Text: Mark 12:28-34

"And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these." Mark 12:30-31

Two big takeaways from this text:

1. Love God with your first and best.
You may have heard people say, "Love is a verb." Yes, love is as love does. It acts. It responds. It pursues. But love is not only a verb. It involves affection, delight, and emotion!

So what can you do if you don't love God even close to the way Jesus commanded? I would advise you to remember than you are still a work in progress (see Philippians 1:6), but also evaluate your life (see 2 Corinthians 13:5 and read this article).

• Ask God to reveal your rival gods. Look at what you think about, spend your money on, look forward to, and makes you feel satisfied.
• Confess the idol and take steps to truly put it in a subordinate place in your life.
• Confess to God that you don't love Him like you should or confess to Him that you don't even want to love Him as you should.
• Begin to spend regular time with God. Schedule your time with God and make it non-negotiable.
• Seek real Christian community with others who will hold you accountable and encourage you to grow.

Before you read #2, consider this wisdom from Jon Bloom-- "The most loving thing we can do for others is to love God more than we love them. For if we love God most, we will love others best."

2. How you love others reveals how you love God.
The Apostle John puts it bluntly: “for if we don’t love people we can see, how can we love God, whom we cannot see?" (1 John 4:20). Our love for each other is an indicator of the place God has in our life.

• Will you take a long, honest look right now at the way you love others?
• If you pursue delight in God, He will equip and motivate you to use your spiritual gifts to love others!