Category Archives: Human nature

How’s your love life??

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Questions are everywhere. Online surveys abound, not to mention all those questionnaires circulated by your friends to get to know you better. (Has one of them has recently asked you, “How’s your love life?”). Perhaps the greatest, the most important question asked, raises that very issue. It put to Jesus and recorded in the New Testament, in MATTHEW 22:37 — 

36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”

I call this the greatest question because of the answer Jesus gave — asserting that this one thing is the greatest duty laid upon human beings:

37 And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment.”

heart-sketch-web1The greatest commandment is to love God. Do you love Him? Do you see how Jesus was concerned that we love God with more than a passing affection — and with more than mere feelings? Every faculty of a person (heart, soul, mind) is summoned to love the Lord your God. And this is to be without reserve, without limit (“all your heart, all your soul and with all your mind…”).

Examine your heart, my friend. This is no small thing to gloss over or ignore. It is the very reason you were created — to know and love the Lord your God (and then, love others in His name).

Get time with God — in His Word, the Bible, and on your knees in prayer. Gather with others who love Him dearly. I pray for you what Paul prayed (Eph. 3:17-19),

…that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith — that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

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Abandon low & carnal aims!

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I constantly mark and underline in my books. Perhaps one of the most precious quotations I have found over the years is this, from Thornwell. (I found it many years ago in Iain Murray’s THE PURITAN HOPE, a real gem of a book).

J. H. Thornwell quote…

“If the Church could be aroused to a deeper sense of the glory that awaits her, she would enter with a warmer spirit into the struggles that are before her. Hope would inspire ardour. She would even now arise from the dust, and like the eagle, plume her pinions for loftier flights than she has yet taken. What she wants, and what every individual Christian wants, is faith — faith in her sublime vocation, in her Divine resources, in the presence and efficacy of the Spirit that dwells in her — faith in the truth, faith in Jesus, and faith in God. With such a faith there would be no need to speculate about the future. That would speedily reveal itself. it is our unfaithfulness, our negligence and unbelief, our low and carnal aims, that retard the chariot of the Redeemer. the Bridegroom cannot come until the Bride has made herself ready. Let the Church be in earnest after greater holiness in her own members, and in faith and love undertake the conquest of the world, and she will soon settle the question whether her resources are competent to change the face of the earth.”

247xh

—from Collected Writings, 1871, volume 2, page 48; 
quoted by Iain H. Murray in The Puritan Hope, (Banner of Truth, 1971, page xxii).

Earnestly seeking things above,
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