How to Love the Lord

Loving the Lord means surrendering to Him every day. Jesus says we can't be His disciple if we don't pick up our cross and deny ourselves. What does this practically look like? What does it mean to love the Lord with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength? Is the Lord expecting perfection?

In today's episode, I talk about why following the Lord doesn't mean perfection, and why the Lord is pleased when we wrestle and fight to know Him and lose everything for His sake, to know Him and be faithful where He's called us. 

Scriptures talked about today:

• Hebrews 12:3
• John 17:3 
• Philippians 3:7-11
• Joshua 22:5 
• Romans 1:5
• Hebrews 11:6
• Job 1:20-21
• Matthew 4:10 
• Matthew 5:3
• Matthew 18:1-4
• Acts 20:24 
• James 4:6-10
• John 15:9-11
• Romans 16:26

I used BibleHub.com to do all my word studies. It's an amazing tool and free to use (again, not an advertisement, just an endorsement of something that has been hugely helpful in my study of the Scriptures).

You can find me on Instagram / Threads

Join the newsletter!

Questions? Comments? Email me at: carrie@ps8116.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:04

Hey everyone! Welcome to today's episode of Honey from the Rock. I am glad that you're here, and I am excited about this episode because it has taken a direction and turn that I was not anticipating. I I was kind of thinking after last week's episode of examining Jesus and him showing us how he loved the Father, heart, mind, soul, and strength through examining various things in the Gospels that we would then move on to the second commandment. Love your neighbor as yourself. And yet, as I was preparing this episode and sitting with the Lord and seeking the Lord and digging into the word, I really felt like he was saying, no, not yet. Let's sit here for a little bit longer and really ask the Lord to bring us to a holy spiritual understanding according to Scripture, how the Lord has laid out that we love him. Right? We're not Jesus. We are not perfect. We are sinners who have fallen short of the glory of God. And yet the Lord is so faithful because in his death and his burial and his resurrection and his ascension, he has opened the way for us to be reconciled to the Father, to come into union with him and to know him. And the things that he commands us to do, he has given us the Holy Spirit to help us, right? He's given us another comforter, an advocate, the spirit of truth who leads us into all truth, who reveals Jesus to us as we are in the word and we are, we are digging into scripture as we lose our life for the sake of Jesus and his gospel. And so as I was thinking about it and the Lord changed direction on me a little bit here, I sat down and I'm like, okay, Lord, cool. Let's go. And I so I recorded an episode. I had notes and everything. I got done recording that episode and I promptly started bawling. And the reason why is because the first recording I did of this, I know that the Lord was helping me think through some things and see some things a little bit more clearly. Not necessarily disciplining me, which he has done, no doubt. I mean, the Lord disciplined those, disciplines those whom he loves. And I have, I have been on the receiving end of the Lord's discipline, and I'm so thankful for it. I'm so thankful for his correction. But I really felt like he was helping me clear some things that were clouding my vision away. Like things that I was either holding on to or I didn't quite understand. And because I am a verbal processor, sitting and recording that episode helped me, helped me see things more clearly. And the Lord showing me that I needed some draws cleared before I actually shared things with you. So I'm so thankful to Jesus for that. And where we're gonna land today, like I said, is completely different than where I thought we were going to. To love the Lord our God with all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength. The Lord has put a little bit of a different spin on it today because we can look at our own heart and we can look at our own soul, we can look at our own mind and our body, and we can ask questions of ourselves. And we absolutely need to. We need to examine our motivations and we need to examine where our thoughts go, where our affections are. And I and I will actually talk about that. But today, the Lord wants to exhort us, I think, and say, I have not hidden how I want you to love me from you. And there are practical, beautiful ways that we can show the Lord that we love him. And I and please hear me when I say this. Number one, I am not saying that this is a works-based faith. Paul is very clear in Ephesians 2 for by grace you have been saved through faith. It is not of your own self, right? Not of works. We there is nothing we can do. That way we have no boasting in this. It is the grace of the Lord and faith in who he is and what he has done that saves us, no doubt. But Paul does follow that up with verse 10, saying that we are the workmanship of Christ created for good works. And what better work is there to be burst out of a gratitude and a thankfulness for the immeasurable grace of God than to worship him and to love him heart, mind, soul, and strength first. And so I'm not saying that if we do these things, it will make God love us more. That is impossible. He has already showed us to the uttermost how much he loves us. