Jesus answered: ” ‘Love the Lord your God will all
your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength
and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.'”
After we love our Lord with ALL your HEART, with ALL your SOUL, with ALL your STRENGTH, with ALL your MIND, what is left?
I believe everyone on this planet would agree we are made up of three parts: Body, Mind, and Soul. Agree?
Around Deuteronomy 6:5, Moses teaches Israel what God has taught him. He says, “Hear, O Israel…Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.”
If all of us are made up of only a heart, a soul, and a mind (and given strength by God – for the “joy of the Lord is our strength” Nehemiah 8:10) – and we are called to love our Lord with ALL of it, what is left?
If we truly fulfill this commandment, we’ve loved God with ALL of us – nothing is left. In Leviticus 6:18, God teaches Israel through Moses to “love [their] neighbor as themselves.] But if we love our God with ALL that we are, do we have room to love our neighbor or better yet, ourselves?
but what I do know is …
because we love God with ALL that we are, He then can love through us. By loving Him with ALL of us, we will begin to truly love ourselves because ultimately it’s God, our Father and Creator, loving our imperfections and all. We will also begin to truly love others because it is God loving them through us – imperfections and all. For God is love; He formed us out of His unending and never-failing LOVE.
You know, if we live to truly love our Lord with all that we are, we will never have a problem loving someone else. We won’t even have an issue loving ourselves!!
*Please pray for our team as we travel to work alongside the Kunas in Kuna Yala, Panama.*
The Kunas are the second largest indigenous group in the country, with close to 65,000 people in the whole Panamanian territory. While some Kunas live in Panama City, most Kunas remain in Kuna Yala, a protected indigenous semi-autonomous territory in northern Panama. We will live with in their villages located on small islands off the Caribbean coast. According to a native Kuna, many times pastors in the islands lack training and remain pastors on faith and love of the people. We will hopefully bring encouragement to the pastors, as well as pray for them while we are there.
*Picture taken from www.visitpanama.com
