Clear Focus, Part 5: Love God (#962)
Well, welcome everybody. Here we’re going to continue our series on having a clear focus, which we want to have for this great year in 2019. We want to know what to focus on, so our brains don’t get more scattered than normal. And the last couple of sessions have focused on the love of God. One session we talked about how God loves us, another session we talked about how we should love others, and the focus today will be on the importance of us loving God. And I just remember so many times in my life just sitting there, by myself with nothing going on, and how happy I was just because I knew how much I loved God and He really loved me. And that’s really about all that mattered, because there are many other things in life besides that, but if you have that as your foundation: that you really love God and that you know He really loves you, you can get through about anything. Because so many other things in life are going to change, so many other things in life you have no control over. You know, like look at all the great political fights going on in our nation and around the world; we can have opinions on it, but we really have no control over it. So why let myself get so upset about it, because if the politics go one way or the other, I’m just going to be miserable. And, whenever any of us listen to the news, some things we’re happy about, some things we’re mad about, but we can’t do anything about it. So, we might as well be glad that God really loves us and we can really love God. And if we have that as the basis of our lives, then everything else just fits.
I got a text from somebody this week from somebody that that is going through some challenges and just said: “I’m so angry” and then she said: “how do I forgive people?” And I just told her some very simple things: well, remember how God has forgiven you; remember that Jesus Christ gave his life and shed his blood for you; but most of all, pray that God will direct your paths, so you can move on with the rest of your life. Because what has happened in the past and what other people do, you really have no control over. Because there is always stuff in the past we don’t like and there’s always people doing things we don’t like. That’s life. But, we can certainly pray that those thing will work out, but we have no control over them. So, if I decide that I’m going to have a miserable day because someone is doing something don’t like, or because something happened in the past I don’t like, I’m just going to be miserable. But if I decide that God loves me and I can love God and that is the foundation of my life, that’s always with me and nobody can take that away. I can chose to let it go out of my life, if I don’t want to focus on loving God, and I don’t want to focus on how much he loves me, but nobody can take that away.
There are a lot of other things people can take away; I’ve had jobs where the boss took it away, transferred me to a different project, laid me off, gave somebody else my job. We’ve all had that kind of thing. Or, there is a person you really like doing something with and then one day they decide that they don’t want to do that with you anymore. We’ll, that’s over. And you can get all mad about it, but it is over. So you can decide that: I’m miserable because of what that person did, or you can say: “so what, God will provide something else for me.” Look at Elijah when God told him to go tell the king, king Ahab that it wasn’t going to rain. And Ahad sent the whole army after him. We’ll God sent him out to the wilderness, by a brook; and He had the ravens cater his food for, I don’t know how long it was, for weeks of months. But then the brook ran dry, and the ravens didn’t bring food. So, what’s he going to do? He didn’t have to give up; God told him to go find that widow woman in Sidon. He went there and they had a little, a very small portion of meal, and they managed to eat off of it. He, the woman and her son for many days. God came through.
And there is always things changing in life. And obviously we want to try very hard to try to get things to go the way we want to in life and sometimes we can and a lot of times we can’t. But, what we can do is we can always love God. And we can know God always Loves us. So, that is what we’re going to have a very clear focus on today and in the weeks ahead of loving God. So, let’s start in Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy chapter six…
As taught by Bruce Mahone, 20190210.  All rights reserved.
Verse Listing and Notes
Deuteronomy 6:4-5           Love the Lord thy God
Deuteronomy 7:7-9           Them that love him
Deuteronomy 10:12-16     Love him and serve
Deuteronomy 11:1-25       Love the Lord
Deuteronomy. 30:15-20    Life and good
Joshua 22:1-5                       Be diligent to love the Lord your God
I Chronicles 10:1-14            How did Saul die?
Matthew 22:34-40               First and great commandment: love God
Romans 8:28                        All things work together for good
I John 5:2-3                           For this is the love of God
Teaching
Clear Focus, Part 5: Love God (#962)