Okay. The Apostle Paul wrote two letters to the church, the Thessalonian church. You read through those two letters and you find out that Paul is not trying to correct some sort of deviant doctrine or some sin or the idolatry of those people. Basically the church, the Thessalonian church was a good church. There were a lot of strong points to it. The people were good people. The only thing that he really corrects during those two letters, and he mentions it in both letters, that there was an individual in the church called the busybody that would, he didn't want to work. He wanted to mooch. But that was really the only thing that Paul was bringing up as a negative. But he used the book, these two letters, to encourage them to remain faithful in persecution, during trials and difficulties. Stay faithful, don't quit, keep going. He wrote, encouraged them to be patient in waiting for the coming of the Lord. Be patient, be patient. But he also used part of these letters to encourage God's people to keep growing in their love for God. That is the biggest challenge I think he gave them. Keep growing in your love for God. There in 2 Thessalonians he said this, that the Lord would direct their hearts onto or towards the love of God. The word there direct really means, it's in a continuous, it's in an active tense, which is a continuous, to represent a continuous movement in a singular direction. They were to keep growing in their love for God, keep directing their hearts in the direction of God, focus on Him, delight in Him, learn of Him, walk with Him, love Him more and more. You know, I think one of the biggest dangers of a church. That's a good church. We walk with Christ, we try to worship him in spirit and truth, and we desire to live our lives for Christ and be a witness. But I think sometimes we get to the point of our life, if I ask any one of you, do you love God? You say, of course I love God. I'm here in church, aren't I? You see, we almost get to the point where there's a static understanding or love for God. Oh yeah, we love God. We just sang these wonderful hymns. I was looking at these words that we were just singing, and if you sang those with the right heart, you're expressing a love for God. But so was the church, the Thessalonian church. They had a love for God. It's evident through Paul's writing But he said, don't stop. Keep directing your heart towards the love of God. Don't let that become a side issue. Don't let that be, well, I've got, I checked that one off. I'll lay that one aside. What's the next lesson I need to learn? We never finished checking that off, is my point. The best message I can bring to you here at the beginning of 2024, it's hard to believe, A new year. I'm sure there's many of us that would love to have this year, a year when we find ourselves walking closer to God. We find ourselves having a greater impact and influence in the community around us. And wouldn't that be a desire? How can we reach more people? How can I live closer to God myself? The greatest thing I can bring to you the message I think I can bring to you this morning, the beginning of 2024, is a message that would say keep growing in your love for God. So much hinges on that and we'll get into that here. I'll talk about ministry in Mexico. I mentioned Karis's grandparents and You know, the longer, we were only there for just under four years, and I got sick, we had to leave. But those three years, nine months, whatever it was, so impacted our life. We learned so much about God and so much about ourselves. We taught at a Bible Institute, and we started a little church. in a town called Tamazunchale, Mexico. No one's ever heard of it because you don't go there unless you intend to go there. I mean, it's not one of these, you know, pass-through cities. No, you gotta go there if you want to. What a thrill that was. I remember the first person I went to Christ in another language. You mentioned the thrill of that taking. I had a Gideon's, Gideon Bible. One side of the page was Spanish, the other side was English. And so I was leading this guy to Christ. What a thrill. We started seeing people come to the Lord and that little church was formed. This is great. We started to see the church multiply. maturity in the members, growth and desire to serve Christ. And I said, well, let's start branching out. The church was already organized. I had my board of deacon. One man, you know, hey, you go with what you got, right? You have my board of deacon. And it was abounding, and I thought this has got to be the greatest thing that anybody can do on earth. Let's go start another one. So we thought we were going to take the one church and start branching out to the other one, and Lord bless this, Lord give us your blessing on this, let's move forward, let's start another church. I got sick, deathly ill. They put us on an airplane and sent us home, told my predecessor, Dr. Marvin Lewis, to call my pastor and let him know that I was not going to survive. They need to make preparation for this. They're coming home. Went home to Michigan. As