Love

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.  Matthew 22:37

I use the word “love” to describe how I feel about many different things in my life. I love my wife, I love pizza and I love the Red Sox. Clearly, I love my wife differently than I love those other things! But my point is that we tend to use the word pretty casually sometimes. As I thought about that recently, I considered how casually we say that we love God. If someone were to ask you if you love God, most or all of you reading this blog would say, “Yes! I love God. Of course!” But can I ask you today to think about what that means? Will you take a few moments out of your busyness to really consider what it means in your life? To ask yourself to what depth, or to what extent, your love for God reaches?

The Pharisees had been watching Jesus, and decided to try to use the hundreds of regulations in the Jewish law to trip Him up. They figured that no matter which one He chose to say was the most important, they would have a reason to show how that was the wrong answer. Of course, He knew what they were doing, and challenged them with the fact that everything we do flows out of our love for God. Is your whole heart consumed with your love for God? Does your soul long to hear from Him? Is your mind being renewed daily (Romans 12:2) by the Truth of His Word? There is nothing casual about God’s love for you. There certainly shouldn’t be anything casual about your love for Him.

-Pastor Mike