Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and
might. Is there, then, anything left for
anyone else? Only if God also
loves. The Good News is that He loves us
enough to give His Son for us. If we,
all of us who claim to be Christians, followed this one commandment we would
change the world from self-obsession to God-obsession. The things about which we expend our energy
in all forms would change dramatically.
We would care a great deal less about most things that consume us and we
would have more peace and rest because we would rest in the sovereignty of God
in all things. Jesus was quite clear on
this matter in Matthew's Gospel when He told them and us to not worry about all
the other things in our lives, including what would seem quite basic concerns,
and trust that God has all that taken care of.
If we took Him at His word, the world would see us as truly blessed.
Does hating life mean misery and suicide? Jesus didn't commit suicide, He laid down His
life willingly but He didn't take it Himself.
He considered eternity to be of more import than this life and allowed
the Father to do with His life as He willed.
Hating my life is simply realizing that sin has controlled me and living
not by my desires but for the glory of God.
It is saying to Him, whatever will glorify you is all I want to do in
this life. When we get to the place of
surrendering our lives as completely as Jesus did then we can understand Him
and our own lives aright. We can do as
Jesus did, choose to die to self and live to the Father. We can willingly lay down our claim to this
life in surrender to Him or we can continue to live for ourselves or even for
others, but if we don’t live for Him we will never truly glorify Him, no matter
how much we do for others.
"Let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence
and awe, for our God is a consuming fire."
Loving God means realizing that He is a consuming fire, powerful yet
loving. As John wrote in his first
epistle, we love Him because He first loved us.
Indeed, the writer here says that we have not come to that awesome and
terrifying mountain where the nation first met God in Exodus 19, we have come
to a city filled with worship and joy.
At once, however, we realize that this city has come under judgment
multiple times for the failure of the people to continue and persevere in that
worship. They took Him for granted,
forsook Him and were unfaithful to Him although He was never unfaithful to
them. Trusting Him is not quite enough,
it can turn into familiarity and boredom.
Worship is the antidote to that situation.
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