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believes in him will not die, but will have eternal life. Jesus has already shown us to the uttermost how he loves us. But he desires that we love him in return. And so today I want to I want to talk through some of those things. I will put, as I, as I do, every scripture that I talk about in the show notes, but I will warn you today that there is a lot. There is a lot of scripture, and I don't know how much of it I will read through. I don't know if this will be two episodes. I don't know. I'm gonna follow the Lord's leading, and I hope that you will come along with me on this journey. And so I want to start by reading a quote from Samuel Rutherford, who I believe was a Puritan. I've read a lot of his stuff, and I just today, just you know, I'll be honest, I was working on other things and forgot to look up when he was alive. So you can Google him. But I read this quote on uh threads, and it was so powerful and beautiful. I posted it on my Instagram, and I hope it blesses you. So this is a quote from Samuel Rutherford. I have a lover, Christ, and yet I lack love for him. I have a lovely and desirable Lord who is love worthy and who beggeth my love and heart, and I have nothing to give him. Dear brother or sister, come further in on Christ and see a new treasure in him. Come in and look down and see angels' wonder and heaven and earth's wonder of love, sweetness, majesty, and excellency in him. I love that quote. I love I love the admission that I know that the Lord wants me to love him, and I have nothing to offer him. I I just have me, which is what the Lord's given us to offer him, but it feels like nothing in comparison to the magnitude of what he has done for us and the magnitude of who he is. And and yet the Lord will accept nothing less than my whole life, my whole self given to him. But I love Rutherford's encouragement to come in, come in and experience the majesty, the wonder, the beauty, the sweetness and excellency in Jesus. And that's my first point, for lack of a better way to put it. As we examine what it means to love the Lord, let's consider Jesus. Again, always considering Jesus. The writer of Hebrews tells us to consider Jesus, right? He who has endured such hostility from sinners, from us. Before we came to the Lord, we exhibited hostility against him. And then in the revelation of our sin, but also the revelation of his love, his call to repentance and to be brought into his grace and his mercy and his love, and this discipleship way, which is narrow, that that he wants us, he calls us to this. But let's consider, let's consider our Lord. And I want to briefly read a verse from 1 Samuel as well, which says, it's 1 Samuel 12, 24, only fear the Lord and serve him in truth with all your heart, for consider what great things he has done for you. And in in reading this word, consider in both the Hebrew and the Greek, what is what is really being said here? What does it mean to consider the Lord? And so I looked it up, and in the Hebrew, it's used over 1300 times, some form of it. And basically what it means is it's the full range of seeing, from the simplest act of looking to the highest revelatory vision. It is a foundational thread binding narrative, law, poetry, and prophecy into a unified testimony of God's knowledge and self-disclosure. So that's the Hebrew. That's how it's used in this first Samuel verse. In the Greek, where it is used in Hebrews 12.3, it's only used once, but I love how the topical lexicon puts it. The author uses this word at a pivotal point in the exhortation section of the epistle. The command, consider him who endured such hostility from sinners so that you will not grow weary and lose heart. Calls readers, calls disciples, and even those who may be unbelievers reading the word, there is a call in this to engage in careful, reasoned reflection on the endurance of Jesus Christ. Right? And the and the writer of Hebrews positions this immediately after the great cloud of witnesses in Hebrews 11 and after the directive to fix our eyes on Jesus, Hebrews 12, 2. This verb deepens the author's pastoral strategy. The community is not merely to remember Jesus. We are not merely to remember him, but we are to weigh his endurance against our own trials. It spotlights an intentional comparative reflection on Jesus' sufferings that energizes weary disciples. In one decisive imperative, the writer intertwines doctrine, devotion, and duty, assuring the faithful that the thoughtful meditation on the crucified and risen Lord will uphold them to the end. This is the consideration. This is how we consider Jesus. And this needs to be the basis of what of what