How to Love God with All Your Heart Soul Mind and Strength

hi everyone mark dejesus here in this session i want to address the topic how to love god with all your heart soul mind and strength just the very subject alone can in many people's lives lead them to great empowerment but i also know many believers that struggle with what does it mean to love god what does it mean to engage him with all of your heart what does it mean with all of your soul mind and strength what does it look like to have a powerful love relationship with god because in the scriptures god does mention we are to love him as we're going to see in the scriptures i'm going to bring out to love him with all our heart soul mind and to love our neighbor as our self so i want to take a moment here and kind of break this down how do we love god with all our heart soul mind and strength well let's look at these passages and then look at some of the words to consider before i get into the practical steps the first thing is deuteronomy 6 5 is where this is mentioned this is the initial mentioning of god establishing his heart for love relationship keep in mind this is under the old covenant of the law but yet even within the parameters of the law god is establishing the importance of love relationship and he's setting the stage for an eternal understanding of how important it is to love god and connect to his love and to experience that love in our relationships he says you shall love the lord your god and in deuteronomy covers three areas your heart with all your soul and with all your strength and so in the old testament you don't see the word mind brought out because jesus when he says it he brings out the mind he says jesus said to him you shall love the lord your god and this is in matthew 22 37 you'll love the lord your god with all your heart soul and he says with all your mind so there's two things worth mentioning here what i like to do is say let's look at all four of these words to let them encompass the power of love to let love influence all those areas but to also understand too in the old testament writings there was no word for mine it was all heart also the learning that went on when things were learned there was it was done in a mentoring context it was working with someone walking with them to teach to remind them it was a learning not just in a textbook kind of format but learning through the experience the ways of god in the new testament times you live in the you see the times of the influence of the greeks which elevated philosophy and the mind and reasoning and understanding and the accumulation of knowledge which the accumulation of knowledge is great but there's some there's some things we're all running into one is we all realize you can have head knowledge of something but feel very disconnected to it and and struggle with posse possessing it experiencing it in your life and it's important to learn too that when it comes to love love isn't something you can just learn in a classroom love is something you have to engage your full faculties to it so although learning about it is great we have to find our ways of application and learning so i just find that interesting whereas in the new covenant times the times of jesus there was a lot of elevation of mind thinking and in some ways it enhanced society and created opportunities for greater development but in other ways it distanced us from emotion it distance us from connection and really understanding that love is something that needs to be experienced so just some food for thought as we're learning to process so let's look at these four words okay these four words that talk that reference we're going to love god with all of these areas the first area is your heart and what i want to point to when it comes to loving god with all of our heart this really deals with our core affections the bible says where your treasure is there your heart will be also so i want god to have access to every place of my heart to my core affections and even my desires be formed by the love of god be influenced by the love of god and this is what i'm so passionate about is encouraging people to get to the root system of their life getting to the heart of the matter is really what it's all about because when our love relationship with god influences our heart then our motives get influenced it's not just what we do it's like why do we do it you know we get more honest when we look at our anger problems we get more honest about why do i get angry what's the real thing that's going on in my life you see when we have a heart relationship there's a it's a whole different level when you have a heart relationship with somebody it moves past just being polite and the formalities it moves into being known it moves into being vulnerable and so i tell people you want to have a real relationship with god it often takes the first step of do i want a real relationship where i can allow him to be involved in every aspect of my life and because of how we've been taught about god we avoid that for so many years in my life growing up the concept of give your all to god give your whole heart to him first of all i felt like it was like i never could do it enough so i was always striving and two it was incredibly frightening because i didn't realize how much in his love he receives me to connect to him i was so aware of all my sins flaws failures mistakes hang ups weaknesses and all that i became so distracted by it the idea of loving god with all my heart was very very challenging so for many you can relate to that you're just very under this pressure i gotta love him with all my heart right but it's just endless striving and what