talked about, dreamt about and sung about. It has been called the “thing that makes the world go round” and "a many splendored thing," and many other things. The love story has been written about in poetry, in songs, in literature, in novels and for movies.

Yet it is most of the time not defined clearly, simply and often not even practically. Love has been confused with passion, sexual attraction, the need for mystical experiences, the answer to loneliness, and many other needs of men and women. These may be needs closely related to love, but not one of them is quite love itself.

But one thing is clear - everyone knows they need love in their lives. Everyone wants to be loved and wants to love. And many look for love in the wrong place and has been hurt, devastated and ruined by an unfulfilled need for love.

Most people would try everything to find real love. Many tried "free love," simply to find that it was not free at all and cost them their education, their youth, their purity and their self respect. “Free love” is expensive! It can cost you your marriage and the privilege to see your children grow up. You may find that extra-marital "love" affairs are dead-end streets and that at its best leads to nothing and at its worst leads to death itself.

But there is one love affair which is good for us, that we need to survive in life and that can teach us the true meaning of what love really is! There is one love affair that is worth dying for and that makes life worth living. The One who prescribed, even commanded, this love affair was Jesus. It is a love affair with God.

A scribe asked Jesus to explain, in a nutshell, the bottom line of what it meant to follow God.
In his reply to the Scribe, Jesus pulls together two well-known passages of Old Testament Scripture:
One of the teachers of the law came and asked Jesus, "Of all the commandments, which is the most important?" "The most important one," answered Jesus, "is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these." (Mark 12:28-34)

The first commandment concerns itself with love for God; the other with love for your neighbour. We have nicknamed them the Great Commandments. Everything written in the Bible boils down to these two great commandments, and the key is found in these words: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. This is the top priority. This is where it all begins. This is where true living begins. This is where understanding love that is real, begins! This is where spirituality, union with God, positive thinking, great personal relations, exciting church membership, successful parenting and a glorious marriage begins. Loving God is the source of a dynamic, caring, meaningful life!

As we consider the meaning and impact of the Great Commandments over the next couple of blogs - please listen carefully. Because without a love affair with God, all that we do becomes meaningless. Without a love affair with God, we lack the motivation and the passion to do his work, and any other meaningful work as well.
Of one thing I am certain - there is today a frantic need for a passionate, hot-hearted, intense, consuming love affair with God.
This is the one and only love affair that will take you to heaven, even before you die!

The authority of Christ in my life.

A few days after Jesus cleansed the temple, he returned to Jerusalem. So the chief priests and scribes and elders came to him with a question: "By what authority are you doing these things, or, who gave you this authority to do these things?" In essence they were saying to him, "Who do you think you are?" They didn't believe in Christ, and for this reason they questioned his right to rule and reign over them and teach them.

The question this passage (Mark 11: 27 – 33) asks us, is, do we also question the authority of God over our lives? Do we question the right of God to be LORD in our lives? When Christ speaks to our hearts, are we impressed with the authority of his word? Do we feel that it is optional and do we feel we can choose whether to obey Christ or not to obey?

Christ's word is not optional in our lives. His authority is not limited over us. When Christ speaks, we must do what he says. To do anything less is, in effect, to question God's right to the totality of our lives. When we question the authority of Jesus in our lives, when we question the authority of God's word in our lives, we tread upon dangerous, thin ice. Before you know it, the ice breaks and you are plunged into the icy depths where one is cut off from the life of God.

But whosoever surrender to Christ and humbly follow him, and love him, live in complete fellowship with God. The warmth and the light of his kind presence direct and keep us, always, until the end.

Reading the Bible for personal application. (4)

This is the last devotion about the personal application of what we read in the Bible. In the first three devotions we concluded that:
1. The Bible was written to others—but speaks to you too.
2. And, the Bible is about God—but draws you in. We have to look for what the passage says about God and recognise why it is straightforward to you that this passage has relevance for you personally, today.
3. When you recognise an unknown passage as a straightforward passage, it will generalize or summarize in a way that it invites personal application and relevance. Think, for example, about promises of God for all believers, especially those that we came to know as the Gospel promises – about salvation, redemption, forgiveness and reconciliation with God in Jesus.

But now, how to work out the implications for me, of less-direct Passages?
Lets consider two examples to help us understand that every passage holds a message for us. An extreme challenge to personal application is a genealogy or census. These are directly spoken, irrelevant to your life. Your name is not on the list. The reasons for the list disappeared long ago. You gain nothing by knowing that “Koz fathered Anub, Zobebah, and the clans of Aharhel” (1 Chron. 4: 8). But when you learn to listen with an open heart and mind you may find good things taught, even here, for example:
• The Lord writes down names in his book of life – even mine.
• Families and communities matter to him.
• God remains faithful to his promises through long history.
• He enlists individuals, like me, for his saving grace.
• These genealogies form part of the history and background of Jesus. If you are in Jesus, his family becomes your family and God’s promises to them become very personal promises to you!