we hold on to as we examine, as we examine scripture. And so it is from that basis as we we considered Jesus last week and how he loved the Father and the Spirit, walking out love perfectly. He is our foundation, he is our cornerstone. And so now we practically look at what does it mean to love the Lord? And I want to say before we even dig in, this does not mean you only know how to love the Lord in happy times, or you only know how to love the Lord when things are going great, or you only know how to love Jesus when you feel like he's just blessing you and blessing you and blessing you. The command to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength spans not only the mountaintops, but the deepest valleys. And I will say from my own experience and my walk with Jesus that my love for Him has only grown deeper and richer in the most tragic of circumstances, in the depth of grief, when I have not understood the Lord's will, when I have not understood why he has asked certain things of me, yet trusting his character and said, Lord, I don't get this and I don't understand, but I will love you and I will trust you. And that comes out of the out of knowing him. And I will say, it is very difficult to love someone you don't know. Yes, we are called to love our neighbor as ourself, but in terms of the intimacy of love that we are called to between us and the Lord, if we don't know him, if we are not saturating ourselves in his word, to see the revelation of his character and who he is and what he says he will do, what he has done, we make him cold and distant from us. We make him a God who is far off, which he is not. And so, first and foremost, to know the Lord is to love him and to love the Lord is to know him. Jesus tells us in his high priestly prayer in John 17 that eternal life is to know the one true God and Jesus Christ, whom he has sent. That knowing in the Greek is an experience of him. It's not just an abstract, weird thing where, yeah, I know, I yeah, I know I know him. No, it is relational, it is intimate relationship, and that's what it means in the Greek. This this verb, uh, gonosco, and again, Greek scholars, please don't come for me for my pronunciation. Um, it's it appears in the New Testament 222 times. And in the gospels, it can kind of be like, yeah, I know him or intimate, intimate knowing, but John takes it even deeper, both in his gospel and in first John, because he links knowing to revelation, faith, obedience, and eternal life. And even how Paul uses it, he contrasts divine omniscience with human limitation. And revelation closes the whole of scripture with the promise that the church's works will be known by the risen Jesus. It is relational intimacy, it's intellectual apprehension, it's moral responsibility and eschatological hope into one dynamic verb. That's the topical lexicon. To know in the New Testament means to be drawn into the life of the triune God, to walk in obedient faith and anticipate the day when the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. This is the kind of knowing that we are called to. This is the kind of intimacy that we are called into. And and if we think that that striving and fighting and wrestling and pursuing the Lord, that he is not going to respond to us, that in desiring to love him and know him, that he's not going to respond with revelation according to his word about how he loves us. This is a reciprocal union that we are called into. We can love the Lord because he first loved us and he wants us to know him. He wants us to know him. Paul tells us in Philippians 3, he says, I count everything as dung, even the things that I have suffered, everything. I am casting it aside for the surpassing worth of knowing Jesus, for being able to walk with him in the fellowship of his sufferings, in the power of his resurrection, that I might by some means attain the resurrection from the dead. Nothing, nothing in this life is worth anything unless I know the Lord. And we know reading Paul and reading Paul and reading Paul that that man loved the Lord. But again, it was it was a growing in sanctification. It was a growing in crucifixion of the life. It was the loss of this life, the laying down of our precious things on the altar, because we we desire nothing but the Lord, and we want to love him in truth and in spirit, and we and we want to experience and know by by his revelation his love for us. And so Paul is is only expounding in Philippians 3 on what Jesus said in in Matthew um 10 and in Luke 9 and in Mark 8 that if we're gonna follow Jesus, we have to, we have to be crucified with him. We have to deny ourselves, but what is worth it, what is the fruit of it? Knowing the Lord and growing and knowing Jesus, we will grow in love for him. His beauty and his grace and his blessed person will become so real to our heart and to our mind. We will we will know him, and and faith and hope and love, all of these things will grow in us because we will we will know that he is a person. He is not some idea or or some fancy or something