are you what are you looking at when it comes to actually approaching god who is he are you approaching him in that he's always angry at you ready to cast you away and nothing's ever good enough you know kind of mentality that you feed then that's going to influence this and for many people it distorts how they even approach loving god because it's performance based right so we have to understand who we're talking about we talk about god and jesus represented the heart of the father in each interaction so that people would understand this is the god we're talking about and this is the god i'm saying love him with all of your heart because this is a real relationship that you can have a real dynamic authentic relationship the second area gets into is the soul and when you hear me talk about the soul some of the things that i talk about are your belief systems your thinking patterns the perspectives you have on god life this world your identity how do you see yourself how does your personality get formed and how to say how does your style of relating when my soul when i love god with all of my soul i allow his love to infiltrate my belief systems to be formed by love relationship with god my thinking patterns to be formed out of love relationship with god my perspectives my identity and my ways of relating you see every aspect of our life that's not first formed by the love of god can go into all kinds of distorted dysfunctional unhelpful disempowering areas where faith hope and love don't increase but feel stagnant in our life so i want to take my belief systems and form them people say how do i how do i go stronger and like let my soul be thinking on and meditating on things more powerfully will let it be influenced by love by the love of the father for you his undying never-ending compassionate love that he has for you and jesus brings in the word he brings in the in the word where the old testament brings in strength he brings in the word mind now before i get to mind let me just address strength because that's from the book of deuteronomy where in there he talks about that word strength it's um great might to a great degree so in the biblical context here um that word in the in the in the old testament can speak of like exceeding very there's like an intensity to it that we be known for our passion for god that we get excited about it we guard our affection for him there's a force of passion that i just love him there's a picture of like that that i get of a man who just loves the woman that he's with he says i love this woman you know that kind of um where there's an exuberance and there's just an overflow of strength and energy a love relationship with god ought to add energy to our life i just think in that simplest form imagine being with a person that you truly love and you experience love being around them do you walk away drained or do you walk away with energy added to you refreshment and when i look around and observe the modern christian life it's very drained very burnt out very there's like a loss of energy there's there's more heaviness than there is joyful rejoicing experience to that degree we have we have we have a ways to to go of resetting our understanding of what it means to let his love infiltrate love empowers your life the bible says in first corinthians 13 that love believes all things when i connect to the love of god it enhances my belief system when it enhances my perspective i learned to believe again to believe stronger now many say i don't have any strength i don't have it i just don't have it and and typically what we do as preachers and teachers is we just kind of condemn people for that state and we kind of what's wrong with you to to to so many of our brothers and sisters and what love that what we don't understand is when you don't have strength the love of god arrives to meet you because when you're at your weakest he's still at his strongest and his great this is where we learn his grace where he meets us where we're stumbling fumbling struggling because many believers read the passages of love the lord your god and they feel it disqualifies them because they view it from a performance place and that performance has burned them out they're like trying to i remember i remember literally kind of saying okay i'm really loving you god i was like what is that like to to actually engage it so i always felt never enough never enough never enough i didn't know how to relax in love relationship have that great passion but not passion in performance and trying to make it happen but the passionate just learning to rest and enjoy and feed off of because his love adds fuel and had adds energy to my life when i'm connecting to it in its authentic way so jesus adds the mind we can kind of connect some of that to soul right because the mind you know the greek culture brought out the elevation of the mind but the mind without love has a lot of emptiness sometimes the smartest people can feel incredibly empty sometimes those who have great knowledge and great perspective and understanding and so what i want to do is i want my mind my actual thought patterns how i think my emotions that that because i talk about when our thoughts our thoughts have emotions connected to them that's why we pay attention to them i want every thought that passes through good bad whatever i want every thought to come into into come under the influence first of the dominion of the love of god because then that sets the stage because without his love man i'm going to try to do all this stuff to fix my thoughts make sure i'm doing good i'm going to be under pressure don't make sure i think these thoughts make sure i don't and all