God Gets All Of Me

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ A very happy Tom Change Sunday to everybody in the room. You're here at 9 a.m., so you deserve an extra star on your crown today for getting up early, although you lost an extra hour of sleep today. I hope you enjoy that tonight. So glad to have you here. If it's your first time, I want to add my welcome and good morning to you. So grateful to have you and all the people that are online as well. Hope you feel a blessing today. If you have your Bible, I would invite you to turn to Mark chapter 12. We're going to use Mark's version of our text today. We'd love to have you in the scripture with me today. And if you don't have a Bible with you, that's also available in our sermon app today. A few years ago, the church gave me an incredible blessing of the gift of sabbatical. So I was gone for three months and got to do all kinds of cool things. I had promised my wife that we would take time for the two of

us to focus on our relationship. So while I was away from all my other responsibilities to invest in our marriage. So I booked us a marriage therapist in Georgia that had been highly recommended to us. And we went away for the weekend. Just the two of us stayed in an old antebellum home and the therapist came to us and had these multiple intensive sessions. Just the two of us. And in one of those early sessions, he's getting to know us as a couple. He's asking us about our relationship. And so he says, Wes, I want you to tell me about Amanda. Like, what do you appreciate about her? Tell me about your relationship with her. And I was like, okay. And so I start listening off. Man, she's a great mom. She has a phenomenal work ethic. She does a great job at the house. She's faithful. People love her. She's a servant heart. And I went through this very long list. I felt really good about myself. The counselor comes back and says, something's missing. And I'm like, what did I leave out, you know? And he turns to Amanda and he says, something's missing, Amanda.

Do you perceive what's missing? And she said, I feel like something's missing, too, but I don't know what it is. And then he turns to me and says, I noticed that you didn't say that you loved her. And of course, I, heart sank down in my stomach. And then I felt like I needed to defend myself. And I said, well, of course I love her. We're, like, I'm committed. Like, we are in this forever. And I start going through this long, you know, speech about my commitment to Amanda, our marriage, working on it, that's why we're here, all of that. To which the counselor then looked at me and said, Wes, the Pharisees were committed. What this marriage needs is more love in it. Yeah, ouch. And he was right. And I needed to hear that. I needed somebody to say that to me. Now, again, if you asked me, like, did I love Amanda, I would be like, of course I love Amanda. I'm married to Amanda. We're faithful. But I knew when he said that, he's right. I have had a lot of room to grow in my love for Amanda. And I've tried the past couple of years since that time to take big steps in that direction. And what was true in my marriage is also true in many of our walks with Christ.

You can be committed to God with love. about loving God. You can say with your mouth, I love God, I love Jesus, that's why you're here today, you came to church. But if we were really to dig down below the surface, if we were to say like, tell me about your relationship with God, tell me what it's like to be with God, and you might go through this long list of things. God has done this for me, and God has done this for me, and the cross for me, and he's been faithful to me, you could go through this long list, and to which many of us might go through that long list and never say like, and I love him because of it. And this is not a new struggle, of course. People have always struggled in their love relationship with God, Israel struggled in their love relationship with God. They had, the Pharisees had kind of identified 613 laws in the Mosaic law that they were zealous for the law, and they were devoted to the law, and yet when the son of God stood among them, the very essence and being of love, they didn't recognize him. And that's kind of scary, isn't it? The very source of love lived with them, and all they had for him was hatred. Man, I don't wanna be that. So Jesus is being tested by an expert in one of the law, and it makes total sense that they're asking him, Jesus, this question, because they're kind of coming after him to trap him and test him.