that we just kind of hope is true. No, we will come to know the Lord. And in knowing him, we will grow in love for him. And so, out of knowing what has to happen, what's another way that we love the Lord? The obedience of faith. And and what is obedience? But submission. It's it's submission to whatever the Lord says that he wants us to do, however, he's leading us, no matter the cost. There cannot be any conditions on our obedience. There cannot be any conditions on our love. We cannot say to the Lord that we will only love him to a certain point, or we will only obey him to a certain point. Again, it goes back to Jesus saying, You will love me all your heart, all your mind, all your soul, all your strengths. If you are going to come after me, you must crucify your whole life. You must deny yourself. In Luke 14, he says, if you can't even hate your own life also, you are not worthy of me. Jesus has given all, and we can never measure the magnitude of what he has done for us. Ever. We will never be able to. And so it he is worthy. The Father, the Spirit, the Son, they are worthy of the laying down of the whole life, of the obedience. And and in the Greek, it it means literally submission to what is heard. We literally respond to the Lord's voice, to his obedience requirement. In the Hebrew, the word uh is often translated keep, and that way it is, it occurs about 469 times, and it's everywhere. It's in the Torah, it's in prophets, it's in the poetry, and it expresses the idea of guarding, keeping, watching, observing, attending, and maintaining. Um, and the context determines how it's used. Um, you know, it could be a shepherd keeping his sheep, a priest watching sacred space, a king protecting his realm, or an individual obeying God, or God Himself preserving people. And one place that it is used is in Joshua 22, he says, only be very careful to follow the commandment of the and the law, which Moses, the servant of the Lord, commanded to you to love the Lord your God and walk in all his ways and keep his commandments and cling to him and serve him with all of your heart and soul. And Paul says in both Romans 1.5 and in Romans 16 26, he talks about walking according to the obedience of faith. Um, he says in Romans 1.5, Paul, a bondservant of Christ Jesus, called as an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures, concerning his son, who was born a descendant of David, according to the flesh, who was declared the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead, Christ Jesus our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles, in behalf of his name, among whom you are also the called of Jesus Christ. We are called to the obedience of faith, to the practical walking out, Lord, this is what you command in your scripture. And so I am going to obey it. I I have faith, I believe you, and in my belief of you, Lord, I am going to walk this out, right? James says it, and Paul doesn't agree, or Paul doesn't disagree with James. The walking out of faith accompany is accompanied with works. Those works are not salvific, but they are the fruit. They are the fruit, they are the outworking of a life that is submitted by faith to the Lord, that is, that has come under gratitude for the grace that has been shed abroad in our hearts through Christ Jesus our Lord, that we want to obey Him because of who He is and what He has done for us. So we have knowing the Lord is where love is birthed. We have the obedience of faith, which is where we start to see our love practically work worked out, and then worship. Worship. We, if we love the Lord, we will worship Him alone. Every single idol in our life will be put to death. We will not worship anybody or anything except the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. So in Job 120, after Job has lost his children, he's lost all of his livestock, he's lost all of his houses, the scripture tells us that Job gets up, he tears his robe, he shaves his head, then he falls to the ground and he worships the Lord. And he says, Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked I shall return there. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. This particular scripture means so much to me because in 2019 I my youngest sister passed away. And there's a lot that goes in into her death, but I will say the Lord the Lord so ministered to our family in the loss of my sister Carly. He was so present in her death, he was so kind in his presence and in and in the peaceful way that she died. But but the Lord, the Lord hit me with this scripture when I got home that the Lord gives and the Lord takes away. And blessed be his name. Blessed be his name. And that is why worship is so important. Because when things happen that we don't understand, or when things happen that we do understand, and we see them for what they are and why they've happened, either way, the Lord has moved. And because he is sovereign and he is good and he is kind and he is merciful and he is God, he is the creator over everything and has supreme and ultimate