Thursday August 22, 2013 Day 22 You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all our mind and all your strength. Mark 12:30 SPHERE #2: LOVE WITH ALL OUR SOUL: PERSONALITY A. Love with all our soul: the soul is our personality, or the animation expressing the uniqueness of our abilities and desires, including the way we talk and walk and what our preferences are. B. Our personality is expressed most dynamically by our speech. What we say enhances or quenches our ability to grow in love. Therefore, we set our heart to express ourselves and to communicate in a way that enhances, not diminishes, love. When the Spirit is grieved, we do not receive from Him in the same measure (Eph. 4:29-32; 5:1-6). 29 Let no corrupt word proceed out of your mouth, but what is good for necessary edification, that it may impart grace to the hearers. 30 Do not grieve the Spirit of God. (Eph. 4:29-30) C. Our love can be diminished by the negative fire released in us by wrong speech that affects our inner man (Jas 3:6-10; 4:10-11; 5:8-9; 1 Cor. 3:2-3, 16-18). We renounce grumbling and speaking against one another, knowing it hinders our ability to love God and feel God’s love. D. In our failure we confess, “I’m loved [by God] and I am a lover [of God]; therefore, I am successful.” I am not defined by my failure or by my accomplishments. I am not despised by God, nor am I a hopeless hypocrite because of my weakness. We must live by our spiritual identity (what we look like to God) instead of our natural identity (what we look like to others). VI. SPHERE #3: LOVE WITH ALL OUR MIND: THOUGHTS A. Love with all our mind: we fill our minds with long and loving meditation on God’s Word and resist putting anything in our minds that diminishes love for Jesus and quenches the Spirit. B. To love God with all our mind involves taking time to fill our mind with God’s Word and to agree with biblical paradigms of God. This involves refusing lies about Jesus as our Bridegroom, King, and Judge. We gain revelation of God’s love by meditating on it from God’s Word. C. The language of the human spirit is image. Our mind is our intellect, understanding, and the place of our imagination and our daydreams. It is our internal movie screen, giving us pictures (good or evil). It is like a camera that stores our memory. As we renew our mind with God’s Word, we repaint our internal canvas. We erase and replace wrong thoughts with godly thoughts. D. Much of our life occurs in our mind because we can never turn it off. Our mind defines so much of who we are and how we love. God’s Word equips us to think first and most naturally about God. To love God with all our mind is a powerful possibility. Through meditation, we can take the reins of our mind and write the script of the movie we continually watch within. We cannot shut down the images in our mind, but we can direct them. Jesus can become our first thought, even our daydream. As our mind is renewed, Jesus becomes our sweet escape from lust, pride, and fear as we retreat into His beauty and love. Jesus desires to be our resting place, or getaway. When you take a deep breath or while driving alone, where do you go in your mind?
Posted on: Thu, 22 Aug 2013 21:45:44 +0000
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