it does is make us land into failure more and more because i need to learn how to lean on his love to help me to form the thoughts thoughts that are based on god's ways are meant to be formed out of relationship with him we have been duped in so many ways by forms of religiosity that get us bound in certain patterns of trying to fix all these things without first connecting to the fact i am loved right now before i even address any of my thoughts that i'm battling with i must first establish love what it means to be connected to the love of god now there's a passage of scripture that i found very helpful for me in the early stages of my renovation which i call and and when you do renovations you you you go past just patching holes in the wall you go down to the foundation i was reminded of revelation 3 20 which by the way is often used as an evangelistic tool to win others to christ but this is actually written to the church jesus is saying i stand at the door and knock if anyone hears my voice and opens the door he doesn't say i'm going to come in and ring your neck and i'm going to i'm going to point out every flaw in your life he says i want to come in and dine with you and you with me he's like this this is not just the one way of me just interacting with you you ever sit down and have a meal with somebody you're doing all the talking or you're doing all the interacting jesus is saying it's not about that it's me i want to dine with you and you with me i want you to learn how to experience who i am i want you to learn how to express that to me i want that connection so when i began what i call the renovation of my life while i'm struggling with anxiety obsessive thinking depression panic attacks all this stuff where i'm like realizing i'm just a mess in my thoughts then i began to look around and people i was talking to they were saying yeah i struggle with that too i struggle with that too and i'm looking around at the body of christ and going we're all struggling with this stuff right typically what we do with god is we say god i need you to work on this with me and god will often say no i'm actually working over here and we think oh my goodness this is so unrelated and i just i kept sensing god pointing me back to what it meant to just connect with him in a revelation 3 20 to just be with him to not rush through it to just sit with him to be able to just connect and yes avenues of worship and praise those kind of things certainly but even just stillness quiet learning to quiet myself and quiet all the noise and just be we in our busy lives and all our constant stressors and and voices that scream in our in our thoughts the greatest war is over just being able to connect to revelation 3 20. to sit and have a meal it's time for us to start doing that to realize we're malnourished and we need the sustenance the nutrition of connection in any great relationship when that simple intimacy isn't there the great relationship says it's time to recognize this it's time to get back to the fundamentals because for so many of us the christian life gets complicated in our busyness our church service our our activities and all these things that we do in our modern living but at the end of the day do you feel refreshed by it do our do our spiritual ministry even your personal devotional activities do they refresh you i didn't say do you feel like oh i did that today so i feel good because i did that does it actually refresh you if not you found a good resource today because i'm speaking into this for your life in your journey and so what i want to do is i want to empower but it has to be important to you we have to say you know what this is a value i i want what christ wants i want this i want this dining i want a real relationship i don't want this phony thing where i'm just constantly unfulfilled constantly feeling disconnected i want a real love relationship well there's many people around you that are being sucked into a hypnosis that pulls them into chronic busyness and striving and all this stuff that's leaving them feel very empty and very disconnected you have to be aware in that value system there's some things that you'll need to understand to help move you into a new direction and i want to encourage you in these and these are not a list of like to-do lists or things of like you know use these 10 things these are important thoughts to help navigate this for you and the first thing is this very very important loving god is a response to his love for you loving god is a response to his love for you to the average christian when we talk about loving god we feel this sense of like okay i gotta dig real deep here we go okay god i'm gonna love you we we apply a sense of what energy we can muster up why because there's a plague of people living under performance driven christianity it's a hidden work of law influenced thinking living behaving where we relate to god out of this like striving we have this sense of like it's got to be enough i've got to do it just right i've got to make sure that i stick with the check boxes and get the rules right and what happens is we're left feeling empty in that emptiness we look at ourselves with shame and we say i just can't do it i'm not doing it good enough and so instead of getting to more the heart of the matter which is like how i'm approaching god needs relearning and equipping we go back and say i just need to try more and do more you know maybe i seem to pray longer maybe i need to do this maybe i need to serve much longer i'm not dedicated as enough i'm not i got to be more joyous i'm going to i'm going to put some force to this and i'm going to be joyful [Music] right and that