you can tell, I did survive. If you haven't noticed, I did make it. But it was a difficult time. But I remember going through a moment Laying flat, I couldn't get out of bed, hardly get out of bed for four months, laying flat on my bed and just, God, what are you doing? What are you doing? The work was flourishing and abounding. And then now what? Lord, you're messing it up. Lord, I pray that you bless it, but now look what you're doing. This is not helping, Lord. You say, really, you prayed that? I'm being very honest with you this morning, opening myself up. You see, I had gotten to the point that I began to love the work of the Lord more than the Lord of the work. You see, I was more about doing for God than being what I needed to be for God. I was loving the wrong thing. It sounds very spiritual. A church planted, teaching at a Bible school, developing some young men to serve Christ who were going out. Man, this is great. The Lord said, no, no, you've got to learn some lessons, young man. I was like 27 at the time. Put me flat on my back for four months, six months before I can get out of the house. I mean, it was rough. Sit down, my son. You need to learn who really is in charge here. See, I got so enthusiastic. I just, the blessings were abounding, which seemed, oh, they were God's blessings. The church was abounding. But in my own heart, I was taking control of it. I was loving it, the work, the activity. And my love for God was over here. He said, wait a minute, brother, I thought you were, I thought missionaries are perfect. No, we're really not. We're normal people. Well, let me ask you the question. How about you? Is there something that you can be so focused on right now in your life that that has taken the throne of your heart over God himself? It may be something good. You're serving in the church here. You're working hard to supply the needs of your family. All kinds of things. Sports. Hobbies, all kinds of things can take our heart and can have the throne of our heart. What about you? What's on the throne of your heart? See, I had to learn that every aspect of my Christian walk and service, including the gospel ministry, including my service for God, begins and hinges upon a true, intimate relationship and love. God. The thing that we sometimes let grow static, and then we wonder why our spiritual growth is static, or our effectiveness in evangelism is static. You see we cannot be good representatives of the love of God to our community if we ourselves are not growing in the love of God. Can you get that? We wonder why maybe we're so anemic in our outreach, But we never think about growing in our love for God. But for us to learn to love God we need to use his definition. What does it mean to love God? Well it means go to church. See we can have all kinds of ideas of what loving God in our mind what it should look like. Well let's find out what God says about it and then use that as the standard. Let's use that as our pattern, what we need to follow if we are truly to love God as we ought to. And here we find our text there in Mark chapter 12 verse 28 through 31. This The context of this is the Passion Week of Christ. Of course we know he came in, the people shouted Hosanna, you know, and the triumphal entry of Jerusalem. It was during this week, and then of course we know at the end was his crucifixion. But his religious enemies, the scribes, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, were trying to do all they could to discredit him. to turn the hearts of the people away from him. They saw, they saw the multitudes following him. They got to put an end to it. So while there was this great gathering, a Pharisee stood up and says to Christ, all right, who do we pay taxes to? Of course, Christ answered, well, render unto Caesar what Caesar unto God, which is God. And shut him right down. Then the Sadducees got it. By the way, Sadducees didn't believe in the resurrection, but the question was, okay, in the resurrection there was a widow that had had seven husbands. Now when she dies and goes to heaven, which one will be her husband? Ridiculous, hypothetical type questions that mean nothing. Of course, we know Christ answered and shut him down, left him speechless. But then a scribe stood up and described that he had a question worth listening to, a question worth Christ giving time to answer. No simple, hollow question, but a wonderful question. And Christ actually responded by quoting from Deuteronomy. And this is what Christ said. It says here, and one of the scribes came, and having heard them reasoning, in other words talking about they had been reasoning with the Pharisee and the Sadducee, and he had answered them well. Now the scribe asked him, which is the first commandment of all? And Jesus answered him, the first commandment of all is thou shall love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind, with all thy strength, This is the first commandment. Now notice that Christ gave him more than what he asked for. He asked, what is the first commandment? Christ gave him the first and