Keep being in the Word!!
Deuteronomy chapter 10.
Moses continues to address the Israelites pointing out the fact that they have rebelled against God over and over again, yet God has shown great mercy and love for them.
1. God wants to use us!!! Have you ever felt like a failure? Like you're just not good enough? Be encouraged! God still loves you and still wants to use you! The Israelites messed up constantly but God still had his open arms to receive them and use them.
God says come As You Are and do these four things: Fear Me. Obey Me. Love Me. Serve Me with ALL your heart and soul.
To fear God is to want to obey God. To love God also results in wanting to obey God. We are inclined to want to obey that which we really love! To love God is to want to serve God. That which we truly love is that which we will want to please and we do that with God through our obedience and how we serve him.
Jesus said the two greatest commandments are to love God and to love others. So if we love God we will want to love others and serve them. How are we doing with that? Let's give an example how we loved God and then give an example of how we loved someone else.
1. Love God: my example of loving God is my desire to want to spend time with him each day. I look forward to it.
2. Love Others: this morning I reached out via Facebook to a gentleman who facebooked me saying he is struggling with his marriage.
I would love to hear testimonies from you guys!
When it comes to love for God and love for people, I don’t think that we could do a good job of loving vertically (God) without loving horizontally (people). We also couldn’t do a good job of loving horizontally (people) without loving vertically (God). They go together. When we love both God and people in those vertical and horizontal relationships, we have the message of the cross. I can’t draw it here, but I hope that you can get the picture.
1 John 4:7-21 fits well with this.
“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent His only Son into the world, so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and His love is perfected in us.” By this we know that we abide in Him and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent His Son to be the Savior of the world. Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as He is so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. We love because He first loved us. If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from Him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.”
God won’t love us more than what He already does because He always has a perfect love for us, but our love for Him can grow everyday as we spend time with Him and go deeper in our relationship with Him.
A personal example of loving God would simply be wanting to live more like Jesus today. An example of loving others I guess would be my seeking to connect with a boy who is dealing with his parents going through a divorce right now so I would like to try to encourage him and show him the love of Jesus. I was told that he came to VBS just to see me and talk with me about some things in his life, but he wanted to leave whenever he learned that I wasn’t able to be there this week. I hope that he is still able to be ministered to during VBS and that he may build more healthy relationships with others and have more Christian friends for his life’s journey.