performance driven living leaves us exhausted that's why i wrote a book called exposing the rejection mindset because in that i document the rejection root and it it comes about in all our lives in places where we don't experience the unconditional empowering love of the father so therefore we don't know who we are we live in spiritual slavery our identity becomes based on what we do and i am seeing scores of believers with even massive debilitating depression many times just can't even get out of bed simply because they've been taught a performance-based interaction with god the weight is on them they feel this constant striving constant doing to try to love god and they have not been taught no we love him as a response loving him is a response to receiving his love look at look at what first john says in 1st john 4 10. i appreciate his message here he says in this is love not that we love god like wait a second is this contradictory is this is this is this counteracting wait it's just is this in conflict with what we just read in matthew what jesus said no it's bringing fuller context to it see this is this is what's important about the word of god the word of god works in harmony so where you see one verse going one direction it's meant to provide harmony because the in musical score the note by itself needs the other note to create a harmony oftentimes in music you'll have three notes that make like a chord and them together create a harmony together that's beautiful and in many ways the scriptures do that they create a harmony so what john is doing is bringing a fuller understanding that love is not like you trying to love god you don't have it in you you need an encounter with god's love it's in a response and that opens up his grace now of course it doesn't mean you have zero capacity to love or experience love people who don't believe in god can love but this depth of love relationship with god is built on his love for you he says in this is love not that we loved god but that he loved us and sent his son this eternal this eternally significant moment in time where he sent his son to be the propitiation to be the atonement to be the covering for our sins so that this love blanket fills the atmosphere so i can now come boldly before the throne of grace because i'm responding to what he's done and many of you have been taught to do do do not in response you haven't been taught the response of just the beauty we're focused on how good we're were i doing my devotions today i'm doing doing good it's worthless you know what i mean i don't mean what you're you know i don't want to call your life worthless you know what i'm saying like this perspective of trying and trying and instead just posturing yourself to receive when i change my posture just learn to receive it dynamically changed my capacity to love him so in verse 19 again john says i quote this all the time we love him because he first loved us otherwise loving god is going to be an attempt to earn his love to earn his approval and validation not a response to his love that's already available to you and what i discovered is learning to receive began to actively teach me about his grace because god's grace is his divine power working in and through our hearts and our lives it's an energy from heaven that comes in alignment with just connecting to more and more of how he sees you and how he sees others and it empowers you that love sets the the footprint of how hope and faith get ignited and many of you need encouragement to stop this love instead just right where you are let all of you be loved by all of him let your life just be impacted see yourself through that love what does it look like to see yourself the way that god sees you you didn't start so loving god with all your soul mind and strength doesn't start with you interesting because many of you thinks it starts with you started with him who started before you were even born before you even had a thought he saw you and he has love towards you so that's the discovery of not this endless striving and all this things that we these hula hoops that we jump through right and seeing myself through that love and letting it be a response that began to change my life and will forever be something that will continually growing and expanding loving god is is not experienced in striving this is really important no relationship grows by forcing it in in this like i'm gonna do it many of you are in that performance mode let go of the striving love is not nurtured while under stress love is not developed by just trying harder love is developed by learning to pause and take in the beauty of who he is and his love towards you and letting that be a part of how you see everything so now my heart soul mind and strength come under the influence of the majestic powerful love of god now we have to pause our striving doesn't help for two reasons one it puts it all on our effort to make this happen and two the striving puts us under a busy buzz doing a lot of stuff but never really connecting and modern christian activity is very busy but it's unfulfilling and it leaves us with a burnout kind of posture and then we blame ourselves and it's a it's a hamster wheel that we stay in and so for many of you there's a posture of striving that needs to be let go of now i'm going to tell you this this is going to be important as you let go here's something that i've learned in my life is is we don't really make heart changes until we really come to the end of ourselves come to the end of ourselves meaning like okay something needs to fundamentally change in my life otherwise we just keep patching holes and we'll just keep trying to build on on this