Table of contents for Do You Love Me?

1. Do You Love Me?
2. It’s About the Heart – Throughout the Bible
3. It’s About the Heart – He is Everything
4. It’s About the Heart – A Relationship With God

If God is a part of your life, then you have to ask yourself, how much of my life is His?  You see, He will not rest until He makes you into the image of His dear Son.  He wants to be the Lord of your life.

That means that there are two different people that are fighting over your heart—you and God.  I think you know who will win!

He is Everything

Everything in your Christian life, everything about knowing Him and experiencing Him, about knowing His will, depends on the quality of your love relationship with God.  If that’s not right, nothing in your life will be right – Experiencing God: Knowing and Doing the Will of God, Revised and Expanded

We were created to be beings of worship—worship is something that is natural and normal.  The truth is, if we don’t look to Him to be the foremost thing in our lives, if we’re keeping back parts of our life, then we aren’t allowing our love relationship to grow, and we’re not being all that we can be.

We were made to love Him, and when we’re in that love relationship with Him, we find in Him everything we need.

Seek This First

… But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.  Matthew 5:25-34

This passage of Scripture talks about how in Christ we have everything we need.  The birds of the air don’t worry about food.  The field doesn’t worry about dress.  But we worry about both of these things, even though God loves us much more than any of these.

You see, if we’re in God’s will, He will provide.  There’s an old saying that what every God orders He will pay for.  Often we’re so caught up in making sure that we have everything that we need so that we don’t need to rely on God, that we don’t bother to seek Him!

Eternal Beings

When it comes to thinking about ourselves, I believe that we are often fooled about our true nature.  It’s easy to get focused on the tangible, on the moment.  We can think about what we do, where we are, and what family we belong to.  The truth of the matter is, however, this world is not our home, we are just passing through.

We are eternal beings, in the process of becoming what God wants us to one-day be.  The question is, how are we preparing now for our future in Heaven?

Table of contents for Do You Love Me?

1. Do You Love Me?
2. It’s About the Heart – Throughout the Bible
3. It’s About the Heart – He is Everything
4. It’s About the Heart – A Relationship With God

When you ask the question, “Do You Love Me?” you immediately realize that this is a question directed at the heart.  What you may not realize is that it’s always been about the heart—from the beginning of time.

You see, throughout the Bible, God has always been concerned about our heart attitude toward Him.

Throughout the Bible

Adam and Eve

It was about the heart in the Old Testament as far back as the Beginning.  When God created Adam and Even back in the garden, the test was the Fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil¹ but at the root of the test was whether or not the two first people would want to serve and love God first and foremost, or whether they would pursue their own way.

Their true heart attitude was on display when they were confronted with their sin.  Instead of acknowledging their sin and seeking to make right with God, they sought to shift the blame to someone else.  One wonders what would have happened had they sought forgiveness instead of making excuses!

Noah

God has an interesting commentary about people at the time right before the flood.  It’s not just that they were sinners, selfishly looking after pleasure.  Of course, they were that too.  God’s commentary is that “every imagination of the thoughts of their heart was only evil continually.”  Their heart did not want to do right, so they weren’t looking to do right.

In all of the earth, only a few short generations after Adam, God could only find one man and his family that did seek God.  He was not perfect, but he longed after God, and God saved Noah and his family from the destruction of the Earth.

Saul and Samuel

The Amalekites were a bad bunch of people—marauders.  As the children of Israel were leaving Egypt headed toward Canaan, the Amalekites attacked them, and God told them that they would be judged—utterly destroyed.

However, in God’s mercy, they were given multiple years before that happened.  It wasn’t until the time of King Saul that God finally judged the people, and He gave Saul a specific command: kill all of them.  From the smallest to the greatest, there was to be nothing left of this people.

Saul didn’t comply, and God sent Samuel to take the kingdom away from Saul.  However, Samuel also rebuked Saul, telling him “To obey is better than sacrifice.”  In essence, he was saying, your heart’s desire for obedience would have been better than sacrificing the animals you saved from this king when.  Your heart is more important than you deeds.

David

David was a man after God’s own heart.  Not that he was sinless.  When it comes to the “big sins” of the Bible, David’s sin with Bathsheba is one that is remembered.  David was where he shouldn’t have been and he did what he shouldn’t have did.

But the sin isn’t why he’s given such a great title.  It’s not because of his slaying Goliath.  It’s because he saw sin as God saw it.  He broke to pieces when confronted with his sin, and pleaded God for change.

The Greatest Commandments

In the New Testament, when the religious leaders of the day were trying to trip Jesus up, they thought that they could get Him to make a mistake by placing one commandment over the other, when they were all in force.  So, they set Him up, asking Him what the “greatest commandment” was.  Jesus, knowing their intents, but also the Word of God responded, “To love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind.”

Even the second, “Love your neighbor as yourself” contains a heart action—we are to love God and others.

Sermon on the Mount

In what was surely surprising for those in attendance, Jesus’ most famous sermon talked about the heart as being the key to living right and being blessed.  Each one of the “Beatitudes” or blessings that are found at the beginning of Matthew 5 have to deal with the inner person.

And then when you get into the portion after that, you see that for every commandment that is listed, Jesus talks about how it is not enough to simply obey the commandment, but that your heart has to be right in that area as well.  It’s not enough to not kill, you have to not hate.  It’s not enough to not commit adultery, you have to not even lust.

You see, from the very beginning of the Bible until the end, it’s always been about the heart.  It’s always been about how our heart loves Him, how it believes Him, etc.  That’s key to understanding this question of “Do you Love me?”

1. Which was not an apple!

If you were to pick the hardest Bible passages, what would you pick?

A recent post by Ann Althouse suggested her Top 10 Worst Bible Passages.  A lot of the problems that people have with these passages has to do with context and an understanding of the times.

For example:

2. "Go, now, attack Amalek, and deal with him and all that he has under the ban. Do not spare him, but kill men and women, children and infants, oxen and sheep, camels and asses." (1 Samuel 15:3)

This seems harsh, except it is in God’s hand when any should die, and they had been warned and God had shown mercy.  It was many generations after they had been told to change that they were judged.  I can see why we believe that killing everything is harsh, but it was a whole lot more efficient than the tactics we have today.  Just saying.

To me, the hardest things to reconcile are things like Romans 9—why did God love Jacob?  Why did He hate Esau?  That kind of stuff blows my mind.

What do you find difficult?

And yet today it’s the opposite—church discipline leads to splits which lead to division over the color of the carpet or what you think of the current Pastor.

We can never be too pure, and we’ll always have opinions over doctrine, but there must be a line—a line where we’re willing to accept differences and live together in Christ. 

Where would you draw the line of separation?  On a personal level?  On a church to church level?

I know that we should always judge what we experience by what the Bible says.  An experience that did not come from Him must come from somewhere else.

But when I read something like this in my comments on preaching I’m left with a question:

Will do! My daughter has to preach in four different churches EVERY Sunday – one of them in a foreign language. Well, foreign to her. She has six parishes in all. But I know that once (at least) she felt the Holy Spirit prompting her to preach quite spontaneously on a different subject to the one she’d lined up. I’m sure He’ll do the same for you if necessary.

So, my question is…  if I don’t believe the Bible supports women in the ministry, who gave this woman’s daughter the words to say?  Or, to ask it a different way, if she attributes the call of the Holy Spirit to a natural phenomenon, what does that say about others that do the same?