the second together. Why? Because you can't have one without the other. They go together. The second is, like namely this, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There's none of the commandment greater than these. What is the first commandment of all? That's the question of the scribe to Christ. Now we need to understand the Old Testament has some 31,000 verses, and the Jews have really broken it down, have extracted from all of those verses any commandment that God has given to man. And they have found 300, excuse me, 613 commands, 365 commands or acts that they should perform, and 248 commands of things which they need to abstain from. And so the scribes, okay, Christ or Jesus, and he said, Jesus, what is the greatest of all these commandments? Can you see the value of that question? There was some depth. There were some things to really learn from that. And he responds again, I mentioned, from Deuteronomy chapter 6 verses 4 and 5. So let me go through these and let's see how he responds. By the way, this is God's definition of what it means to love him. And let's stack our definition or our practice or our understanding of loving God up to this list. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind, and with all thy strength. Four elements. But then the second, thou shalt love thy neighbor, qualified as thyself, and there's none other commandment greater than these. Now I'm not going to touch on that second commandment, though it would be a good study also, but I put it up there just so that you can see that they are connected. You can't, we cannot love our neighbor properly and we won't if we don't first understand the love of God and don't love him properly. Do you understand that? We want to reach the world with the gospel of Jesus Christ, with the love of God, but we ourselves lack a proper love of God. So let's just go through these learn what it means to love God, okay? So the first commandment is to love the Lord thy God. Now there is four things, with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy soul, with all thy mind, and with all thy strength. Now there are four elements here. There is a literary term, it comes from Latin, which is polysidentin, which is a, makes reference to a quick Succession of conjunctions tie together a series of things. In other words, this and this, this and this, this and this. And what it tries to do, it communicates an intent to cause the reader to consider each element as distinctive parts, yet be taken together to form a single whole. Polysyndenton, this and this, and this and this. In other words, each part is significant and necessary It's like a puzzle. Are all the parts to a piece into a puzzle necessary to make the puzzle whole? Of course. I've told the story, we picked up a puzzle years ago in Bavaria, on southern part of Germany. It was a picture, it was a large, I don't know if it was 1500, 2000, it was one of these And it was a night scene of the Castle Neuschwanstein, the one that they call the Disney Castle. And it was a night scene, and so it was a lot of just grays and dark blues. That's it. There weren't yellows and reds. And we worked on that thing literally for two years. It was on our table, and we would go work. And you get tired of working on it. And then you go back and put some, we got to get this, got to get it done. And we finally, well, we didn't finish it. We got close to finish it. And we found there was one missing piece right in the middle of the... All that work and there was one missing piece. I mean, it drove us crazy. So my wife wrote the company. They sent us a whole new puzzle. We literally, We finally got it. You know, sometimes you do all that work and then in a couple of days you just go and throw it back in the box. The point is each piece is necessary. And here we find in this puzzle in Empton, this grouping, all the parts are necessary. If we emphasize one over the other, we're not doing it. It all comes together as one puzzle, one picture. But then it says there are the qualifying adverb, with all thy heart, all thy soul, all thy mind, all thy strength. And right about this time I go, ooh, wow, that bar is set very high. And if we don't keep at it, We are not even going to come close to matching the definition of what God says, what it means to love him. See what I mean? We get to the point, oh yeah, I love God. But we don't compare it to his definition of what it means to love him. This should convict the spiritually minded believer of what his love of God should really look like. but yet it should convict us on how short we fail in it. Let's look through these one by one. The heart. You know, every culture around the world refers to the heart as the center of man's emotion. Everybody knows what this is, right? I mean, all the cultures that we've been in, A heart means man's emotion, that close, the most intimate, the most prized and guarded part of their life, their heart. It's the point of emotion of their life. Come on, guys. Well, I don't do Valentine's Day. I stopped doing that years ago. I don't need an