structure that is just leave keeping us in these same traps i had to come to a place where i came to a humble surrender but it was a humble surrender and a posture of learning it wasn't like you know sometimes the words even the word surrender spins out many believers because they're taught of surrender like in the context of an angry god performance driven god and nothing's ever enough so you're not there there isn't this you're giving out not of an experience of love you're giving out almost to try to earn love and and paul talked about like you can give your body to be burned there's people give their body to be burned but they're like still trying to do it in this exclamation of maybe this will give attention to heaven that i really love you you know try to elevate what we can do and so i want to encourage the surrender is more just cease from striving take a deep breath and just yield your faculties god i humble myself i don't know what love is i don't know how to love you i don't know how to connect your love as a father and many in many ways those were some of the wordings i said to god myself i said this sentence god i don't know you as father i don't know how to connect to your lover's father but i want to learn so surrender there's a humility that i need to know and i posture my heart to learn so that i can extract from my journey through the word through interactions through even coincidental moments where god can use everything to speak into my life this is where i am honestly god i don't know how many of you saying i don't know how to connect to your love but i want to and will you show me and that's the beauty because god meets you where you're at and his grace arrives to empower you and you yield to that grace step by step yeah but mark my life is so messed up and i'm at a i'm at desperation we gotta get you out of desperation because love is not desperation i understand that emotion but if we live from desperation to desperation we won't hear his love because love isn't just a 911 response and sometimes that desperation is if i'm desperate enough you know and we used to sing this i'm desperate for you you know we met well but it's like if i sing this loud enough heaven's gonna come here relax just surrender your faculties to who he is and let all of you be impacted by all of him well that's scary mark well what kind of god have you been introduced to now god he wants an all-in relationship don't get me wrong you know he want but doesn't doesn't anyone who wants a deep relationship with somebody don't you want an all-in when you get married and that marriage is a picture of our relationship with christ do you want do you want a marriage it's like well we'll see or do you want i'm all in right so what's in the natural is too true in the spiritual so yes he wants an all-in all surrender relationship what that means gets distorted because of how we see him you know i lived so many years of my life like if i live in full surrender that means everything i like i have to give up because because i got to live and surrender it got real distorted in my life and and i felt shameful even expressing this because i felt like nobody else had this battle you know and then i began to share people like yeah me too it's a it's a god distortion the thinking like if i feel a passion to go down this pathway no god doesn't want that he wants me to go you know leave everything and go to another country you know because because i had this assumption it was always always kind of the most difficult scenario was always what god wanted and i'm not saying that your journey won't lead you in difficult places i'm just saying our distortions of who we're approaching like wait a second i'm dealing with a father here and i have to learn what it means to relate to a good father as a son not a slave and so i hope this is encouragement and encouraging you know to your life so a loving relationship with god flourishing flourishes by letting him be a part of everything in your life stop seeing god is like you connect with him during devotion instead connect with a god that's always with you all the time he never leaves he's always by your side connect to that and that's abiding in him we want to learn about abiding in him it's just increasing our awareness of who he is at every moment now it doesn't mean you walk around going oh jesus is here jesus with me you know god is with me yeah he just spoke to me oh he's there it it's i'm not talking about that kind of obsession i'm talking about just in your everyday life in just the little matters you're just aware that he's with you that's very empowering to me it adds energy to me to know he's got my back he's with me and i've got an obstacle in my life he's not trying to kill me he's not trying to just you know do all these things against me he's here with me to equip me empower me i'm going to learn through this how to experience his nature you see what i'm saying i'm allowing love love relationship to influence everything and relationship is like we're connected we're connecting yes i have those moments those pit stops right and you're like well where do i start actually applying this well start with where you are right now god meets you where you're at so give them what you have and so many times believers are like i should be praying an hour you can't even seem to pray 30 seconds and then you condemn yourself you can't pray 30 seconds well give him 30 seconds and experience a amazing 30 seconds because for for many of you you need your whole devotional life needs uh or or your quiet time whatever you call it needs an overhaul meaning that god's like yeah let's stop doing this because i'm getting bored