September 14, 2008
Morning Worship
Text: Deuteronomy 6:5
Subject: Loving God
Title: Because He First Loved Me
Last week I spoke to you about letting your love for others be manifest in your flesh. If we are ever going to impact the world for Christ they have to know that the church cares about them – not just when they show up at our doorstep, but also by going out to minister to them. That is really the love of God working through us.
We know that we have God’s love in us because Jesus Christ has poured out His life for us and we have received Him into our hearts by faith. We sing the song, “I love Him, I love Him, because He first loved me, and purchased my salvation on Calvary’s tree.”
In the King James Version of the Bible, the word translated love is used over 175 times. 160 of those times the original word is agapeo or agape referring to the kind of love that God has for us. It is a forgiving love that holds no grudges. It is an all-encompassing love that removes our sin from us no matter how badly we have acted. It is an undeserving love that he gives us because of grace.
Now I want to take a step in a different direction for just a minute. If God has poured out His love for us (and He has) then how does that love affect us? I mean is it the kind of love that just makes us feel good about ourselves, all warm and cuddly, and then we just go about our own business until we need another good feeling? No! God’s love touches every part of our humanity – spirit, soul and body.
And that’s where we wanted to get to today. In the scriptures God calls us to love Him with the same kind of love with which He loves us – agape love. That means when we love Him in return we are supposed to do so with every part of our being – body, soul and spirit. Jeremiah 17:10, “I the LORD search the heart and examine the mind, to reward a man according to his conduct…”
Let’s look today to see what the scriptures say about how we can love God in return for His love for us.
5Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.
Lord, open our eyes to see and our ears to hear what the Spirit is saying to the church.
I. LOVE THE LORD WITH ALL YOUR HEART. What does it mean to love God with all your heart? Seven times in the KJV the phrase “with all your heart” is used. In each of those instances the word heart comes from the Hebrew word that means the heart as the most interior organ or the inner most part of a man – the inner man. It is a man’s spirit that is at the center of his being. So if we are referring to the heart of a man as being the center of who he really is, then it is his spirit that defines who he is. I want to share with you some of the things that accompany that kind of love – love from the spirit of a man. Deuteronomy 11:13, So if you faithfully obey the commands I am giving you today—to love the LORD your God and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul—14then I will send rain on your land in its season, both autumn and spring rains, so that you may gather in your grain, new wine and oil. 15I will provide grass in the fields for your cattle, and you will eat and be satisfied. If you are loving the Lord from your spirit - that is the innermost part of your being – if your love for Him goes down deep, more than just saying you love Him or feeling your love for Him – if it is truly coming from the spirit man, then you can expect blessings. Verse 14 says that the Lord will send autumn and spring rains or early and latter rain. The latter rain can be seen as the outpouring of the Holy Spirit into the lives of believers as the love the Lord and seek to draw closer to Him at all costs. Now, the only way that you can love the Lord with all your heart, or spirit man, is to have a relationship with Him through Jesus Christ. There is no other way that anyone can love Him, because it is through that relationship that mankind, in his brokenness through sin, can be restored to God. Jeremiah 29:13, You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. 14I will be found by you,” declares the LORD, “and will bring you back from captivity. God will deliver those from the bondage of sin who seek Him. I want you to notice what happens when you seek Him with all your heart. Going back to our original verse - 5Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. – What happens in the other parts of your human existence – outside of the spirit man – flows from the spirit man. Matthew 12:34, For out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks. What you have in your spirit will flow out into your speech. Now look at what Romans 10:17 says, So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. Where does real faith stem from? Is it from the mind or emotions? Is it in your actions – the physical body? No it is from the spirit of a man but it flows into both the mind (soul) and the body. The word translated “Hearing” means both to hear and to understand. You hear with your physical ears and understand with your mind but it flows from the spirit.