And in Mark chapter 12, verse 28, the text says, one of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating, now can you imagine what it had been like to debate with Jesus? That's not gonna go very well for you. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, of all of the commandments, which is the most important? The most important one, answered Jesus, is this. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all of your heart and with all of your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this, love your neighbor as yourself. There is no greater commandment than these. Well said, teacher, the man replied. You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. To love him with all your heart and with all your understanding, with all your strength, and to love your neighbor is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices. And when Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, you, you're not far from the kingdom of God. And from then on, no one dared ask him any more questions. So the Pharisees' question, while it made sense, was really about rule-keeping obedience. What do I need to do for God? And Jesus redirects this answer to relationship. He uses the law, but he uses the law to point,

like, it's not just doing, but it is about being with the Lord. He uses the law to confront the condition of our hearts. And Jesus made this one command the cornerstone of all the other 612. So God just doesn't want half-hearted obedience from us, he wants wholehearted love from us. Because you can still obey somebody and resent the mess out of them. So love is the difference between a have to and a want to, or a get to. That's true in marriage, but it's also true in our relationship with the Lord. Jesus is giving us a warning here about a loveless religion, and that is very possible. Now consider for a moment, the law could have read something like, love God, love people, end of story. Just very plainly and simply. But the law provided some depth to the command by explaining, not just love him simply, that's true, but love him with your heart and your mind and your soul and your strength. So what I wanna do this morning is kind of unpack what does that mean to love him with those aspects of who we are. So the first one is this, is a matter of the heart, and that might seem like an obvious thing. I mean, we just celebrated Valentine's Days

and hearts and hearts candies are floating around everywhere and hearts on cards. But if it's so obvious that we're to love God with our heart, then why did God have to write it down and to remind us to love God with our heart? What does that even mean? Of course, we're not literally speaking about the muscle that pumps blood to all of the rest of the parts of our body. The heart is considered the center of our affections and our emotions. So when someone has our heart, whether it's a spouse, a child, or a friend, we feel certain emotions, right? Longing and caring and comfort and joy and peace and desire when someone has our heart. Now, love has to be more than emotion, but it has to include emotion. If I said to my wife, I love you, but I never longed for her or expressed that love to her or in affectionate ways, you'd probably say, I hear what you say, but like, you don't really love her. Yeah, how many Christians have this kind of relationship with God? I mean, Jesus is pushing back against just a performance-based religion. In other words, our love for God is more than just obedience. Certainly, obedience is part of it, but it can't be the foundation

because when obedience is the foundation, you get legalism. But when the foundation is rooted in my heart, my affections, my desires, my longings for the Lord in my life, it radically changes my motivation. So I don't just do for God. I do because I want to, because I love him and he's my everything. You know, the way that we, there's something in us that should long for him, not just his blessings, not just him doing for us in our long prayer list. There's something in us that needs to long for the person of Christ in our lives, to hear his voice, to experience joy in his presence. The way that we speak about what he's done in our lives, it ought to choke us up at times. The way that he's rescued us and redeemed us and touched us in the innermost places of our being. And if you find yourself disconnected from that, like if you find yourself like, I don't know that my heart is all the way there yet, then I think a great exercise to help us get there is to grow the heart through gratitude in our lives. If you just start making a long list, and I encourage people to do this at Thanksgiving, but this is an ongoing, amazing spiritual exercise that you can do, because maybe your heart hasn't been touched because you don't have enough gratitude in your life for what the Lord has actually done for you.

And when you experience that and are reminded of that, all of a sudden the heart ought to well up in us, like I am overwhelmed at the goodness of God in my life and what he has done for me, and that should cause us to get emotional. If it doesn't, you don't realize what has been done for you. You don't realize what we just celebrated in communion a moment ago, because it hasn't touched you in the inner place of your heart. The second thing that Jesus mentions in quoting the law here is that love is a matter of the soul. Now, in our Western minds, we tend to think about as people that we have a soul, but it's kind of more accurate biblically to say that we are a soul. Our soul has to do with our personhood and identity, like every bit of our being, the entirety of who I am. When something touches our soul, there is a whole body response to that thing. Here's an example from the scripture here. Psalm 103, verse one. Praise the Lord, my soul, all my inmost being. Like everything that's a part of me, inside of me that has to do with me, praise his holy name. That isn't just using your mouth to say the right words, although you are, and that's important.

