Monthly Archives: October 2016

Posted on

God-Loving Begins with God-Knowing

The more you know God, the more you will love Him

Loving God as our first love means we will have a daily awareness of God and our need for Him. Love is not automatic. It is something we nurture and grow. It is easier to say we love God than to actually love God. But love is an expectation for the spiritual person. God tells us the expectation in Mark 12:30, and it is a tall order.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. Mark 12:30

We love many things, don’t we? I think of favorite foods, books, people, movies, scents, clothes, tastes in artwork, music, and places we like to be. These are the things that make life enjoyable and worth the journey. These help us understand the concept of love.

Loving God is a combination of all of the goods in life and that thing called, more, which I have mentioned several times before in my writings. God made us to want more. We should not be satisfied for life as it is. We were made for more. The more is more of Him.

The interesting part of this reality is this; when we receive more of God through an awareness of Him, we begin to crave more and more and more of Him. The more we know God, the more we love God, the more we will want to be close to Him. In this God satisfies a deep need that lies within us, the need for truth and purpose . . . and relationship.

Notice, the verse doesn’t say know more about God with all your heart, mind, and soul. It is love the Lord with all your heart, mind, and soul. Love will initiate knowing. A byproduct of the loving is a quiet sense of knowing God. This happens when all parts are fully engaged in the loving of God with the mind, the soul, the heart, and the strength.

We drift away from God-loving as our focal point when our focus is or becomes person-centered as more important than the maintaining and developing of a personal relationship with God.

Some people have yet to fall in love with God. Loving God comes when you trust Him with your needs, wants, and desires, when we look to Him to be our all-in-all. God is the purpose of life for you and for me. Trust, true, living, unadulterated trust, means letting go of the picture-you-have-in-your-mind for your own self in order to become the-picture-God-has-in-His-mind for your life.

Loving God as your first love has many fine characteristics. The following list is an example of what this kind of love looks like. The list is not exhaustive.

You will know you love God when your attitudes and actions display some or all of the following–

  • Love that delights in the Lord is primary over the love of someone else
  • Love for God that is real longs for fellowship with God throughout the day
  • Love for God and thoughts of Him enter your thinking during times of leisure
  • Love for God like this does not make excuses for wrong behaviors that are not of God
  • Love that is God-centered means that our alms, acts of worship and service will be cheerfully and freely given
  • Loving from the heart is to love others as Christ loved them, unconditionally and without the need for merit
  • Loving from the heart is to forgive others as Christ forgave them, not tallying their wrongs to be remembered
  • Loving from the heart is to view God’s commands as expressions of His love
  • Loving God will mean to seek God’s approval first, rather than human acknowledgment and praise
  • Love like this will be shared with others rather than hidden from view
  • Loving God means being sensitive and willing to give up that which offends or harms
  • Having a servant’s heart, a humble heart, and an other-centered disposition

How do we do this?

God tells us to ask, seek, and knock, and then the door will be opened to us. We must ask Him for what we want, spiritually speaking. Then we seek God with our whole heart and look for His answer with expectation. We anticipate His fulfillment of our request. This is the critical point (after salvation). Be intentional. Tell Him that you want to know Him. Open yourself up to having an honest conversation with God. Give yourself freely to this undertaking. Seek to not withhold any part of your thinking or life from God’s loving intervention. (Expect it to be uncomfortable at first as He reveals your inner person to you.) Believe me, God wants to answer your prayer by coming close to you.

That’s what I did. I asked. I surrendered. I listened. I waited. I pled. And I gave up doing it my way. God takes us as serious once we decide to become serious with Him. He never forces His will as a way to bend us into compliance. It doesn’t work that way. He understands where we are weak. He will reveal Himself to us in His way. We aren’t cookie cutter Christians. Each one of us is unique. What is common to our spiritual experience, though, is there is a great deal of humbling that goes on before we become a sweet savor to God.

Above all else, find God as your first love. Pray, fast, give, meditate, memorize scripture–there are many ways to seek God. It is helpful to implement and practice spiritual disciplines as a way to increase your love for God. This is not a shallow pursuit. It is deep, borne out of sincere desire for God, and for God to reveal Himself. At some point, your ability to trust God will become strong like an anchor. The questions will calm once you feel secure in God.

Study of the Bible’s words, biblical text, will increase your understanding of God and His truth. The New Testament gospels, the book of Romans, the book of John are all great places to begin your spiritual fine-tuning in such a way that it will draw you deeper into His ways. If reading the Bible is new to you, I suggest you read John first. The psalms offer prayers of comfort during the hard and stressful times. A psalm a day will keep the doctor away. They are all about life in the real. Philippians gives peace and joy, and practical thoughts for living the Spirit-filled life.