act of Congress to tell me to tell my wife I love her, quite frankly. So what I did, I did reverse Valentine's Day. I do 364 days as though it's Valentine's Day, and one day of the year I give her reprieve. Okay, gentlemen, try that. Try that. What do you think, Paul, has that worked? She says yeah, yeah. Okay. I know it is to have a heart that is so aflame for my wife. And it grows, it grows. The more we're together, the closer we are, the more I learn of her, and we work together, and the more that love grows. Our heart, we love the Lord with all our heart, all of that emotion, all of that desire for Him. I put it there, our faith is not an emotionless faith. By emotion I don't mean this...and I see some things of these silly, mindless, erratic foolishness prevalent today in churches and what they call worship, but it's just...it really burdens me to see this. It grieves me You know, I think even in the Old Testament, there were times when God's people even adapted the worship practice of the Canaanites. And they thought it was all good, but there was all this emotion, this noise, and that's not what I'm talking about. It's when our heart fills and overflows with God, we get thinking about who He is and what He has done for us. We shout amen. Where does that come from? Inside. This emotion comes out of us. While fellowshipping with him in our car, while driving to work, we sing. Why do we sing? Our heart's full of God. There's this emotion. Our daily Bible reading gives us assurances and wisdom, instruction, correction, and greater faith. We lift our hearts to God in praise. See, the heart, he wants us to love him with the emotion of who he is. We sang this morning, and I was taking note of the praise that we were singing, the acknowledge of him as God, as the creator, as the omnipresent. I mean, all of it was there. You know, someone wrote that one day. whose heart was full of praise, and the emotion comes out. Loving God involves our emotions, kind of the source from which the streams of our worship and praise of him flow. Buddhists. Buddhists really don't have much emotion for Buddha. They don't really care for Buddha. We see this, and I've seen massive, massive, I don't think a solid gold, but these big Buddhas, you know, and we kind of look at it, we snicker a little bit at the size of the Buddha. But in these cultures, that's a representation of wealth, of prosperity. And here's this big golden Buddha. But it's not because they like Buddha. They look at him only as an example, as motivation. Hey, if he reached enlightenment, I can too. So they look at how I'm gonna be just like him, but it's more arriving to the moment of enlightenment. The Hindus, the Hinduism is based on reincarnation. With a constant cycle of birth, life, dying until we find true perfection. You know, those are not based on loving God, it's loving themselves to get to the point to be like Buddha, to be able to reincarnate to the point to have the best life possible. I mean, it's all, you become your own savior. Mormonism, some say that's a Christian, it's not a Christian religion. They say they love God of the world, but ultimately believe in themselves becoming a god of their own world. Do you know that? They believe that they become a god of their own world. And the children they have here in this life become their spiritual children. They go to, they use that to populate their own earth, their own world. What? They're their own Savior. Catholicism also has some, by the way, having ministered in Mexico, they don't talk as much about Christ or about God, they talk about Mary. Their emphasis is there, their love is for her. Again, a misdirected love. All of it is they become their own Savior. A Christ-centered Christian experience is totally different. You know, we realize that we have a God that has 1,000 glorious attributes. Think of this, our God is wonderful. He's the one who knows and loves us above all the universe. He's the one we can personally know and love. He's the one who gave himself his only son to redeem us. and the one who made us his own beloved child, and who will one day take us to heaven to be home, to be with him where he's prepared a place for us. Do you see any difference why our heart really ought to be filled with emotion? It is so different than what these false religions have. Our love of God with own heart is when we find our full salvation, our full satisfaction and joy in him, causing us to worship him with all, for all that he is. Psalm 73, 25, Whom I have in him but thee, and there is none upon earth I desire beside thee. Psalm 82, 2, My heart greatly rejoiceth, and with my song will I praise him. Every child of God ought to experience this, this sense of such excitement for their God. Is your heart full of joy because of our God? Our heart, we love him with all our heart. Let's move on to soul. The scripture used this word different ways. the soul of man. But because of the context, to me it's easy to see that it's making reference to that relationship between man and God. The first mention of soul in Scripture