Today, like never before, the world needs to know and love God. Often times people think that they can live a “good life” without loving God, however, all of creation was created to love God. Therefore, without loving God a person can never truly experience the purpose they were made for. Likewise, they will never understand the foundation and explanation for everything in creation.
It is my prayer that you learn to know and love God with all your heart and live the kind of life that pleases Him!
SERIES TEXT
John 15:12-17, “12 My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. 13 Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command. 15 I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.
16 You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit— fruit that will last— and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. 17 This is my command: Love each other.”
HOW vs. WHY
WHY EVERYTHING IS THE WAY IT IS!
WHY WE LOVE GOD!
HOW TO LOVE GOD
Mark 12:28-31, “28 One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”
29 “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel:The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ 31 The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”
- WORSHIP: We should love God by worshipping Him in spirit and truth, John 4:23.
- OBEDIENCE: We are to love God by obeying all of His commands, John 14:15.
THE DIVINE ROMANCE
- “It is a world of magic and mystery, of deep darkness and flickering starlight. It is a world where terrible things happen and wonderful things too. It is a world where goodness is pitted against evil, love against hate, order against chaos, in a great struggle where often it is hard to be sure who belongs to which side because appearances are endlessly deceptive. Yet for all its confusion and wildness, it is a world where the battle goes ultimately to the good, who live happily ever after, and where in the long run everybody, good and evil alike, becomes known by his true name. . . . That is the fairy tale of the Gospel with, of course, one crucial difference from all other fairy tales, which is that the claim made for it is that it is true, that it not only happened once upon a time but has kept on happening ever since and is happening still.” Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale.
- “God created man because He loves [love] stories,” Elie Wiesel.
- “We live in narrative, we live in [a love] story. Existence has a story shape to it. We have a beginning and an end, we have a plot, we have characters, [we have a happy ending where the hero captures the heart of His lover by sacrificing everything for her],” Eugene Peterson.
Love God with everything inside you and release your heart to forever experience the journey of His divine romance!
