| Love the Lord your God with all your heart … |
| —from Mark 12:30 |
“Love makes the world go ’round,” the motivational speaker stated forcefully.
“No!” shouted someone in the back of the room. “Change makes the world go ’round. Love only keeps it populated.”
The 2,000 people in the audience roared with laughter.
No matter how you may feel about that exchange, love does play a very important role in the life of a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ. Here are Jesus’ own words, as recorded in Mark 12:30-31:
“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”
God breathes His love into us—into all four of our human modalities: heart, soul, mind, and strength. In return, we must first breathe that love back to God. And, we must do so with all four of our human modalities: emotional (heart), spiritual (soul), intellectual (mind), and physical (strength). Then, we must breathe that love outwardly, so that it touches the lives of the people who cross the pathway of our lives.
As we begin a new year of life here on earth, let’s ask God to fill us full with His God-breathed agape love. Then, let’s ask the Holy Spirit to help us breathe that God-breathed agape love back out into a world that desperately needs God’s love.