we find in Genesis. It says, And the Lord God formed man out of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul. That breath of God is what gave life to man, enabling him to relate to God as a living being. So I look at this, the soul. The soul is the part of man that allows him to have a relationship with God. We can relate, we can have that walk with him. No other created being has that but man, because man breathed into us that breath of life. We will one day be separated from or live personally with him for eternity. So in other words, there is a relationship that he prepared for us that we can have that for all eternity. By the way, we sang that first hymn, that last phrase, talking about seeing the mighty power of God, it talks about the omnipresence of God. I thought, yep, there it is. He desires fellowship with us. Now listen to this, all right? Fellowship. He wants to have a day-by-day, moment-by-moment walk with us. And you know, in order for us to be able to do that and for him to have that offer it to us, he paid a big price. He gave his only beloved son, Jesus Christ, to come and give himself. Why? To save us, yes, but so that we can have restored fellowship with him. Think of the price that he paid for that fellowship. But how many of us, we will fellowship with him, but when it's convenient. Hey, I did my 15 minutes this morning, we live the rest of our day. Do you understand? He wants to be with us moment by moment. His omnipresence is there. He wants us to be aware of this. A lot of people say, I'm going to go to church so I can be with God. I can meet with God. OK. Yeah, you can come to church and meet with God. But I tell you what, when you leave church and get in your car, he's going to be in the car with you, too. Well, sometimes. I think a few times the way I drive, he says, listen, buddy, you're on your own. He gets out. No, you think of this. But people have this in their mind about, this is where you come to meet God. He's in your car on the way home. You get home. You can't tell him, Lord, just wait here. See you next Sunday. Just wait in the car. You go in your home, you know where God is? In your home. Psalm 139 talks about this, how He is with us everywhere. Every moment, He's with us. Now, this makes the sinner uncomfortable. If you're trying to live a life of hypocrisy and you have, you say you live for God, you go to church, but then you realize He's with you everywhere you go, everywhere you sit and stand and work, He's with you. That's why I say it makes the sinner uncomfortable to know that, but it is a great comfort for all who love and walk with him to know he's there with you. Over the generations, of course, the psalmist, we go through the psalms and the psalms are, we can find it full of man's emotion. But then you find over the decades, the centuries, men and women of God have written hymns Think about, look at those hymns. Look and understand that the person who wrote this was someone who was full of the love of God. Some of the hymns we sing, I need thee every hour. Not just when I go to church. Close to thee, day by day in each passing moment. Nearer, still nearer, constantly abiding. Oh, for a closer walk with thee, I found a friend. I mean, we can list hymns all morning of people who understood the love of God, and they experienced it, and the presence of God in their life, and they wrote about it. We love God with all of our soul when we know him relationally as creator to created being. as father to child and as friend to friend. Wow. Here in Romans, first we got Romans 8.15, You have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear, but you have received the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father, Abba, Father. What comes to my mind is, in Spanish we would say, Papi, Papi, Papito. That's a term that you use, you would call your father, your loving father, is to show the depth of respect and love for you. Papi, Abba, Abba, Abba. Then also in James 2.23 the scripture was filled which said Abraham believed God and was impudent and for righteous and he was called the friend of God. You know what if he could be called the friend of God can we be called the friend of God? Can we have that relationship? Often think of Enoch who walked with God I think, well, if Eni can do it, can we do it? See, but we have to keep out in front of us that goal that we are going to walk with Christ. We're going to learn of our love, expand our love for Him. All of our soul, all of our being, that relationship that we can share with God, we're going to pour ourselves into it. could be, I lose track of time, maybe two months ago when we had a gentleman in our church, Mount Calvary, who had grew up in the church, claimed to know the Lord, but then he came to the point in his life that he realized he knew of the Lord, but he didn't know the Lord. There's a difference. knowing of and knowing personally. What a wonderful testimony he gave. A grown man, now in his 40s, saying, you know what? I finally came to the point I realized that I don't know him. I don't have that