too right start where you are and for me i tell this is an old story it's worth repeating busy busy go go go life but i realized this love of the father sonship learning to receive his love this began to open up in my heart and my life but yet i still had this you know tons of layers of busy striving performance perfectionism so i just gave him i gave him what i had before i went out the door i felt this prompting just before you go out just sit for a moment and just reflect on my love that i have for you and look at your day at all the things on your calendar and let each of the things on your calendar be influence your perspective on them be influenced i love you i've got you i'm here with you and you don't have to earn my love in all these meetings and all these places so i began to realize i can get filled by him so that i don't go out there to try to get my core need of love met by all these people's circumstances whether it's through performance the applause the getting people to like me people policing tying into codependent patterns tying in to these enmeshment patterns tying in to trying to make everyone happy all that stuff comes out of we're disconnected to the father's love for us and so for me the beginning all i had was a minute meaning that's all i was able to handle and then i just increased it and i increased it and then it grew and blossomed and there's different ways now and and i find more enjoyment it's about enjoying him love relationship is about enjoyment does the church's emphasis and teaching on love relationship have the fruit of the spirit have enjoyment as a manifestation because for many it's just obligation and duty jesus did not die on the cross so that we would manifest the same duty and law because this duty is duty he didn't die so that we would then keep striving and keep looking at how good are we doing but we've been taught that you've been conditioned in that and our and our modern cultures keep that going with our constant business performance based environments so let him meet you where you're at maybe you're a pastor church leader and you're always busy and everything's going just meet him where you're at there there was a song i played in one of my videos past by news song it's an old song it's called before the day and it just simply goes before the day slips away i want to stop and say i love you now i'll let me rephrase that for you before the day slips away i want to stop and thank you for the love you have for me and i'm not saying don't say i love you i'm just saying reset the starting place let your faculties be impacted by how much he loves you right now stop trying to get it together and then you'll feel better because then your love relationship with god will always be conditional so if you get it together and get your act together whatever that means then now from here on out it's based on you getting it right and i want to release you of that let god meet you where you are right now and then that'll impact how you relate to others because loving god grows as you practice giving out that love that you're experiencing that you're learning to receive and experience you know we live in a very um fabricated where we feel like imposters and what we're sharing with people why because we're forced to live in this role that's not authentic to just hey i'm in my journey you're in yours and i want to just keep lowering that facade and lowering that facade no no i'm on a journey and i'm simply giving out to you what i am learning i'm not giving out to you where i've arrived let's i'm going to level that too i'm giving out of what i'm learning myself and growing in and this gets rid of hypocritical ministry and this gets rid of these phony baloney standards by which we live by it's inauthentic and it's it's it's not helping the mental and emotional health of people whether you're up on the platform or whether you're in a position or not we're all on a journey and we all have areas that god is working out and healing and growing and so i'm going to share with you what i've learned in my own life and so i pray that somewhere and today you found some good takeaways if this resource is a blessing to your life please consider going to mark dejesus.com click on the donate button you can give a one-time donation or become a regular partner there is also a level one and level two partnership available at this time that gives you access to some other resources too that will just add to your equipping if you want to choose those but you don't have to choose those specific ones you can you can donate any amount of your choosing and the various ways you can do that are on the donate page if you want to connect more to the love of the father then this book is is my gift to you experiencing god's love as your father you can get it as a free download but you can also get it as a hard cover i i it's a it's a great gift that you can give out to somebody and you man you want to learn how to connect to who he is his father and i just pray that the resources and materials that we're putting together are a blessing to your life to those you love and i just pray you learn to receive his love for you let it impact your heart soul mind and strength so that you respond out of that and give your full self to him and i'm really grateful may grace and love increase and may healing and freedom just be added to your life many blessings to y'all see you next time lord willing and the creek don't rise

Channel: Mark DeJesus

Views: 2,094

Rating: 4.9428573 out of 5

Keywords: Love God, Love, Receiving God's Love

Id: Hn7hPYnwVJg

Length: 41min 25sec (2485 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 30 2021