But what he's saying is like everything, like an entire body response that I am overwhelmed at the goodness of God in my life, and I just wanna give him praise and thank him. Thanksgiving for what he's done for me. My soul and my inmost being are acting synonymous here. Everything in me. Psalm 42, same thing. As the deer pants for streams of water, my soul pants for you, my God. The soul here is pictured as thirsty, longing for God. As when you're thirsty, doesn't it consume your whole self? You can't think about anything else when you're thirsty. All you can think about is how quickly can I get water or a Gatorade in me on a hot August day in Alabama? And what if we had the same kind of longing and intensity for the Lord to be present in the deepest parts of who I am? Not just doing them for him, but because he's the center of who I am so that when I have my personal Bible study or private prayer time, I'm just not checking off boxes to say I had a quiet time today. I'm there because I want more of him in me. I'm longing for that. It's a way of expressing my inner world belongs to him and not just my behavior. Now here's the scary thing, is that when our soul is missing in our love for God, we can still appear faithful on the outside while being distant in the inner places.

And what will expose that more than anything is just a little bit of suffering. And it will send everything on your life into a tailspin, which is why you gotta love him with all of your soul. So when you love him with all of your soul, whatever happens on the outside, yeah, it'll be discouraging, yeah, it will be hard, but it won't destroy who I am because my soul is all about him. Now I think a beautiful picture of this kind of love to love with our whole soul is on display when the sinful woman comes and anoints Jesus and washes his feet with her hair as she's weeping. I mean, what you see is her innermost being desires to offer to Jesus this response of love by caring for him, by serving him. And sitting in the same room is Peter, a disciple of Jesus, who knows Jesus better than anybody, is sitting off in the corner of the room and completely lacks understanding about what has been done for him because Jesus has to remind him, do you see this woman? Do you see what she's doing for me? In other words, Peter, you're following me, but you don't really long for me. Your soul isn't connected to me at the deepest parts of who you are. And I wonder if you long for God with your whole being, your whole self, your whole soul, do you ever ache for his presence

and a touch in your life from him? Do you pant for him like you pant in thirst for water? And if you find yourself saying, I don't know that I do, then what I would say is you grow the soul through private experiences in worship. Privately. Because then you're not concerned what you look like, what you sound like, what other people are watching you, thinking about you, your soul has an audience of one because you're the only one I want. It's not about the show, it's not about performance, it's just simply like whether you are in your recliner, in your living room, or you're in the woods, or on the mountaintop, or the edge of the Grand Canyon, that you are able to just express the entirety of yourself to the Lord. Lord, I want all of you. I long for you with everything that's in my innermost being. You get in the car, you turn the music up, and that's the great thing about private worship. You don't even have to like what we sing on Sunday morning because you have your own playlist you can choose. Get in those moments where it's just you and the Lord and empty that out, grow that muscle, develop that on your own privately, and then you don't have to worry about corporate worship because you've spent time with him privately. Number three is love is a matter of the mind. And this is the mind here. Of course, we're not just talking about the brain

as an organ as complex and amazing as our brains are. I mean, the science of neurology just in the last few decades has expanded exponentially, and it ought to blow our minds, literally, about how amazing the brain is. and that God is saying, I want you to love me with your head. That the mind is the seat of our intellect, our thinking, and our knowing about God. It has to do with our understanding, how we understand what's true in our lives. And because you and I live in a broken and fallen world, we have a lot of wrong ideas, and messages, and images, and information about life and God. And our thinking can become misguided and wrongheaded. When I don't know what God is really like, or I have some secular or worldly ideas about God that I've projected on him, I am in great danger. Here's what Dallas Willard writes. He says, to serve God well, we must think straight. And crooked thinking, unintentional or not, always favors evil. That was the origin of the first sin, wasn't it? What did the serpent come and do to Eve? He messed with her thinking. And he began to plant lies in her mind about God's motives for taking care of them. Even though God had clearly said directly, face-to-face, to the two of them, here is who I am, and here's the way

I'm gonna take care of you, and this tree, and then the serpent comes in and is like, did God really say? And starts messing with her in that way, right? We, all of us, myself included, have a desperate need for the truth of God in our lives. So that we understand who he is, what he's about, his love for us, and his call and work in our lives. And so the goal of loving God with our mind is to bring my thinking in alignment with his thinking. Not to get God to come in align with me. It's for me to get in alignment with God. This is what Romans 12, two says. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. In other words, he doesn't just say, if you don't wanna conform to the world, just stop doing what you're doing and do something else. He starts with, how about you make some decisions and some changes in your mind? And you change your strategy. There's a battle for our minds. If you don't believe that, just look at the billions and billions of dollars advertising industry spends to get inside your head. To get you to make purchasing decisions. To get brand recognition and top of mind and to influence us culturally and get us to think that we need a product that you may not think you really need.