The second example is Psalm 21: 1. “O Lord, in your strength the king rejoices”? The psalm is not talking about you. You are not a king in the way that David was. But it does connect with you.
David lived and wrote these words, but Jesus Christ most fully lived, is now living, and now fulfils this entire psalm. He is the greatest King, singing this song of deliverance; and he is also the almighty divine Lord. We know from the perspective of the NT that this psalm is explicitly about Jesus. And you, who are in Christ, share in the triumph of your King.
Having made the psalm your own, in Christ, you may now make it your experience too. You could adapt it into the first person, inserting “I/me/my” in place of “the king” and “he/him/his.”

Learning to wisely apply the harder, less obvious passages has a surprising benefit. Your whole Bible now “applies personally.” This Lord spoken about in the Bible, is your God – get to know him better from him dealing with believers that lived ages ago; this history in the Bible, is also your history; these people became your people; this Saviour has made you one of his own, to participate in who he is and be blessed by what he does. Venture out into the remotest regions of Scripture, seeking to know, love and trust God more.

The Bible, as holy Scripture, is the only certain source of God’s words. Paul’s statement that “All Scripture is breathed out by God” (2 Tim3:16) means that all the words of the Bible are God’s words to us. Therefore if we want to hear our Creator and Lord speaking to us, we must continually give attention to all the passages of the Bible, asking what it says to you, today.

Jesus, after defeating Satan with three quotations from Deuteronomy, declared, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matt 4: 4.)
The Scriptures were food to Jesus. Jesus’ dependence on the sufficiency and potency of God’s Word shows us that every word God shares with us, has meaning and application in our lives. What applies to Jesus implies meaning to me who has been saved by and in Jesus Christ.

(For this 4 part series I relied heavily on articles by David Powlison on this topic!)

God is in his temple!

Seven hundred fifty years before Christ the prophet Isaiah went to the temple to worship and pray. The Lord opened his spiritual eyes and he became aware of God’s presence in this place of worship. He could see how the glory of God filled the temple. The train of God’s robe was like carpeting on the temple floor. Above the glorious presence of the Lord, seraphim were hovering. They are six-winged spiritual beings. With two wings they fly, and with the remaining wings they cover their faces and feet in humble admiration of our awesome God of perfect holiness. Isaiah heard in stunned silence, that they chanted to one another, "Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of Hosts. The whole earth is full of his glory." (Isaiah 6:3)

The smoke of the incense burnt by the priests filled the temple. And the holiness of God was as thick as the smoke. Isaiah fell to his knees. And in all humility cried out, "Woe is me, for I am ruined! Because I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips. For my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts." (Isaiah 6:5) Isaiah was amazed, yes smitten, by the glorious presence of the holy God in the place where his people worshipped him.
Our awesome God was there. That was what kind of place the temple was.

This is a dramatic statement about the importance of worship. Where two or three are together in the name of Christ, our God is present – just as he was in the temple in the days of Isaiah.
God desires communion. What he wants is for us to fellowship with him, for us to be awe-struck by him, to love him, to honour and glorify him. That we may serve him with all of our hearts. “Having church” is so much more than going through the motions. It is coming into a divine encounter with the living God. An encounter that changes our lives.

Through real worship and service, we are changed, and then our lives can touch the lives of others. True worship and service are living testimonies to the power of God - to us and to the world.

Is there more than an appearance of Christianity about us? Is there substance? Is our worship real? Is fruitfulness the result of our holy communion with God? By God's grace it can be.

Nothing beats a good organ and an excellent organist!

The Sacraments

Christ ordained two sacraments: baptism and holy communion. They respectively succeed the two sacraments found in the Old Testament, being circumcision and the Passover.

The same Word of God that addresses us verbally through Scripture, preaching and personal witness, comes to us visibly and tangibly through the sacraments. The sacraments are not just symbols of the Word or visual aids to it, but visible, material forms of the Word itself that apply, confirm and seal the promises of the gospel to each individual believer. To all who receive these promises with open hearts, Christ comes with saving grace in the power of his Spirit.

As the Holy Spirit awakens faith by means of preaching, teaching and the personal witness of believers to Christ, so by means of the sacraments the same Spirit confirms our faith, binds us to Christ and through the faith that grows from the work of the Word through preaching and the sacraments in our lives, Christ establishes our salvation.

Jesus Christ alone saves. Just as no printed or spoken human words themselves can save, so no water, bread, wine or outward ritual can save us. Yet Christ chooses to come to us wrapped in human words and in the elements of water, bread and wine. As the very Word of God, Christ is the essential content of the sacraments, just as he is of Scripture, preaching and personal witness.

The spoken Word, experienced in the reading and preaching of the Word, in singing, worship, praise and prayer, constitutes our relationship with Christ. In the same way the sacraments make our faith relationship with Jesus stronger and more relevant to our lives, by making clear the message of God’s offer of grace. Only by trusting in God’s promise and assurance, signified by the sacraments, do we receive this saving grace that they promise and confirm to us.

Jesus chose to enter into this faith relationship with us through the faith that grows when we hear and believe his Word. Jesus therefore commanded us to celebrate his Supper, because he longs for an ever growing and more intimate relationship with us. May we be found faithful in answering his call