relationship with him. My soul has no fellowship with him. He got saved and was baptized. Amen. Appreciate the honesty and the boldness of a man like that. There's, I love Spanish. I prefer to actually preach in Spanish. And there's two words for the word know. In English, it's very, to me, it's limited. English language is limited. In English, we have one word, know, to know them. In Spanish, there's two words. Saber y conocer. Saber and conocer. One means to know academically. And they have a word for that, right? Saber. You have a knowledge of him. Perconocer is knowing, having that relationship. And this gentleman realized he was only, he knew of, but he didn't know Christ personally. Do you know Christ personally? Fellow grew up in the church, Mount Carith, you know what I mean? How about you? Do you have that relationship with God? He paid the ultimate price for it. All we need to do is reach out and receive it. All right, with all our heart, with all our soul, with all of our mind. The mind in Scripture means the faculty of thinking, reasoning, understanding. This word focuses in on how much we know something academically, the knowledge of it. Okay, now he's talking about not just relation, he's talking about actual knowledge of God. Our faith is not a mindless faith. He wants us to use our minds to meditate, to read, to study, to know him. And by the way, when someone really knows someone, You want to find out all you can about it. A hobby, if you love a hobby, what do you do? You love a sports team, you find out all the stats, you want to know all this stuff. When your heart is given to something, you want to know more and more. And this is what it's talking about. With all your mind, now you're learning more and more about God. Genuine love generates genuine interest. If anyone says he loves someone but has no desire or interest in learning about them, has no genuine love for that person, the one true living God wants us to love him by disciplining our minds to be constantly learning of him. So we don't put this on a side. We want to learn more. By the way, it's It's an infinite topic so don't think you can wear it out. Loving God, loving Him, so as to be continually learning about Him. Isaiah 34, 16 says, seek ye out of the book of the Lord and read. Okay, commanding us to read. John 5, 35, search the Scriptures. Alright, search. Work at it, for in them ye think ye have eternal life, and they are they which testify of me. Learn, read the scripture, learn more of me. Hosea 6.6, For I desired the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings. Ephesians 3.4, whereby when you read, you may understand the knowledge of the mystery of Christ, 2 Peter 3, 18, but grow in grace in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. The list goes on. I won't even read the whole list of verses I have. You go through Scripture and find out how many times we are commanded to use our minds, to think, to quicken our listening disciplines. verse I've become fond to is 1st Samuel 15 22, hath the Lord as great delight, listen, he has delight in something, and it's a greater delight than what? Burnt offerings and sacrifices. He says, behold to obey is better than sacrifice and to hearken than the fat of rams. Hearken means to give attention, pour yourself in, hearken unto this, is better than the fat of rams. God is saying, exercise your mind, your understanding, your intellect. Pull all those faculties into, give them all energy that they can learn of me. God commands his followers to energize their mind. We're not commanded to empty our minds. By the way, Buddhism. Talk about Buddha, you know what they want? You always see them sitting with their legs crossed and they've got their, you know, whatever they're doing, they're meditating. You know what they're trying to do? They are told that if they can clear their mind, I mean, empty it, whatever they're doing, you know, trying to get their mind, so they're not thinking about anything. That's when you reach, Perfection, that's when you reach the joy of this life and that to come. Huh? Empty your mind. God says, no, fill it. I want you to know. I want you to understand. But listen, learning takes discipline. Right now it takes discipline. I'm always reminded that preaching is God's way of proclaiming truth through different personalities. I'm not a Dr. Casillas. I speak a lot, but I'm not the most dynamic. Listen to me. We often want the discipline to be on the part of the preacher. Well, if he could be more entertaining, I'd listen better. Listen, the scripture puts the emphasis on the listener. Discipline your mind. Discipline your mind. Listen, sit up straight, pay attention, hearken, because it's better than the fat of rams. But why are so many churches going more towards an entertainment type style of worship? Because people don't want to discipline their minds. Entertainment is not discipline of your mind, it's just sitting there enjoying what comes at you. Yeah, but if the preacher was more entertaining, told more jokes or something, you know what? Let me put this