These are places to begin a deeper relationship with God. Let me know if I can be of assistance to you.

What do you think? What can you add to this list? I welcome your comments.

God Alone.

Note: Some concepts in this blog were gleaned from a sermon by Pastor Larry Peterson

Posted on

The Political Abyss & A Turnaround

THE BETTER GOOD

Our country is in a mess. What the heck is going on? We are swimming around in abysmal conditions without any clear understanding of why or how we got here. It is like we are in a battle, the battle of bad v good, but we’ve forgotten what good looks like. Even our explanations seem to have an edge to them.

There is a struggle going on although it’s not a new one. This one includes deception and misinformation. It is hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys. There is a lot of crossover. In my skepticism I think “The pot is calling the kettle black.” Such is my disillusionment.

Let’s take a closer look.

The Way of Bad

The advantage the bad has is that it leads with lies. The lies often are couched in misleading lingo. What may sound plausible or positive often has a dark side. People don’t want to unmask it because that would expose the true state of things.

One misleading lie is that the government is the cure to what ails us.

Not so.

The people and their beliefs are the cure to what ails us.

The government is a vehicle to serve us, but it cannot be the cure because it functions at the mercy of its laws and its people. A government is a structure, one that can be strong and life-giving or compromised and corrupt.

The thing is, evil comes on many levels when good is disregarded.

The Way of Good

The advantage the good has is that it leads with truth. Let’s take the most basic truth of all, that there is intrinsic value in every life. We all know this is true. To deny this is to say one life matters more than another life, which gives superiority to one over the other. We also know that good will do good, which is a form of doing right. It is the ‘better good’, ‘best interest’,  ‘higher ground’ of the end result. Purity of thought and action will bring goodness and richness to our lives and world because it promotes what is helpful and best as it exposes what harms and denigrates.

We are in a battle, whether we realize it or not. The battle is for our minds–what we think, believe, and then embrace. It is good to ponder this instead of remaining oblivious. People and organizations have lied to us…even in educational systems, in government systems, in religious institutions, and in families (they may not have realized the lie-believed).

A way to unmask the lies we have believed is to unravel the thread until you get to the root of the matter. What is its inner truth, its true make-up? What is its consequence? How does it play out?

Our society is in trouble because it fails to consider the bigger picture, that ideas become realities, some for the better good and some for  utter harm. To ignore this is to say good is bad and bad is good, as the lies take over and destroy us as a society. It becomes a cesspool of instability because it has no rock on which to stand.

The Way of The Better Good

We can unmask the lies we have believed as a society. Love is the measuring device. The place to begin is with what we care about. What do we love? Are we loving in the way we treat the unborn, the people with developmental challenges, the environment, the various races, religions, and cultures? Are we respecting of people we philosophically disagree with? Are we allowing our love to inform our moral choices and the words we choose to say about and to other people? Is our self-love destroying us? Do we see beyond the end of our nose? Are we hateful or hate-filled, not caring who it hurts?

Love that is true love will do the right thing, always. Sometimes we mistake something for love when it really is pride, arrogance, or ego (even self-righteousness, when we think we are the only ones who are right and good). It takes a great deal of introspection and clarity to see truth as it stands alone.

For me, this includes God’s help. But even God can be misunderstood if we have a mindset that misinforms us about His ways. It helps to ask God to reveal our individual areas of blindness, and we all have them. For example, we may think we are are not prejudiced, but God will show us where we are prejudiced, where we are dark in our understanding and beliefs. Then it is up to us to change our views. Confusion will dissipate and the better good will prevail.

The whole thing is complicated. Yet it is simple, too. Do what is right and good according to the inner values of right and good, which  promote goodness and value to all living things. Live out The Golden Rule, and you will be on the right path.

The choice rests with us.

Who we are and who we will become boils down to our belief system. Constant blaming of others is a form of scapegoating. It deflects from us and our duty to respond and act in appropriate ways. Those times when we choose to be strong, brave, honest, and true, when we choose to treat people with dignity, kindness, and substance rather than with arrogance, self-centeredness, or haughtiness, are when we will make steps toward living life the better good. This past decade of coarseness in our country, as Mark Shields said on the PBS NewsHour, will lessen as we begin to shift in a more positive direction towards the reclaiming of best interest in a civil society. Maybe we will quit the mudslinging and bring back gracious discourse.

Truth talk is also a necessary starting point.