Mark 12:28-34
As John Grassmick says in the Bible Knowledge Commentary on these verses…”It is a commitment to the Lord that is comprehensive and whole hearted. The heart, as the control center of your life, the soul as your self consciousness, the mind our thought capacity and strength our bodily powers”
And when we learn how to love the Lord like this the result is love for others.
So in this series what I would like to do is help us understand that this type of loving God comes from instituting Spiritual Disciplines in our life.
7th grade seeing another guy with a “note”
(I will never forget the first note from Amy… I cherished it and the main reason why is because I felt like somebody)
The simple fact that God gave us His Word displays we are important.
But some say…
1. I don’t need God and His Word, I know I am important and I have the answers. (Pride and rejection of the Lord)
2. Or the Christian response sometimes is… “I hear you, I know I am important to God, but I don’t really need to spend time learning more about Him or how I should respond to Him unless something is going wrong”. (Ignorance)
My appeal to you tonight is… I want us all to realize that we have the great privilege of having communication from God to us and that means we need spend time reading, memorizing and studying every aspect of it to develop our love for the Lord Jesus.
The Bible is what we should…
• fill our hearts with. (Heart love) How? Psalm 119:9-16 Meditation and memorization
Many times people are only interested in something when they are dealing with it…but as a student of God’s Word, in order to fill your heart in order to spur your heart on to love the Lord, we should expose ourselves to teaching before you deal with them.
When you hear things you “already know” you will reevaluate your life to make sure you are still practicing them. (Lets look at like this we fill our hearts and minds with information that leads to transformation and we need reminders)
I would go so far as to say if there is a Biblically based teaching and you say you got nothing from it. You have some kind of a problem. –maybe with the person teaching it? –maybe it is convicting you? -maybe you are apathetic? -maybe your heart is hard? –maybe you did not pray before you read or heard the Word?
I was never out of my Bible. John Bunyan
• study and question for ourselves. (Mind Love) (my pastor said so should not be your answer) The Bible is everyone’s book Acts 17:10-12 the Berean’s (George Kuhn)
Never let good books take the place of the Bible. Drink from the Well, not from the streams that flow from the Well. Amy Carmichael.
I am a man of one Book. John Wesley.
• pass down to the next generation (Strength love) .Deut 6:7-10 Teach the Scriptures. This is hard physical work.
Much of it is in the delivery (Tom Allen’s illustration about yelling at your kids)
• learn about who to hope in. (Soul love) In 1 Corinthians 15:3-4 Jesus’ life fulfilled the scriptures to give us salvation GOSPEL
People do not reject the Bible because it contradicts itself, but because it contradicts them.
Romans 15:4 this is not only true of future hope but it is true of hope in any circumstance we find ourselves in.
Within the covers of one single book, the Bible, are all the answers to all the problems that face us today--if only we would read and believe. Ronald Reagan
When you start to realize that God’s Word has what you need and offers hope you start to develop a love for it and it becomes something you do not want to live without.
Evangelist Robert L. Sumner tells about him in his book The Wonders of the Word of God. Of a man in Kansas City was severely injured in an explosion. Hiss face was badly disfigured, and he lost his eyesight as well as both hands. He was just a new Christian, and one of his greatest disappointments was that he could no longer read the Bible. Then he heard about a lady in England who read braille with her lips. Hoping to do the same, he sent for some books of the Bible in braille. Much to his dismay, however, he discovered that the nerve endings in his lips had been destroyed by the explosion. One day, as he brought one of the braille pages to his lips, his tongue happened to touch a few of the raised characters and he could feel them. Like a flash he thought, I can read the Bible using my tongue. At the time Robert Sumner wrote his book, the man had "read" through the entire Bible four times.
Through the Discipline of being in God’s Word we learn to love Him with our heart, soul, mind and strength.
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