up here. The need today is not better preachers, but better listeners. Now, I understand, I pour, I put a lot into my preparation. I'm not the smartest, but I pour a lot into it that I can communicate truth to God's people and the gospel to lost men. But we forget that God requires of the listeners to exercise their mind, discipline their minds. Even when it's not as entertaining as the last guy, we discipline our minds. It takes discipline. The last one, and we'll go, this is quicker. It says, with all thy strength. And the Greek definition means ability, might, and power. It's with all our strength. We pour ourselves into these things, he says. These are not half-hearted. The heart, the soul, the mind is applied to all of our strength. Or should I say, all of our strength is applied to those other three elements. We love God with all of our strength when our relationship with him exhibits diligence, energy, and passion. Here in Deuteronomy 28, 47, God commends them or condemns them because they were not worshiping him with their strength. He says, Thou servest not the Lord thy God with joyfulness and with gladness of heart. See, half-hearted. for the abundance of all things. God had blessed them with such wonderful abundance, but yet they were not willing to discipline their minds to energy and effort behind it. Serve the Lord with gladness, come before his presence with singing. All right, summary here, okay. The greatest command is for us to love God supremely, but he wants to put all the pieces of the puzzle together. We don't want to leave one out. Well that one's not important. I'm good in this one, but I'll just focus on this one. Can you imagine if you're putting a piece of, putting a puzzle together. Well, I won't worry about all these, and you take half the pieces of the puzzle and just throw them in the garbage. Those aren't important, but these, I'll focus on these. It doesn't work. You need all the pieces. But here's what, there are times, here are the four points. The heart is worship, soul is relationship, mind is knowledge, and strength is passion. But here's the problem, all right? We've gone through all that, now follow this. There are times when we have a lot of knowledge, a lot of academic knowledge. but no passion, all right? I know some guys, I love them. Boy, they are, when I was at Bob Jones, I wasn't the smartest guy. I never made the dean's list. I made the janitor's list about every week. I worked hard and I hauled around the smart guys. I never understood it. How come this just doesn't somehow stick to me? I worked hard. But a lot of these guys went out, and they were very academic, and you know what? In the Lord's work today, they were good at stuff. They have all this knowledge, but they don't have the passion. How about, you can have passion without relationship. There are people who can run around churches, shout amen, and don't make all kinds of noise, but do they really have that relationship with the Father? Or we can worship. We can have worship without knowledge. There's a way to do worship that is not correct. God does give outlines and express to us what worship, what our worship should look like. So they have worship without knowledge. Or they have knowledge without relationships. In other words, each one of these four pieces must be all together. You leave one out and it doesn't work. All of them. Our worship, our relationship, our knowledge, and our passion. You wanna love God? There you go. This is to be our goal. And so we can't just let it go static. Hey, I love God. Sure, I love God. This goal will never be fully reached until we're with Christ in eternity. But that's no reason that we're not to keep that as a goal in front of us today. Let's keep working on these things. In church, listen, discipline your mind. Study, worship, praise Him, develop that moment-by-moment relationship with Him and have the passion behind it. I'm putting up, you see here, I'm not gonna touch on that second one. But Christ pulled those together. All right, you want to love your neighbor? Do you really want to love your neighbor and reach your neighbor? Do you want to reach the folks that live around the church here? Do we really want to do it? I'm asking you, ask yourself, do you really want this? Or are you content with your level of love of God, going to church, learning of him, reading. I love reading books. I need to pull all four of those together and I truly believe I've become more and more of the conviction to see that when a child of God brings those four elements together and brings it into a church and that church seeks these four things Then they can go out and love thy neighbor as thyself. They will then have the energy, the effectiveness of taking the love of God to those around them because they know Him and they seek that love supreme in their lives. That will change your life. It will change I say change this church. I appreciate the church here, but like the church in Thessalonica, they were a good church, but yet we find Paul said, but wait a minute, you lack this. Let your love