Loving God with Your Heart
By Rick Warren
“You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength.” Mark 12:30 (NLT)
One day a man asked Jesus which, of all the commandments, was the most important. Jesus answered him like this: “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength” (Mark 12:30 NLT).
That’s what it all comes down to. God didn’t put you on this planet to mark things off your to-do list. He put you here to learn to love him with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. But what does that really mean, and how do you do it?
Loving God with all your heart often happens when you’re talking—it’s how you share the gift of communication with the world. Loving God with your soul happens when you’re feeling—when you’re sharing compassion. You love God with your mind as you’re thinking—when you’re giving consideration to people or ideas. And, finally, loving God with your strength happens as you’re doing—when you’re making a contribution to the world.
Another way to say it is that you can love God with all your talk, all your feelings, all your thinking, and all your acting.
God calls each person to love God in all four of these ways. The world needs communication, compassion, consideration, and contribution from every follower of Jesus.
But the reality is that your personality causes you to tend more naturally toward either the heart, soul, mind, or strength. For the next few days, we’ll take a look at the strengths and pitfalls of each of these four areas.
Today we’re going to focus on the communicators—the people who most naturally love Jesus with their hearts.
Heart people are talkers, and they have a hard time being quiet. When you’re a heart person, you’ve got to let it out. You’ve got to tell other people. Heart people love to tell stories. They love to sit and converse, especially in heart-to-heart conversations.
The world needs people who are communicators. We need people who can lead discussions and who can verbalize what the rest of us feel. We need teachers, counselors, and coaches who can teach us and direct us. We need comedians. We need preachers. We need all of these people who are built on verbal skills and who are able to move the world forward.
The Bible says, “Let everything you say be good and helpful, so that your words will be an encouragement to those who hear them” (Ephesians 4:29 NLT).
When talkers use the right words at the right time, they can restore, encourage, build up, and heal broken hearts. They can also use their abilities to guide, direct, and point us in the right direction.
But God’s warning for talkers is this: You also have to act.
Proverbs 14:23 says, “Hard work is worthwhile, but empty talk will make you poor” (CEV).
This means you eventually have to act on what you’ve been talking about. Some people never get past the discussion stage.
What things have you been talking about doing? How long have you been talking about it?
Don’t just talk about it. Start doing it! And see how God uses your words and actions to make a difference in the world.
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This devotional © 2018 by Rick Warren. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
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