That is the transformation of the mind. They're after it. There's a battle for it. And that's why, if you're gonna love the Lord with all of your mind, you have to saturate yourself with the word. You gotta saturate yourself with scripture. You gotta commit it to memory. I mean, I know you have a copy of the Bible probably, or at least you can access it on your phone, but a daily single verse popping up on your phone is not gonna be sufficient alone for transformation of the mind. You are going to need a diet, drinking from a deep well. You're gonna need to spend some time in the word. Not just simply a little quick verse while I'm waiting in line at the doctor's office to make me feel good about myself that day. And I'm not saying those can't be powerful or good, I'm just saying that alone will not renew your mind. You're going to need to commit some things to memory. You're gonna have to let it dwell and stir and cause you to ponder. And then you might have to use resources, whether it be the internet or something, or asking somebody that you know that has biblical understanding, like, yeah, but what does this word mean? Like, where's he going with this thought?

And dig down deeper in the scripture. You gotta digest and process, then, the implications for your behavior. Not just knowing what the words are, but what does it mean in the deepest parts of me and how does it impact me? And you gotta allow it to confront your sin and your brokenness in your life. That's what the word is designed to do. It's designed to help us heal from our, brokenness, and if we don't ever allow it to confront us, you won't be on the path to healing. And when your mind has access to that kind of truth and absorbs it and process it, then I can be free to fully love God the way that He wants me to. And I'm in awe of His works and who He is and His story and what He's done. And all that requires intentionality and effort. It requires time. It requires discipline. But when your mind is not involved, you are susceptible to every passing fad, distortion, and deception that the enemy will throw at you. You'll just coast along and go with the flow. And so Jesus reminds us, no, it is to press in to love the Lord with all of our mind. Number four, we're to love the Lord with all of our strength. So our strength is synonymous with our energies and our passions about us. It's using everything at my disposal, in my physical body, to fully walk out this kind of love. I.e., love for God isn't just something that we feel in the inner parts of our being, but it's also expressed in my actions. We talked about that last week in love for neighbor. It's love made manifest in very tangible and concrete ways. If I love my spouse, it will require the hard work and effort to serve her, care for her, provide for her, do for her. Again, I can say, I love you, but how will she know I love her? She will be with the strength and the energy and my passion to then come alongside and do for her. If I love my kids, I'm going to take the effort and energy and strength because it takes a lot of it to bathe them, feed them, clothe them, discipline them, play with them, study with them, and do all of those things, right? I know we have a lot of exhausted parents in the room. You're like,

I need some of that strength in my life. Strength will be required to make the effort to feed my mind, to be with the worshiping community, to fight temptation, to live a life in self-discipline and use my gifts to serve others, right? This is the effort and the energy that love requires. Now, that may sound odd because we don't normally typically think of love as being work. It certainly doesn't sound romantic in a marriage, right? But if I quit putting effort into my marriage and prioritizing her and serving her and doing those kinds of things and encouraging her, forgiving her, then our love will just dry up and fade. That's the judgment against the church in Ephesus in Revelation chapter 2, where Jesus directly says to the church in Ephesus, He praises them for some good things. You hate this false teaching over here and you do this and you do this. Yet, verse 4, I hold this against you. You have forsaken the love that you had at first. Consider how far you have fallen. Repent and do the things that you did at first. So, what is often true in our marriage relationships is also true in our walk with Christ, because when you're dating, you go all out, right? There's flowers, there's candy, there's cards, there's love messages and all those kinds of things. And what happens 10 years later? One day, your wife says, how come you stopped doing all that? And you realize, I've quit doing the important things with my strength and I got lazy. That's my strength and I got lazy. That's also very true in our love relationship with the Lord. So, when you become a believer, you're on fire, you're excited and you're telling people and you're serving and you're all in. And what happens? Our energies and our passions kind of wane and then we start backing off and then we quit doing the things that we did at first. And Jesus is saying, don't quit that stuff. And I would imagine that if we were to interview the church in Ephesus after receiving this word and we asked them, do you love God? That they would say, of course we love God. And yet Jesus confronted them with a lack of love. They'd evidently quit doing some of those important things, because if you aren't investing and using your energy... is to act on love, then you'll just be left with platitudes and hollow ideas about what love is. You might need to grow in this area. One of the indications, like I'm lacking in loving with my strength, if you consume spiritual content