authority. We worship him. And the word worship here in Job 120 in the Hebrew depicts a voluntary lowering of one's body, usually to the ground, an acknowledgement of another's superior honor, authority, or deity. Now, obviously, this word is used in different ways when scripture talks about the Israelites worshiping other gods, but it is it is tied to the worship, the bodily posture in covenantal allegiance to worship the Lord. And I love how the topical lexicon continues to put it in every testament and age, this Hebrew word binds visible action to invisible faith. Calling, calling God's people to embody the confession, the Lord, he is God. And we have entrusted ourselves to him alone. We love the Lord when we completely lay down our lives and worship for him. Jesus, in his resisting the devil in the temptation in the wilderness, says, Be gone, Satan. For it is written, the Lord alone is the one that we shall worship. And the word worship that Jesus uses there means properly to kiss the ground when prostrating before a superior, to worship, ready to fall down and prostrate one, to adore on one's knees. This word in the Greek is used 60 times in the New Testament. And it depicts bodily prostration before the Lord. It signifies the heart's acknowledgement of worth, of worth. Worship belongs to God alone, and that any worship Jesus accepts is the worship that testifies to his full deity. This word gathers the scriptures' witness that worship is the creature's highest calling, the son's rightful due, and the father's eternal delight. To bow before God in Christ now is to preview the joy that will fill the new heaven and the earth forever. This is how we love him. This is how we love the Lord no matter what we are going through in our life. And it's not to deny reality, it's not to deny the difficulty and the grief and the hardships that we all go through. But it is to say, Lord Jesus, even though I may not understand or the difficulty of this feels like it is crushing my very soul. Yet, Lord Jesus, in my suffering, I will lay myself down before you and I will worship you and I will thank you because you are good and because of who you are and because of what you have done, I know that in you and through your spirit, Father, I can walk through this with you. That in my suffering and in the difficulty of what of what is happening in my life, I am not alone. As Jesus was not alone, I am not alone because you are with me and you have promised to never leave me or forsake me. This is what it means to love the Lord in our worship. This is what it means to lay prostrate before him and worship him through through grace and mercy, but but to show him that we will worship no other. And this posture of worship leads to the next one, which is humility. We love the Lord in our humble submission to him. The Lord says, humble yourself before the Lord. Let him exalt you, let him lift you up, but you humble yourself, right? Jesus tells the disciples in Matthew 18 when they say, Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? And Jesus pulls a little child to himself and he says, Unless you make yourself as one of these little ones, humble yourself as a child. You can't be a part of the kingdom. And what is he saying? He's saying, Unless you can, unless you can fully depend on me as a child depends on its parent for everything, for everything. It's impossible to become a part of the kingdom. And yes, we are to grow and be mature, but the childlike dependence of faith that says, Lord, I'm wrestling through this, but I'm going to keep choosing. I'm going to keep choosing to trust you. I know you can handle my questions and my uncertainty and my wrestling, Lord, and just help me no matter how deeply I wrestle, Lord, no matter how much I don't understand, no matter Lord, how much I doubt that I will keep coming back to you in total dependence, Lord. I will keep trusting you and I will humble myself before you because I can't see what you see. I don't know what you are trying to work out of me, Lord, but I know there is much. And so I am going to keep my face in the ground and I'm going to humble myself before you. Humility is not only a necessary part of worship, it is a necessary part of repentance that we humble ourselves when we screw this thing up, which we do and we will do. But the Lord in his graciousness has given us the gift of repentance. He has made a way for us to keep coming back to him and to repent and to determine, Lord, help me, help me to not keep sinning against you in this way because I love you. Because I love you. Help me to strengthen my feeble needs, Lord. Help me to absolutely even, Lord, when it feels like every ounce of strength I have is gone, to know that your strength, your strength is made perfect in my weakness. And so I will stand firm, Lord. I will keep putting on your armor. And because I love you, Lord Jesus, I will keep fighting to stop listening to the lies of the devil, to listen to the lies of my own heart and mind, Lord. And I will keep my eyes fixed on you. And I