continue to grow if you can be effective for Christ. Finish here real quick. This was the question proposed to Christ. And we just touch down with the answers, love God, all thy heart, soul, mind, and strength. But now Christ, we find Christ asking one of his disciples a question. And this is the question we need to finish with. John chapter 21, the Lord said, love is not me. Do you love me? Oh, of course I do. Lord, you know I love you. Peter, do you really love me? Oh Lord, I do love you. Peter, wait a minute, do you love me? Feed my sheep. You see, it took Peter, Peter was in that moment, of course I love you. Lord said, no you don't. Oh wait, what do you mean no I don't? Yes I do. Peter, do you love me? Oh yeah, I told you I did. How many of us respond that very same way? Of course I do. Okay? Then you need to love me with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. At first Peter was very ineffective in his ministry, but after he got this right, a powerful minister of the gospel of Christ an Apostle, great Apostle, but it took him to get to the point that he had the right answer to the question. How do you answer this question? Can you say that yes you do truly love God? I'll be 69 next month, been saved 52 years, well next week, this week, January 9th. This is the 7th, right? Tuesday. 52 years in Christ. And I can honestly tell you that I have learned over these years that there's nothing better, nothing more rewarding, nothing more worthwhile than knowing, serving, loving, and telling others of Jesus Christ. Everything else can fall aside. That is the one thing Folks, let's learn to love God and to serve him above everything else. Check your heart. Is there something on the throne of your heart that ought not be there? Often teenagers have that problem. They think this thing or this sport or this. I know I went through that, but I can tell you, no, it's not the important thing. It will not endure, but our love for Christ will. The greatest question posed to you today, how is your love for God? You will struggle in your attempts to reach the world with the love of God if you do not first possess the love of God yourself. Let's love God. Let's pour ourselves into four things and let's see what God will do in our lives and in this church and this community. in this year of 2024. Father, do bless our listening now of these things. And it's, Lord, I look at this list and it just seems so impossible. But it just underscores the need to keep directing our hearts towards the love of God. not to set it aside as already attained. Somehow that box has been checked off. Now we can move on to something else. We need to understand that this is something that continues and demands our all. Lord, help us once again here commit our bodies to you, to consecrate them. Surrender all that we have and all that we are, that we might serve you, but fathers, we do direct our hearts towards the love of God. Let's keep our heads bowed. I'm not sure how you handle the ends of the services here, but real quick, we're not gonna take time. And just in your pew, in your seat there, if you say, Brother Mark, in the closing prayer, I would like for you to pray for me. I will, in faith, that God will do a great work in your life. You see, I want to learn more of my God this year. I'm going to commit myself to those four areas, heart, soul, mind, and strength. And with God's help, I'm going to love him better this year than I've ever loved him before. And that knowing that, well then by God's help I want to share that love, that growing, that fervent love in my own heart that overflows my heart. I'm going to share that with the world around me that they too can desire to love him as I do. Do people around you desire to love God the way you do? You say, I'm gonna work on these things this year. Will you pray for me? Put your hand up real quick. Okay, very good. Yeah, I can see. Probably half of people. Oh, there's some more. Amen. Amen. Again, I remind you raising your hand does not change your heart. Raising the hand doesn't make you fulfill those four things. It just shows a desire of the heart. Will you act on that desire? And yes, I'm going to go home today and I'm not just going to be a forgetful hearer. This is going to be a message that I'm going to take from the Lord and let this be a guide through my year. Is there anyone else? Say yes, pray for me and I will pray at the end. Okay, good, I'm glad I asked. Let's pray. Father, we come. Father, everyone In this church this morning, we're all humbled by the standard that you set. But I believe I can come and before you and bring the request of these that are here and that raised their hand that, oh, they desire this. They desire a closer walk with Thee. Father, show them the way that they can direct their hearts towards the love of God and work and prayerfully discipline their lives in these four areas that they will experience such wonderful fruit from a life fully committed to God that loves Him with all their heart, mind, soul, and strength. Lord, I pray this now in Jesus' name, amen.