Love the Lord your God

 Sat Sep 04, 2021 -   -  ~5 Minutes

Dr. Gail Walter, M.D.

Missionary in Uganda

Love the Lord your God with every inch of your being…which makes it possible to love those you just don’t want to love, some who are closest to you. Paraphrased Luke 10:27  

With our world sinking all around us we are looking for a quick, all-encompassing fix. We long for normal, but human normal has never been that great. Human normal took us to where we are today. We have trouble envisioning what it means to love one another. Some of us can’t envision it at all because of how we grew up and who we grew up with.

So how do we do this thing called God’s love? It is everything that Christians are called to, all that we are identified by, and something we know next to nothing about. We fail at it so often that we think it is unattainable and will only happen after we die. This is an epic Christian disconnect. It is what nagged at my soul most of my Christian walk. How do you love those closest to you, let alone those who want to destroy you? Because it is suppose to flow from us.

I would truly underestimate the commitment I needed to make.

Last week, I looked into those Christian Afghan faces and knew they understood their commitment to Jesus. It cost them everything. Americans must almost manufacture that kind of intense devotion. And yet God is near to all of us and will draw nearer to those who want more. The problem is our wanter. As Dallas Willard use to say, “Your system is perfectly designed to yield the result you are getting.” In spiritual terms, we want to play Chopin without ever practicing the piano. We want to run a marathon without training. We want to respond lovingly without anger, impatience, selfishness, and a long list of other automated responses that are imbedded deeply within each of us. Our level of commitment leads directly to our results. I am not talking about behavior modification. This is entering into the deepest cooperative effort the Lord has ever devised. If we want the mind of Christ, we must learn how the heavenly mind thinks. I promise you, it isn’t anything like the way we think. The kind of love most of us exude is just a nicer earthly version, though weighted down with manipulation, resentment, and impatience. We can show goodness in limited quantities and then we fail. But we have a series of excuses and justifications.

Being transformed so that we can see into every corner of our being requires we begin to understand God and His kingdom and pursue Him every day, be willing to die to our kingdom, and desire every bit of the Lord’s thoughts that our finite minds can contain.

Our world has become enamored with the love of unknown thousands, hurting in distant places. We are to have this vague caring that extends to every corner of the earth. Believing we love the world, is illusory and deceptive… something God never asked of us. He asks us to do something painfully measurable. He asks us to love Him, and He will teach us how to love those in front of us, our true neighbors. For the disciples it was leaning to love their little group of Jesus followers, for the Samaritan it was the broken man on the road, for most of us it is our family and household, those we work with, and those we might see every day. We don’t need to find people projects. God has surrounded us with people that need evidence of God in their lives. This is definable love because it often involves the very people who have hurt us most. If we did this just for our families, this world would be an entirely different place.

If you ask me what it looks like to love my neighbor, I have to tell you it changes every day. When we open that door, God begins to fill us with His thoughts as we pursue the mind of Christ… and it is nothing like the way we see life. He is taking us by the hand and bringing us into His kingdom. He is growing us and breaking us so that He might remake us like Him. Modern Christians don’t think of becoming Christlike as requiring concentrated effort. We have come to believe that if we go to a great worship service, hear a great message, hang out with other Christians, and study our Bible we will be miraculously changed. There is truth in that because salvation alone changes our entire perspective… we were literally dead and then we become spiritually alive… but then there are the truly deeper waters of our faith… where we work out our salvation with fear and trembling. It is a never-ending task. Loving God and loving those who stand right in our path involves every other part of our spiritual life. It requires discipline to gain the mind of Christ, but it is the most valuable thing any of us can find.

  • I fast, to remember more of Him.

  • I pray, to enter into His plans,

  • I submit and obey to experience my hidden rebellion,

  • I study to fill myself up with the revelation of God,

  • I live in simplicity to find God is my everything,

  • In solitude and silence, I search for His thoughts,

  • In giving and service, I begin to understand His sacrifice

  • And in gratitude I see He has always been with me.

1 Timothy 4:7   “Discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness”

God will change us. We just have to want it.

We have started to read together. Plus, when he naps with me and the dogs, it must include trucks and helicopters and things.

  normal love discipline