Most Important Commandment

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When people asked Jesus what was the single most important thing they could do to be in agreement with God, this was His answer:

Mark 12: 29 Jesus replied, "The most important commandment is this: `Listen, O Israel! The LORD our God is the one and only LORD. 30 And you must love the LORD your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength.'31 The second is equally important: `Love your neighbor as yourself.' No other commandment is greater than these."

Wholeheartedness for God, making Him the object of our attention, the dream of our heart, target of our time, and the beneficiary of our resources, is what Jesus said should be the most important trait in those whose desire was to agree with God. The second, to love those we come in contact with, friend or enemy, like we love ourselves, Jesus called "equally important."

God wants us to love Him with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength because God loves us with all of His heart, soul, mind, and strength! He doesn't ask us to do anything He didn't do first. He loves us with the wisdom of the uncreated God. Knowing good from evil for us at depths and levels we could never comprehend on this side of eternity. He loves us with His whole heart, making us His favorite. Only you can love Him like you love Him, and only you can receive His love like you receive it. Only you can have the relationship you have with Him. Your relationship with Him is COMPLETELY unique. He loves you with His whole heart. He loves you with all His strength. The one who placed the stars in the sky, set the ocean depths, calms storms, makes it snow, created at least a billion galaxies, He loves you with all of His strength.

The ultimate display of His love is in Jesus, the person of God who is God, and created all things with the Father and the Holy spirit. Jesus, because of God's red-hot passionate desire for me to be restored to Him...for you to be with Him...stepped across the line from being perfectly satisfied as the uncreated God Himself, to putting on humanity forever. Right now He is the only one in heaven in a resurrected body, the first born of many. Fully God, yet fully man from the day He was born of Mary, into eternity. He will forever be a jewish man, who is God, choosing you and me over the eternal status He had always enjoyed with God the Father and the Holy Spirit. This is the ultimate proof of God's wholehearted love for us.

There is only one way to satisfy the first commandment. The first commandment always leads to the second. You can't do the second without the first, and you aren't doing the first if you don't see the second forming in your heart.

So, where to start? AW Tozer said it so simply: it takes God to love God. If I want to give God all of my heart, mind, soul, and strength, I must ask Him to take me into it. Constantly asking, seeking, and knocking for Him to lead me deeper and show me how to give Him more, and all the while listen to Him whisper to my heart "beloved, I want to give you more!". A child receives what they need from a Father by asking for it, and asking for it, and asking for it.

Phillipians 2:6 Though he was God, he did not think of equality with God

as something to cling to.

7 Instead, he gave up his divine privileges;

he took the humble position of a slave and was born as a human being. When he appeared in human form. 8 he humbled himself in obedience to God

and died a criminal's death on a cross.

Isaiah 51:15 For I am the LORD your God,

who stirs up the sea, causing its waves to roar.

My name is the LORD of Heaven's Armies.

16 And I have put my words in your mouth

and hidden you safely in my hand.

I stretched out the sky like a canopy

and laid the foundations of the earth.

I am the one who says to Israel,

`You are my people!'"

Luke 11:9 “So I say to you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. 10 For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.

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