Love your God with your Soul

Passage for tonight…Deut 6:1-7

“Now this is the commandment, the statutes and the judgments which the LORD your God has commanded me to teach you, that you might do them in the land where you are going over to possess it, 2 so that you and your son and your grandson might fear the LORD your God, to keep all His statutes and His commandments which I command you, all the days of your life, and that your days may be prolonged. 3 O Israel, you should listen and [a]be careful to do it, that it may be well with you and that you may multiply greatly, just as the LORD, the God of your fathers, has promised you, in a land flowing with milk and honey.
 4 “Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD is one! 5 You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. 6 These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart. 7 You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up.

So how do we love God with our souls?
There are five distinct ways...

1.      1. Rejoice. This isn’t being happy. This is having joy in our hope.   
            
           2.Grief-in a physical manifestation, not just “feeling” grief over the lost, the suffering, the hurt, the deep overwhelming and propelling  desire to see God’s redemption in the spiritual and physical world.  Being propelled by your grief to reach out and use our souls to love.
3.     
           3.Self control with our bodies. Sex. Eating. Drinking. Exercise. Sunshine. Sleep. Sabbath. Music, friendship, conversation, drama, movies, avoiding pornography and trashy love novels, Internet, coffee, relationships, family.
4.      
           4. Worship-physical, emotional, involving not only mind, not only emotions, but our very beings. Not just singing, or dancing, or raising of hands. Service, hospitality, giving, driving someone home after a long day, visiting the sick, the poor, etc, etc, etc.
5.     5.  Losing our lives…I'm not talking always about  being a martyr in our strict definitions, but by dying to our selves by giving away our lives to him. We think of martyrs as the ones killed violently for their faith, but martyrs are all Christians who slowly give their lives away to God by doing all the aforementioned so that others may hear His story, not just living to live, breathing to breathe.

Its not just having a prayer life and doing devos. Its not just fasting and going to church. Its not just praying before lunch and dinner. Its not just coming to English worship and bible study. It’s the bread and wine of heaven. It’s the water that never lets you thirst again. It's worshipping God with your whole soul.

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