Love God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. Jesus said this was the first and greatest commandment. So let’s keep this simple: Do you love God? It all starts there. Make a practice of loving God. “But how?” a friend asked. How do you love any of the people or the things that you currently love? You delight in them. You give your heart over to them. You choose them over other things and other people. They hold a special place in your heart. They get the lion’s share of your time, your attention, your presence. Don’t they? Then this is what we do — we give our whole heart to God. We make him the treasure of our life.

It will be a profound moral rescue. It’s pretty hard to lust after someone if in that very moment you start saying, Jesus, I love you, I love you, I love you. It’s pretty hard to hold bitterness toward someone if in that very moment you start loving God. Whatever it is we find ourselves struggling with, right then and there in that very place we practice loving God and what we find is that our heart is freed to be good again. Loving God alone will heal your humanity. It’s what you were made for.

Loving God is the centering of your existence as a human being. It’s the restoration of your reason for existence. What a relief it is to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. What an utter relief. For then, every other relationship falls into place; every other desire finds its appropriate place in our life. Again, this is why mere “morality” can never substitute for true holiness. You can keep all the rules you think are important and not love God. This is where it all begins, truly loving Jesus with all your heart. Where things are out of whack, that is where our repenting needs to take place.

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