will not turn away from you, Lord, but I will hold on to you with everything that I have. It is, it is a blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. It's Paul's disposition when he says, But I don't consider my life of any account as dear to myself, so that I may finish my course and the ministry which I received from the Lord Jesus to testify solemnly of the gospel of God's grace. This is the humility that we are to love the Lord with. It is a full submission to his will, his grace, his discipline, his mercy, who he is. And finally, the last one I picked was joy. Because a lot of people struggle with this word. I have struggled with this word, because most of the time joy has been described as some sort of happy clappy emotion that, oh, the joy of the Lord, the joy of the Lord. And you know, I mean, God bless people when they're trying to encourage you. And I know a lot of people who have said it to me have meant well. But often we think of joy as an emotion that we have to feel, and that's not actually what it means. So again, the Greek topical lexicon puts it, it's more than emotion. It is the settled, spirit-given delight that arises from the redemptive acts and abiding presence of God. It is rooted in divine initiative, experienced in the disciple, and expressed both now and in the age to come. Helps Word Study says that joy is properly the awareness of God's grace and favor. In the Hebrew, it it talks about joy being an act of obedience, grounded in communal life and enabling generosity towards those who have nothing prepared. It's when Ezra was reading the law in Nehemiah 8:10, and the Lord has reproved Israel as they've come back to him and they properly repented, they truly repented from the heart. And once they repented, they were still grieved. And Nehemiah says to them, Don't, don't keep grieving. Don't grieve, for the joy of the Lord is your strength. You have repented, the Lord has heard your repentance. Now rise up and eat and feast. It's amazing. It is amazing to think about. Joy fortifies hearts for holiness and service. It is, it marks pivotal gatherings where God's people acknowledge his rule and receive his word. It is rooted in his presence. It yields strength for worship, obedience, and mission. And it only appears twice in the Old Testament. But I actually want to read where Jesus says this in the New Testament, and then I'll wrap up. In John 15, 9 through 11, Jesus has just gone through talking about abide in me, right? I am the vine, you are the branches. Abide in me, abide in my love, abide in my word. And he says this: just as the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Remain in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love. Just as I have kept my father's commandments and remain in his love. Again, see, Jesus is not asking us to do anything he has not already done. If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my father's commandments and remain in his love. These things I have spoken to you, so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be made full. That is where our joy is found. Is in the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. And so as I as I wrap this up, I pray that we would consider how to love the Lord. How do I know him? Where do I need to grow in knowing him? Where do I need to grow and strive and ask the Lord to help me in the obedience of faith? Where do I need to humble myself before the Lord? And where do I need to find joy in him? Where our joy lacks, the Lord wants to make it full. If we would abide in him, if we would seek him with our whole heart and believe that he is a rewarder of those who diligently seek him. The Lord loves to see his children worship him. He delights in our love and he delights in our wrestle and our war to know him. But he requires of us in it. And and the requirement is to lose everything for his sake and dedicate our entire life and our whole body, soul, and spirit, heart, mind to his service, to his love, to knowing him and making him known. And so as I wrap up today, just consider again, let's consider Jesus, who it is, who it is that we worship and follow. Meditate on him, ask him to show himself to you in his word. Ask the Holy Spirit, and I am asking the Holy Spirit to help help us love the Lord more deeply, more sacrificially. I know it's not easy. I know it hurts because it is crucifixion, but who we gain is worth more than anything we could ever want. And it is out of this love that everything in life grows. And so I want to leave you with this blessing, which is out of Romans 16, and it's verses 26. I think it's 25 through 26. Paul tells us now to him who is able to establish you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery, which has been kept secret for long ages past, but now has been disclosed through the scriptures of the prophets, in accordance with the commandment of the eternal God, has been made known to all the nations leading to the obedience of faith to the only wise God through Jesus Christ be the glory forever. Amen.