Love the Lord Your God with ALL...

Matthew 10:37-39 - Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and anyone who does not take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.


Mark 12:30 - Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all you understanding and with all your strength.

Luke 9:23 - …If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.

To carry our cross. What does that even mean? We see pictures of it all the time on coffee cups, tee shirts; we imagine ourselves carrying this big, 80-100lb cross beam on our shoulder. Because of it‘s weight we are limping and leaning over, struggling to get to our destination…

People genuinely try to capture this reality, but unfortunately, the “cross” doesn’t have a lot of meaning in our culture. Don’t get me wrong, in many ways that’s a good thing, the cross was such a cruel way for even the most heinous of crimes to be punished. But the unfortunate thing is that because of our culture we don’t understand what the cross really was. It was not unique to Jesus, the cross was a very common, very cruel way to punish many a crime.

Seneca (d. 65 C.E.) refers to a variety of postures and different kinds of tortures on crosses: some victims are thrust head downward, others have a stake impale their genitals, still others have their arms outstretched on a crossbeam.
An especially grim description of this punishment, meted out to murderers, highwaymen, and other gross offenders, is the following from a didactic poem: "Punished with limbs outstretched, they see the stake as their fate; they are fasted, nailed to it with sharpest spikes, an ugly meal for birds of prey and grim scraps for dogs."

So you see here that the picture that the disciples had in their mind when Jesus to take up you cross daily was a lot different, and frankly, a lot more gruesome than the cute picture we put on our mugs! It is terrifying for someone to tell us to take up our cross… and how much more so to take up our cross DAILY! What kind of person can ask something that intense of someone?… Someone that owns us. Someone that paid for us. Someone that can relate to our weakness. Someone that can help us do it!

The next scripture up there talks about the greatest commandment. It says to love God with ALL of your heart, ALL of your soul, ALL of your mind and ALL of your strength. Now lets use a simple analogy with that word “all” for a minute. If you have a bucket full of 154 apples and I take ALL of them, how many apples are left in the basket? …hmmm… that’s right, x=0! When it says to love God with ALL, that means there is nothing left to love anything of the world with in your heart, soul, mind and strength! WOW! You might be thinking, “What kind of person can ask something that intense of someone?“ …Someone that owns us. Someone that paid for us. Someone that can relate to our weakness. Someone that can help us do it!

I sometimes get distracted during worship when we sing songs like The Stand from Hillsong… “I’ll stand with arms high and HEART ABANDONED, in AWE OF THE ONE WHO GAVE IT ALL! I’ll stand, MY SOUL LORD, TO YOU SURRENDERED! ALL I AM IS YOURS!” The reason I get distracted sometimes during songs like that is because I begin to look around and wonder, “Do these guys really know what they’re saying?“ For some reason I think most of us, myself included, have gotten it in our head that the more intense our faces look, the higher our hands are raised, the louder we sing and shout, the more we mean what we’re singing. However, if we really stop and think about the weight of those lyrics, it can become very difficult to sing them with sincerity in our hearts. Not that we don’t want to mean it, but how can we live a lifestyle like that… It makes me start to shrink back a little from singing along. Think about it: when we sing lyrics like, “I’ll stand with…heart abandoned; my soul, Lord, to you surrendered; all I am is yours!”, that’s not just talking about a moment of worship, that’s talking about the way we live our lives. It’s not hard to think about God and worship in atmospheres where everyone around us is on their faces singing their heart out to God. But what about when we leave? Because that’s what songs like this is talking about!

What does it really look like to “abandon my heart“? I have desires, I have dreams of who I want to be, where I want to work, how much money I want to have, etc… But if I abandon my heart, my desires, my dreams to Jesus, then what does my life look like? I guess it looks like whatever Jesus wants it to look like if he’s the one that I gave it too! There’s a song by Tree63 that has a line that says, “They say I must abandon You to make my dreams come true. So what am I supposed to do if I only dream of You?” That song paints this picture perfectly.

How about, “my soul, Lord, to you surrendered”, what does that look like? The word “soul” refers to our Mind, Will and Emotions. That’s whatever we “think about“, whatever we “want to do“, and however we “feel“. Those things are to be completely surrendered to Jesus.

“All I am is Yours”? ALL I AM IS YOURS? ALL? So you mean ALL as in EVERYTHING? As in, THERE IS NOTHING THAT I AM THAT ISN’T YOURS? EVERY MOMENT OF EVERY DAY? ALL I AM IS YOURS?

This is why I tend to get distracted from time to time during songs like this. I look around and think, “Do these guys really mean this? Are they out Evangelizing? Are they out feeding the hungry? Are they praying and getting into the presence of God daily? Are they continually striving to not sin? Are they continually striving to obey Jesus? Everything He says? Even the hard things? The things that they don’t want to do?” A lot of times it seems that we sing songs like this too easily! Should our response always be to sing and shout these lyrics at the top of our lungs? Maybe sometimes the greatest response to lyrics like this is to just pause and count the cost, or to cry out to God for help to fulfill this kind of commitment, or to repent because of the lack of the commitment in our own lives! Let’s take these kinds of songs seriously; let’s begin to look at them as vows we’re making to the Savior of our souls, the Creator of the universe! Let’s have the mindset of Daily Carrying our Cross to follow Jesus! The Cross was one of the most morbid forms of execution we could ever imagine! That’s how serious we need to be about living for God, about giving Him our everything, about crucifying our desires, crucifying what we want to do, crucifying what kind of person we would prefer to be, and say, “ALL I AM IS YOURS”.

We‘ve heard it thousands‘s of times, “in order to do this we need to realize we can‘t do it on our own“. But what does it mean to rely on God’s strength? The Bible calls the Holy Spirit our Councilor, Helper, Teacher, it says that He gives us Power to Witness, Power to obey, the Holy Spirit is our Life-Source. We need “grace” to be able to do what God wants us to do. Grace is empowerment. It’s the power to obey. The bible says in John 15 that “without Jesus we can do absolutely nothing”! We need Him! We need to cry out to Him for the power to live this kind of lifestyle.

We will mess up, and we won’t be perfect, but when we fail we MUST ALWAYS fall at the feet of Jesus and ask for mercy to forgive us and grace to help us to change. Never run from Him or try to hide from Him because of shame. We must remind ourselves that Jesus was a human just like us and is now our high priest… the Bible says that we have a High Priest that understands our weakness (Heb. 4:14-16), that He constantly prays for us(Heb. 7:25), that we can cast our burdens on Jesus for He cares for us (1 Pet. 5:7), that we can find strength in our God (Phil. 4:13).

Jesus, give us the strength to live for You! Make us like You. And help us to never to these things to win approval or any other pointless reason we might have, but to “love You because You first loved us”. Let our obedience ALWAYS be a response to Your Gospel!
Thank You for Your mercy and grace Jesus,
Amen!



Info on the cross:
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/peter_kirby/tomb/roman.html