but you rarely serve. Or you attend church but then you have no responsibility in helping to make it grow and develop. You sit on the sidelines and critique but you don't have anything to offer to make it better. So how do we develop our strength muscle in our love? Is we do that by serving. That love for God isn't fully formed in us and into our habits and our actions until we actually let it manifest in us. Does that require effort and energy? Yes, it does, it requires intentionality. But we aren't just called to love God with words and emotions. We're called to live that out in our actions. So I wanna encourage some of us that may be sitting on the sideline and you say, I love God but if no one else knows that because it's not manifest in your life, it will ring hollow. So let's, as we wrap up this morning, summarize. Kind of the four things here. Our heart, our soul, our mind, our strength this way. That love for God shapes the entire person. The whole of me. In other words, God just doesn't want some of you. God gets all of me. God wants first place. He does not settle for second or third or fourth. He's gotta have our heart and it isn't just flowery or mushy emotion.

It will well up with incredible courage when it's under attack. It's not wishy-washy. It's grounded in truth. My love for the Lord should touch every part of me. And I need all four of those areas. You need all four of those areas. I need the mind when my emotions are distorted. I need the soul when I don't even have words to say. I need it to touch my strength so that I'll do the hard things that love requires. And I need the heart so it doesn't just stay in my head. And you might be thinking this morning about like, how can you command love? Like, isn't, don't we tend to think of love as something that can't be controlled or is completely voluntary? We even say things like, I fell in love as if it just happened in accident. But that's not the biblical understanding of love. God made a choice to love us. God made a decision to enter into our world. It was not an accident, and He certainly didn't fall into it. It was His design. And the command to love would be really difficult if you had to be the source of it and manufacture it on your own. But here's the wonderful news today that this love is made possible in our lives

because it has been already poured out and given to you as a gift. Here's what 1 John 4, verse 19 reminds us. We love because He first loved us. If you're thinking today like, I don't know where this kind of love is gonna come from, good news for you. It has been given to you as a gift from the Lord Himself. That today you don't have to find a way to create it, you just have to respond to it. You have to put it to work because it's already been poured out in your heart. That is the beauty of the gospel story today. That love of Jesus caused Him to move towards you and your sin and your brokenness when you didn't have any love for Him to give. And He rescued you and He redeemed you and He restored you and therefore something enabled you in your heart to come alive in you and to love Him back with everything in you. And this morning, I don't know where you're at in that and which one of those four things you might say is the weakest or you might say. I need all four of those things in greater measure. Today, what I want to encourage us to do is to really give devotion, if it is the greatest command. If we really believe in agreement with Jesus, it's the number one thing, then why would we not give it our all this week to do that?

Why would we not lean in with every fiber of our being and say, I don't even know how to do this yet, but we lean in and say, Lord, that's my direction. That's what I'm aiming for. Would you come and work in me and grow that kind of love in me, because I don't want anything else in the world to shake that. I want, at the end of my days, for my family, my friends, the world around me to know he loved the Lord with every fiber of his being. If you want that for yourself this morning, church, say amen. Let's stand to our feet today. Lord, today we come and we ask, Father, for an outpouring of your love in our life, Father, so that we can be and respond to that love. Lord, we need a deeper love today. We need to grow, Father, in our heart, in our mind, in our soul, in our strength, God. Would you come and do a miraculous work in the inner places of who we are? God, would you come and reveal to us where we're lacking as you came to the church in Ephesus in Revelation, Lord, that you would remind us where we're not loving you as we should, whether that be as a person or collectively as a body. Lord, I pray, God, that you will reveal that to us and then help us to take courageous action. God, to go deeper with you, to allow you to transform the inner places and the inner heart spaces of our lives. And then as a result, Father, that you would cause us to have incredible strength, Father, that we would turn and know you and love you because of your grace.