Love the Lord With All Your Heart and Soul

• We love because He first loved us (1 John 4:19).
  • The God of the universe is not asking you to love something that doesn’t love. He isn’t asking you to love Him solely because He is God and superior to you. He is asking you to love Him because He loves you.
• He loved by creating and not giving up when we went against what/why He created.
  • He formed man out of the dirt with His own hands and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils (Genesis 2:7). He loves you.
• He chased us and never let us get too far away from His love.
  • Exodus 13:3 – “…Commemorate this day, the day you came out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery, because the Lord brought you out of it…”
  • 1 Peter 2:24 – “He himself bore our sins in His body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By His wounds, you have been healed.”
• This is why we love from His love – because He pursued us.
• And within loving someone there is a kind of alignment.
  • Each person has their beliefs and when you love someone there is acceptance and adoption of the other person’s beliefs.
• In this case, with loving God, His beliefs are the only ones to be adopted.
  • He created, He designed. Everything belongs to Him.
• Therefore, we must align ourselves with God’s beliefs because the human machine was built for/by/through His Word (Colossians 1:16, John 1:1).
  • Because God is superior and literally wrote the instruction manual for the human machine – as C.S. Lewis calls it – we must adopt His beliefs. God is truth (John 4:16) and if you do not agree with Him, the debate is over. He is the one who created everything and has set the truth standard.
• We broke the alignment when we decided to do our own thing. We wished to discover ourselves outside of God and found out that He is the only thing there is. He created from nothing – everything came from Him – so there is nothing but God (1 Corinthians 8:4-6). Not in the Pantheist kind of way, but as the only option. The only manual to be found is that of God’s design.
• If we love our Lord, then we adopt His beliefs and because He loves you – His creation – we must also love His creation (Matthew 22:39). This shows and leads us to the second greatest commandment. Love your God is the first, love your neighbour, the second. We love God and so we love our neighbour. He forgave us, so we forgive our neighbour.
• But that does not mean forget, nor align with everyone that believes differently. With love comes hate of anything that may come and attempt to harm or take away the one you love.
• God hates sin, and the one who does the sin (Psalms 5:4-5) but we stated above that God did not abandon us. He made a way to cleanse us, correct us.
  • So with love comes correction and discipline.
• The Scriptures are breathed out by God – they are His manual – and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16).
  • This means as we align ourselves with God’s beliefs as we love Him, we also must love our neighbour and teach, reprove, and correct if needed. Always in the love for them.