“Love the Lord With All Your Heart, Soul, and Mind.”  I don’t know about you, but I struggle a bit with this, the first and greatest commandment according to Jesus (Matthew 22:36-38).  I want to love God, I say I love God, but am I really loving God the way He wants me to?

Among all the attributes we know about God, one is that He is a God of emotion.  God he delights, and he grieves.  For example, Jeremiah says this of God in Jeremiah 3:17 “The Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing.”  And Psalm 78 is a description of what God has done for us in spite of our disobedience.  Verse 40 reads: “How often they rebelled against him in the wilderness and grieved him in the wasteland!”

We are made in the image of God, and that is also why we have emotions.  We delight and we grieve.  For example, I have seven grandchildren, and I dearly love them all.  Among those grandchildren are two sets of sisters.  One set of sisters absolutely adores each other.  They look out for each other, they run to each other’s aid, they are very affectionate with each other.  To witness this makes me very happy. The other set of sisters fight like cats and dogs. They are sometimes hurtful to each other and complain about the other endlessly.  This makes me so sad to see and hear.

Consider this:  As an imperfect human, if I can love my grandchildren as much as I do, how much more does my heavenly father love them?  And even though I love them, if their actions can either delight or sadden me to such a great degree, how much more so will our heavenly father be delighted or saddened to see them act like they do?  What is the application for us?

I challenge you, during this season of Lent and forever after, to put into practice an effort to make all your actions (thoughts, words, deeds) delight God and to eliminate all actions (thoughts, words, deeds) that would make God sad. This is one important way that you and I will demonstrate that we love the Lord with all our hearts, souls, and minds.

Blessings,

Judy