Archive for July, 2010

7-26-10

Jesus said, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.” (Mk. 12:30) What does it look like to love God with all our heart and mind? God is Love who burns as an all-consuming fire of jealousy. He wants to take over our life and to consume us from the inside out by dominating our affections, thoughts and words. This love is not passive but passionate. The more we seek to live for love, the more broken we will be with true humility and seeking to obey Him.

God wants us to love Him with all of our heart and mind, because He loves us with all of His heart and mind. It is our debt and gift to love God. His requirement for us to love Him is to our great benefit.

Jesus wants to reveal Himself to us as more than our Savior (forgiver), healer, and master, but as the jealous Bridegroom God who will not relent in His pursuit of us until He has all of our heart. “For the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God (Ex.34:14). We earnestly ask Jesus to come to us as the God of jealous love who demands everything. As we cry out, “Lord, I want more of you,” Jesus responds by saying, “I want more of you.”

To love God means we seek to love Jesus in a deep and focused way, not just “on the run” as we are seeking more money or good things to happen in our lives. It is to desire to encounter Him more than anything else, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” (Mt. 5:9)

No one else can give God all “your love” except for you. A unique part of Jesus’ inheritance has been entrusted by the Father to you specifically. It is the love that only you can give. We only get one opportunity to do this in a fallen world where love for Jesus is both costly and rare.

We set our affections on anything we choose. We can determine some of our emotions by setting the heart. We change our mind and God changes our heart (emotions). Our emotions will follow whatever we set ourselves to pursue. We can set our heart to be filled with zeal for God. “Because he has set his love upon Me, therefore I will deliver him(Ps. 91:14).

We can intentionally set our affections to love Jesus. This requires we remove everything that diminishes our affections for Him. This requires that we are focused on pursuing love for Jesus more than gaining things and influence. We set our heart to love Him by committing to walk in obedience even when it is costly.

We set our heart for loving God by regularly asking for supernatural help to love Jesus. As you seek Him this week, ask God to pour His love for Jesus into your heart and to direct the reins of your heart into His love.

Blessings,

Gary

7-19-10

Jesus said, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. (Mk. 12:30) But what does love look like? It is more than sentiment or our extravagant expressions in a worship service, and we cannot be content with love for Jesus that is merely rhetoric. True love requires heart responses with follow through.

We must love God on God’s terms. Jesus defined loving God as being deeply rooted in a spirit of obedience (Deut. 6:1-9). There is no such thing as loving God without seeking to obey His Word. Loving God requires more than singing to Him or merely having sentimental feelings about Him. “If you love Me, keep my commandments… He who has My commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves Me… If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word” (Jn.14:15-23). Jesus’ commands are all related to love. He commands us to stay near His heart, to seek His face, to choose love over lust, to receive eternal rewards, and to be vessels of love to others by serving.

There are four stages of growing in love. The first is receiving revelation of the love that God has for us. “We love Him because He first loved us.” (I Jn. 4:19) The foundational truth that equips us to love God is to know and feel His affection for us. God loves us in the way that God loves God. Jesus feels the same intensity of love for us that the Father feels for Him. This is the ultimate revelation of our worth. This truth gives us the right to stand before God with confidence as one of His favorites. “As the Father loved Me, I also have loved you; abide in My love. (Jn. 15:9)

The second stage of love is receiving the Father’s love for Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit. “I declared Your name…that the love with which You loved Me may be in them” (Jn. 17:26). We were created with a longing to be wholehearted and know the joy in loving Him. There is nothing more satisfying than having the power to give the deepest affection of our heart to God and to be loyal in love. We soar in and long to posses this power instead of being stuck in boredom, passivity and compromise.

The third stage of growing in love is, loving ourselves in the grace of God. We will never love our neighbor more than we love ourselves in the grace of God. By loving ourselves, I refer to knowing what we “look like” to God, or knowing who we are in Christ as His inheritance (II Cor. 5:17), along with valuing and even rejoicing in who God made us to be physically and in our personality and gifting. “I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made…How precious are your thoughts to me. (Ps. 139: 13-17).

The forth stage of growing in love is, loving others, which is the visible measurement of our invisible love for God. Only by being energized by loving Jesus and ourselves are we able to consistently overflow in love for others (Jn. 13:34-35).

I pray this week that I may grow in the knowledge of His love for me, love for myself in His grace, and love others with His love.

Blessings,

Gary

7-12-10

Dear TC-HOP Family,

God created us to love Him in four spheres of our life which includes our heart (affections), soul (identity), mind (thoughts) and strength (resources) because He loves us this way. Over the next few weeks I would like to write about loving God by looking at the first commandment, from a teaching I have received.

