Love God

“And He said to him, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.  This is the great and foremost commandment.  The second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:37-39).
What would happen if everyone in your family today said, “We are not going to go to church anymore?  I will never pray again, or read the Bible again, I am through with God.”  How would we respond?  Would we quietly go with them or would we say, “Oh, no..not me.  I love Jesus so much.  I love Him with everything I am, with everything I own, I am going to keep following Him.  I hate to see you go, but, I love Him more than I love you.”
    We have to make absolutely sure that we have our own relationship with God and that we love Him and each other more than we love our families or ourselves.  Because there is coming a day we will stand before God alone and He is going to examine every facet of our life and what He finds is going to determine where we will remain eternally.  And we will hear one of two things.  “Well done faithful slave,” or “Depart from me, I never knew you…” (Matthew 25:23; 7:23).  The Lord may say:  “I know your wife, she really loves me, I know your children and they love me so much.  But, I don’t know you….you never loved me.”
    Listen, there is nothing more important in our life than knowing that we love Jesus and He is the most important thing in our life.  And because we love Him with all my heart, we love each other in the same way.  You know how you are willing to go out of your way to show your love for your husband, wife, kids or a friend?  Isn’t that so cool?  And sometimes, it’s the simplest things that mean so much. Right?  Last week, my sixteen year old daughter text me and she told me she loved me.   Cool, right?  But you know the first thing that popped into my mind?  What did she do or what does she want? But, that wasn’t it.  She just wanted to tell me she loved me.  And we do stuff like that when we love each other.  We don’t mind making sacrifices and going out of our way to show love.  Well, if I love Jesus with all of my being, my life is going to change as I go out of me way to show Him how much I love Him.      “If you love me, keep my commandments” (John 14:15).  Are we crazy in love with God?  Is He the most important Person in our life? 
The second part of what Jesus commanded was that I love my neighbor as I love myself.  Who do we think about the most during an average day?  Am I a lover of people or a lover of self?  There are two things I want us to remember about loving each other the way God said we should and when I say each other, I mean loving our neighbors as we love ourselves.  #1. Understanding.  Without doubt, absolutely, imperative, essential to my loving God is to understand why I must love my neighbor as myself.  And what Jesus said, the way He said it, it is crystal clear that if I don’t love my neighbor in the right way, I can’t love God like I should.  “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love” (1 John 4:7-8).
    #2.  Practice.      Perfect practice makes perfect.  I cannot possibly love my neighbor without perfect practice.  “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.   No one has seen God at any time; if we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us” (1 John 4:11-12).  John is not simply making a statement that God loves us.  John is giving us the standard by which we gauge our love for each other.      If God SO loved us….the word “so” is an adverb of manner and it mandates the love that God has for us is the same kind of love we have for each other.  And the end result of that kind of love is that God will love people through us.  We love God, we love people.  Judge ourselves.




Submitted by: Lennie Reagan

God’s Faithfulness

    One of the things I have learned from studying the Bible is that is so faithful to His Word, His purpose and His people.  Even when men messed it up, God was still faithful.  I don’t know what is going through your mind right now.  I don’t know what the past week has held for many of you.  I don’t know the details of what struggles you may be facing or the past that may haunt you or the fear of the future you might possess.      I don’t know.  God does and He cares.
    I want us talk about how big God is because I believe with all of my heart that if I have the right view of God I can make it through any situation that might come and sit in my lap. Really, the problems that we face in our lives or in the Lord’s church are given birth because someone has the wrong of view of God.  Having a small view of God is one of our biggest problems.      But, when we see God as He is…oh, man it is absolutely off the charts.
    Isaiah, the Old Testament prophet saw God.  Uzziah had been king of Judah for 52 years.  He was a good king and he built up the military of Judah, God blessed him and there was prosperity while Uzziah was on the throne and it was a good time to be a Jew.  About 700 years before Christ was born the sad announcement was made, “THE KING IS DEAD”.   King Uzziah, the eleventh King of Judah, had died.   Despite his failings, he was the greatest king since David.  For 52 years things have been great and now the king is dead.  Can you imagine what the nation of Israel was thinking?  “What’s going to happen to us now?”  The Holy Spirit records these words in Isaiah 6:1…. “In the year of king Uzziah’s death, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne…”         Don’t miss this.  In the year that Uzziah was no longer sitting on his throne, God showed Isaiah the throne room of heaven and Isaiah saw that God was still on His throne.
    You see, it didn’t matter who the king was on this little planet over the small nation of Judah.  It’s like God was saying to Isaiah, “Come on up to heaven and let me show you the throne that really matters.”  And there are some preaching verses in Isaiah 6, but the thing that stands out to me is the timing of this vision.  When Uzziah died, Isaiah and the nation of Judah were worried about the next king.  Would he be a bad king, or a good king?  They were fretting over the problems they were facing and maybe even felt their lives were falling apart.  But God didn’t come down and counsel Isaiah and the people about their problems.  He brought Isaiah up to heaven and said, “Let me show you something bigger….let me show you Who is still on the throne.”
    I, in no way, am trying to belittle the things you are facing.  It breaks my heart that I can’t fix it for you, but what I am saying is that maybe the solution to what you are facing is not taking a closer look at your problem.  Rather, let’s look beyond what we are facing and looking to God’s throne.  He is still there.



