Golden Nugget - How to Love the Lord with your Strength & Worship with Terry MacAlmon

We have been discussing this passage in Mark 12:30 in the last three articles: And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.

During our discussions, we have been going out from the viewpoint that loving the Lord involves sacrificing and giving.

The way you love the Lord with your strength is by doing things, by using your strength.  Don Francisco sang in one of his songs that love is not a feeling, but an act of your will.  You choose to do something in obedience to the Lord.  Jesus said in John 14:15: If you love me, you will keep my commandments, in John 14:21: Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me. The one who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love them and show myself to them, in John 14:23: Jesus answered him, "If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him, and in John 15:10: If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love.

       

Four times in a matter of minutes He said that doing what He says proves that we love Him.  Can it be that He considers doing His will to be important?  Then, seconds later, he said something that we seriously should consider doing.  He said in John 15:13 Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.  Many of us may now have thought:  ‘I’m so glad I’m His friend, for He laid down His life for me.’  However, verse 14 comes next: You are my friends if you do what I command you. 

Ouch… If we do not do what he tells us to do, every moment of every day, we are not His friends. And maybe we do not count among those He has laid down His life for? 

This, however, can be played to both sides.  If you consider Jesus to be your friend, you should lay down your life for Him.  What does that mean?  It means sacrificing things you’d like to do, things you enjoy, things you indulge in to satisfy your desires, therefore everything that defines your life according to your will, in exchange for what He wants, what He expects of you.  This is what the apostles did.  They sacrificed their careers, their pleasures, and their carnal desires so the gospel can go out and it could get to you.  How about us doing it as well?

Jesus did the same.  As we saw earlier, He said in John 15:10: …just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love.  How did He keep His father’s commandments? 

1.   He sacrificed His heavenly comforts and came to earth to identify with man.

2.   Every day, during His early-morning prayer time, He heard from His Father what He should do that day to serve the people whom His Father loves and He did it sacrificially.  He did not first buy everything He needed to live a comfortable life and from there did a few things to appear good.  No, He said: “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” (Matthew 8:20)

3.   He died a horrible death to set you free from the bondage of sin.  This, He did not really want to do.  He prayed in the garden regarding the death He was about to die: “Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.” (Mark 14:36)  He did not suffer and die as a hero, but as an obedient child who proved His love for His Father through His obedient actions, often against His will.

Jesus summarised the life He expects you and me to live in these words: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.  For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.  For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?” (Matthew 16:24-26).

        We read in Ephesians 2:10: For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

        If God went to all the trouble to prepare good works for us to glorify His name, who are you and I to choose to live in comfort and disobedience?

        Let’s love the Lord our God with all our strength.

Let's worship with Terry MacAlmon