Jesus said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. This is the first and great commandment.” (Mk.12:30, Mt.22:37-38) Jesus did not call it the first option, but the first command. Jesus makes it clear that cultivating love for Him is the first emphasis of the Holy Spirit. God has everything, yet He is searching for something that He still wants first. It is love He is after. He is after our heart. The mystery of our life is found in this truth.

He will supernaturally empower us to love Him. It takes God to love God. The anointing to receive God’s love and to love Him in return is the greatest gift the Spirit imparts to us. “The love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit.” (Rom. 5:5)

We must love God on His terms, according to how He defines love. Jesus wants us to love Him in a way that gives Him full leadership over our lives. We must define love on God’s terms, not by our humanistic culture that seeks love without obedience to God’s Word. There are many definitions of love, liberty and freedom in our culture that are not Biblical. Jesus defined loving God as being deeply rooted in a spirit of obedience. There is no such thing as loving God without seeking to obey His Word. “If you love Me, keep my commandments…He who has My commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves Me… If anyone loves Me, he will keep my word.” (Jn. 14:15-23)

The Sermon on the Mount (Mt. 5-7) defines love on God’s terms, and calls us to live out the eight beatitudes as we pursue hundredfold obedience. We measure our spiritual maturity by how much of the Sermon on the Mount we walk out in daily life. We measure our ministry impact by the extent to which those we minister to live out these values, not by the number of people who receive our ministry.

Cultivating love for God has the greatest impact on God’s heart and our heart. Anyone who loves Jesus will love others much more. It is the greatest calling. Some who seek to know God’s will for their life focus on knowing what they are supposed to do instead of what they are supposed to become. When we speak of wanting the greatest calling, it shouldn’t be the size of our ministry, but the size of our heart. The greatest grace we can receive is the anointing to feel God’s love and express it. This brings the greatest freedom and the greatest reward.

As we seek the Lord this week let us make it the first priority of our heart to cultivate our love for God. Come join us as we seek the Lord together at the TC-HOP.

Blessings,

Gary

Dear TC-HOP Family,

“The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering and abounding in goodness and truth…” (Ex. 34:6). When Moses asks the Lord to show him His glory, the Lord responds by revealing His emotions to Moses, assuring Moses of His character and who He is. We’ve looked at the Lord being merciful and gracious, and I now want to look at His longsuffering and goodness.

In Rom. 2:4, Paul states, “Do you despise the riches of His goodness, forbearance, and longsuffering, not knowing that the goodness of God leads you to repentance?” How patient the Lord is with us and He does not lose enthusiasm for us when we fail. His love for us is greater than the pain we cause Him when we resist Him. He suffers long with our sinful responses. As with Peter, who denied the Lord three times, Jesus comes to him after the resurrection and confirms His love and forgiveness for Peter, so He does the same with us. Knowing and understanding this gives us confidence that our repentance is never rejected. Peter may have had this in mind when he wrote in II Peter 3:9, “…He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.”

The next emotion the Lord tells Moses is that He is abounding in goodness. The Lord overflows with good plans for us. The song that is recorded most often in Scripture is, “The Lord is good, and His mercy endures forever.” Some may resist God’s mercy and goodness because it is so free that no one can ever deserve it. God’s mercy is freely offered to us because Jesus fully satisfied the claims of God’s justice by His death. Propitiation speaks of God’s justice being appeased or satisfied by the offering of the blood of Jesus so that sinners can be freely accepted by God. Rom. 3:24-26 states, “Being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood…that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.”

God shows His mercy without violating His justice. He forgives sin because He paid for it. Jesus’ propitiatory sacrifice on the cross does not cause God to love us. It removes the penalty that our sin deserves so we can experience His love in a way that is consistent with His justice.

Just as God declared His name and goodness to Moses, Jesus promised to declare God’s name or personality to us. Jesus said in John 17:26, “I have declared to them Your name, and will declare it, that the love with which You loved Me may be in them.” Not only did Jesus declare the name of the Lord to us through His character as He walked the earth, but He will continue to impart His love in us as we gain more understanding of what God is like. Paul’s prayer of revelation is like Moses’ prayer to see God’s glory. “The Father of glory, may give you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, and the eyes of your understanding being enlightened…(Eph.1:17-18) O that we would continue to cry out to the Lord as Moses did for the Lord to reveal His glory to us.

Come join us this week as we pray together at the TC-HOP.

Blessings,
Gary