Personal Revival: Three Essentials
“Gotta keep it real simple, keep it real simple. Bring everything back to ground zero. Cause it all comes down to this: Love God and love people”. These are the lyrics from a Danny Gokey song that playing in the background as I begin to write this.
I have been hearing it a lot lately; the call to keep things really simple and just get back to the basics which are just to love God and people.
Here’s what Jesus told us that the greatest commandment is:
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbour as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” Matthew 22:37-40
However, if you really break it down then there are THREE areas where we should direct our love to.
- GOD – upward
- OURSELVES – inward
- OTHERS – outwards
LOVING GOD
That seems to me to be, not only the absolute basics, but also the order we need to place them in. For now, I think it is prudent just to do a quick summary and then go into a lot more detail in future posts and look at each one individually.
Loving God with all our hearts, will and mind should come naturally to a born-again believer, if not just out of pure gratitude alone for rescuing us out of the kingdom of darkness and bringing us into the kingdom of the Son he loves.
However, there are many subtle and not so subtle distractions in this world that we live in, that threaten to defeat us in really being obedient to this commandment.
Where are we on the love towards God scale? How do we express our love? What distractions should be wary of?
LOVING OURSELVES
I honestly believe that before we can truly love others, we should really be able to love ourselves. If we don’t, then our insecurities could badly affect our judgment and the way we demonstrate our love to others.
Having been involved in helping people overcome addiction problems and have to deal with short comings in my own life, I have learnt that there are three key areas to focus our attention on:
SECURITY, SELF WORTH & SIGNIFICANCE
These are the three areas that a lot of secular counsellors will look at too. However, when we apply these as Christians, we will look at them through a different paradigm.
In future blogs, I we look at these individually in more depth. In the meantime, it could be good to take a look in the mirror, so to speak and see ourselves as God sees us. Below is a link to another article that I wrote that may prove helpful (Click on image or link below):
https://amarjoram.blogspot.com/2017/04/seeing-yourself-as-god-sees-you.html
LOVING OTHERS
Last night, I began to read a book about the life of George Whitfield (The life and times of the great evangelist of the 18th century revival – by Arnold Dallimore). I’m in the early chapters, but even before his ministry really got started, he put a tremendous amount of importance in showing love, in very practical ways to others; visiting those in prison and sick in hospital and helping orphans to name just a few things.
You only have to look at our supreme example, Jesus, who we are told “went around doing good and healing all those that were under the power of the devil.” (Acts 10:38).
When we have truly grasped wo we are in Christ and have a better understanding of ourselves and for what purpose we have been created for, then we will naturally find ourselves in helping people in a way that is the best way that God wants us to and to the people that God has called us to minister His love to.
