Love God!
As we saw yesterday, Joshua gives his people this advice to be careful and follow God's commandments. For the rest of that verse, Joshua 22:5, he explains what that looks like.
First he says that the law Moses gave was to “love the Lord your God”. To love God. I think it's profound that He puts this at the front of this list because so often we can do the other things that he talks about (that we'll talk about this week) but if we don't do it out of love, we're not really honoring God at all. It's when we look to God as our treasure and our delight and our deepest love that our lives begin to honor him.
Love: The Heart of Faith
Jesus, of course, said that the greatest commandment is to love God, to love Him with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. For Him, that summed up everything in the Old Testament in one broad statement: to love God.
Has God captured your heart, friends? Is your faith a vital expression of love or is it more a religious ritual? Oh, protect your heart from being pulled to loving other things more than God and to enjoying other things more than God! Let your relationship with God be the deepest source of joy!
Thomas Manton said: “Self-love may lead us to prayer, but a love for God excites us to praise.” I love that! Self-love leads us to pray - so often we're praying about our concerns because we wrapped up in our own business. It's not that we mustn't do that, but so often that's all we pray about.
Day of Praise: Centering Life in Worship
Love for God excites us to praise. Let me ask you, is your day a praise-full day? Do you center your whole day around praising God? Here's the thing. When you're praising God, truly that closeness with him always overflows into the difficulties of life and into the struggles and all of that. But if you focus on the struggles that you forget to praise, your relationship with God kind of gets rocky.
If we're going to live wise lives like this Scripture calls us to, let's remember that love for God, exciting us to praise, must be at the center. Why don't you pick a worship song today and let it just sit in your head, sing it all throughout the day to yourself and let it help you remember that God is worthy of your praise, great, holy, mighty, awesome, beautiful, majestic is he!
It’s going to be a good day if we live it with that at the center.
