With all my heart, with all my soul, with all my strength!
I don't get it! I get that I'm supposed to be souled out for Christ, surrender all, at all cost; but, to love this way? I'm not sure! When Lysa asked the question, "how do you love God that way?" I must confess it gave me pause! So, I decided to dig. I looked up the words heart, soul, strength.
How do you love with your heart? Hmmm...well, the heart is the core, the center of it all. Matthew 6:21 says where your treasure is there your heart will be also. God points out the importance of the heart in Proverbs 4:23 where he instructs us "above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life." The heart is where all of our emotions(feelings), affections, desires, beliefs, plans, meditations, hiding places, are housed. We must guard against anything bad, negative, or wrong. It's like a big bowl of fruit! We must sprinkle it with the living water in order to preserve it, keep it from rotting! If we believe with our hearts...we will be saved. I mean, the heart is kind of easy. Right? The heart houses everything that we are about. Let's just imagine the heart as a heart.
A heart without affection is like a purse without money. Benjamin Mandelstamm
Now the soul? That's kind of where I wrinkled my forehead a bit! One definition is this-The seat of human personality, intellect, will, and emotions (spiritual part of a person). Our deep seated emotional house as is seen in Psalm 42:1 As the deer pants for the water, so my soul pants for you, O God. I had to just close my eyes for moment and just imagine a deer panting for water and compare it to me panting for God! Go ahead try it! Imagine running a marathon or even a 5k without water, we would be begging for water, dreaming of it, longing for it, wanting to do #whatever we could to get our hands on it. The other thing that struck me in this passage is where David asks, "why are you downcast, O my soul?" "Put your hope in God." I would encourage you to read the whole chapter. It really made me think because I have felt all of these emotions. In my depression I would ask that same question. What I need to ask along with that is how is my heart. Am I guarding it? Heart and Soul Baby! They are so closely related. The heart pumps with life, the soul lives like a fire under the sun while our strength spends its time in action. Joshua 22:5 But be very careful to keep the commandment and the law that Moses the servant of the Lord gave you: to LOVE the Lord your God, to walk in ALL His ways, to OBEY His commands, to HOLD FAST TO OR EMBRACE him and to SERVE Him with ALL your HEART and ALL your SOUL. #whatever Imagine the heart with a pearl nestled in the center. Heart and soul!
Strength...I had to kind of think on this too! Naturally I think of lifting weights or something. A minister put it this way, strength is the outward expression of our heart, soul and mind. We love him first with the heart then with a whole-life,
whole-soul love, and then we get a fire for God in our mind, then our strength will truly be devoted to loving God. I think of Psalm 1:1-6...2.But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not whither. Whatever he does prospers. Imagine the heart, the pearl in the center of it and now growing from the heart are strong feeders or branches where the life blood flows out and gives life to others.
A soul strong as a mountain river. William Wordsworth
Here's what I have learned through this about the journey God has me on:One cannot truly love someone without knowing them! To truly know God we must long for him without any other motive than reaching God himself. A. W. Tozer I believe there are different levels of loving God. The first is when you are a new born christian. We love with all that we are. We love with reckless abandon kinda like when we fell in love for the first time! The honeymoon phase! I remember when I accepted Christ as my Savior thinking that if I could paint I would paint a picture bursting with color! That feeling that you just can't get enough, can't wait to share the good news. All smiles and full of joy, singing about it, and nothing nor no-one can stand in your way of serving this magnificent God that you've just surrendered the rest of your life to! You ache for Him! A transformation happened in your heart, your well spring of life. Then our soul begins to fill up with the overflow of the heart and spills forth it's beauty onto everyone! Christ becomes who we are, our personality, our longing, our desire. The fullness of the heart and soul is the supplement that builds our strength. It feeds our spiritual muscle. We flex that muscle in our service to God, through prayer and Bible study, and by lifting our voices in praise. We drink the life water of his word to nourish our whole being. When we wrap ourselves with the fruit of the spirit which is chock full of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control, the impurities like sweat, drip from our pores. We are a fragrance to Christ, a tree planted by the water.
Another level of knowing God is when we learn to love God with all our heart, soul and strength through our struggles as we receive his mercy , grace, compassion, forgiveness and faithfulness. This is the kind of love I am now learning. To know God is to know TRUE love. God has brought me and my husband through some very choppy waters in the last 3 years. We have finally come up for air and are embracing God's will and plan for our life. God has been stretching us and growing us. We were recently in a position to be part of a business opportunity but we did not want the desires of our hearts if it wasn't God's idea. So through this we had to answer the hard questions- Are you ready to be souled out at all cost? Are you ready to do it my way in my timing? #yestoGod!
So with all that I am, every breath that I take, every sniffle, blink of my eye, twitch of my lips, every step I take I will love Him! I will surrender all, I will love Him with my heart, soul, mind and strength. #palmsup
To love and to be loved,
Stephanie Goode
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