II. LOVE THE LORD WITH ALL YOUR SOUL. The “soul” of a man is often misunderstood. It is a complicated study but I will try to simplify it as much as possible. Mark 8:34-37, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. 35For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it. 36What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul? 37Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul? I want to take note of two words, life and soul. whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it. When I look at this passage I see the word life as referring to who a person is. If we want to hang on to our lives (thoughts, intellect or our emotions or everything that is represented in our non-physical man) then ultimately we will lose it and everything else. But if we are willing to lose our lives for the sake of Christ and the gospel, we will preserve them as well as everything else. You see we are willing to give up our character, our righteousness, our emotions in order to be who Christ has called us to be. Now look at verse 36. What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul? The words “gain the whole world” refers to that part of a man that we were just talking about – the life – who a man is. Now look at the words that follow - forfeit his soul. By reading this verse the way it is written in the English it would appear that it is saying that if you live for yourself that you lose eternal life – your soul. But I want to show you something interesting. The words that are translated “life” and “soul” in these verses are the same word in the original Greek’ psuche – sookay. That is where we get our word ‘psyche”. Webster’s dictionary defines psyche as the mind, both conscious and unconscious. That is why the Holy Spirit wrote through Paul in Romans 12:2, Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. You see, when we allow what has happened to the spirit man to flow outward into our lives through our thoughts and emotions these things happen. 1) We give up the world. We aren’t worried about gain the whole world. We aren’t concerned with saving our lives. 2) We are being transformed. You are being changed. 1 Corinthians 3:18, 18And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, Where does it come from? … which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. Romans 8:16, 16The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. 3) That testimony of the Holy Spirit connecting to our spirits enables us to renew our minds. You see, once again, the proof that what is taking place in the inner man naturally flows outward to be the agent of change in our lives.
III. LOVE THE LORD WITH ALL YOUR STRENGTH. Now we come down to the part of man that everyone is familiar with. It is the physical man or the natural man. I had about a forty-five minute with some Mormon evangelists on Friday. We sat and talked and they tried to convince me they were right and I told them that if they had to add anything to the scriptures they missed what was important in the scriptures. You know one of the things that they were pretty insistent on is that you have to be baptized in order to be saved. There is a small amount of truth in the things they said, but they kept adding works to grace for the basis of salvation. But that small amount of truth is this, that what has happened in your inner man on the spiritual plane is expected to play out in your natural man. It doesn’t have anything to do with your being saved, but it is evidence that you have been saved. Paul said in Galatians 2:21, I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!” I think that is a spiritual lesson we learned two weeks ago when the Holy Spirit showed up in such a powerful way at the altar and people began to respond to Him in the physical realm. How do you love the Lord in your body? By listening to the word; by acting on the word; by standing on the word. by letting the joy of the Lord be your strength. ; by understanding that your strength is based on the spiritual truth that God’s weakest point (He doesn’t have one) is stronger than your strongest point. I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me.” The life in the body stems from faith in the spirit man. 2 Corinthians 4:11, For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body.
When you stop and think about loving the Lord with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength you realize that our love for God must be in evidence from every part of our being the same way His love for us touches every part of our being. The one thing we can be sure of is this; that if God’s love touches our inner man our response will flow out of that inner man into our thought process and then into our physical bodies. As you make your way to the altars today to spend time seeking how to respond to His love would you just begin to worship Him and ask Him how He would have you respond? Some may weep with joy. Some may laugh with joy. Some may speak in tongues. Others may be led by the Spirit to pray for others. Whatever the Lord would have you do would you respond in the flesh? That’s the way He wants it.
There was a Michael W. Smith song from the nineties that said it like this.
She asked him for forever
And a promise that would last
He said, babe, you know I love you
But I can’t commit to that
She said love isn’t love
’til you give it away
A father lived in silence
Saw his son become a man
There was a distance felt between them
’cause he could not understand
That love isn’t love
’til you give it away
You gotta give it away
CHORUS:
As we live
Moving side by side
May we learn to give
Learn to sacrifice
We can entertain compassion
For a world in need of care
But the road of good intentions
Doesn’t lead to anywhere
’cause love isn’t love
’til you give it away
You gotta give it away
CHORUS
BRIDGE:
Love is like a river
Flowing down from the giver of life
We drink from the water
And our thirst is no longer denied
You gotta give it away
Chorus
There was a man who walked on water
He came to set the people free
He was the ultimate example
Of what love can truly be
’cause his love was his life
And he gave it away
You gotta give it away
How are you going to give it back?