Submitted by: Lennie Reagan

Thinking Correctly

How hard is it for us to say, No?  If someone is asking us to get involved in doing something or another activity comes along, how hard is it for us to say, No?  Here’s what happens.  We get so busy doing so many other things that the priorities in our life get crowded out and usually the first is God.
    If God was physically here on Earth and screaming, “Give your time, give Me your money, give Me your talents,” it would be different. I know that doesn’t sound real spiritual; but, we need to learn to say no.
    It’s kind of like going to Sams.  We’re going to run in for one or two items and we end with a cart full.  When my wife and I go out to eat at Mayflower we usually will order just one meal.  The plate is huge, plus I am cheap. But when the plate comes we will divide the food and she has her plate and I have mine.  Here’s what I don’t do.  When the plate comes I don’t eat from the plate until I have eaten all I want and give her what’s left.  She may not have a lot left to eat.  She knows and I know that I could eat most, if not all that one plate.  Well, that’s kind of what a lot of folks do with God.      We say, well, let me do this and this and this and then, if there is any time left, I’ll give that to God.  And, let me buy this and this, and oh I really need this and if there is any money left, I’ll give it to God.
    We are a consumer oriented people and with that way of thinking there’s nothing to give God.  And we end up without anything or very little time left to give God.  I am not talking about how we can squeeze God into our lives.  What we want to say is that we want God to have priority over me, my life and my stuff. Everyone has time to serve God.  Every one of us has enough money to give God.  Now, do we have enough time and enough money to live the kind of life we want to life and serve God and give to God the way we should?  Probably not.  So we have a decision to make and usually, not always, but usually God ends up sacrificing so we can please ourselves.
    I’m talking about the possibility, and I know it’s a crazy thought to some of us, about the possibility that we come to a point in our lives that we are more concerned about what God wants than what we want.  And that is the very core of what it means to be a slave of Christ.  That’s what Jesus meant when He said we should take up our cross and follow Him….submitting to His will for our lives instead of crowding Him out of our lives and giving Him a token of our lives.
The lawyer who asked Christ, “…which is the great commandment in the Law”? (Matthew 22:36), was attempting to entrap Christ.  The Pharisees, in their tradition, had reduced the Law of Moses to three hundred sixty-five negative commandments and two hundred forty-eight positive commands.  Our Master was asked this question:  “There is no way we can keep all these laws, which one commandment do we need to keep?”   “And He said to him, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.  This is the great and foremost commandment.   The second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 22:37-40).
The one thing this lawyer was attempting to accomplish exposed the fallacy of our concept of priorities.
It appears most American christians look through the glasses of American christianity when it comes to priorities.  We make the plea, “New Testament christianity,” which is the proper plea, but it appears what most folks mean is American New Testament christianity.  If we are going to be the church we read about in the Bible, let’s be that church.  Life is all about priorities and the early church was balanced in their priorities (Acts 2:40-47).
One question that I am asked by a lot of people about my favorite verse, and that’s really hard, but one verse that means a lot to me is James 5:17…. “Elijah was a man with a nature like ours…”  Elijah was a human being just like us.  He was not physically superior to us that made him stand out.  And the same thing is true of Noah, Moses, David, Paul or Peter.  They were people just like you and me.  And when we promote them to a superior status we demote ourselves thinking we can never have the kind of faith they had.  We need to see that it was faith in God that made them stand out.
    Can we have faith in the same God as they did?  Absolutely, positively, without a doubt, beyond any question, “YES!”  “So then, faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God” (Romans 10:17).

Submitted By: Lennie Reagan