He answered, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind.”  and ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’.  Luke 10:27 NIV

When you get to my age, I guess you should really know a lot, but I am amazed at how much I am still learning through Bible study.

Just last week our pastor used this scripture passage at our Wednesday night Bible study and he explained it in a very simple way which made it easy for me to understand.  If you love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and  mind, then it is easy to love others as you love yourself.  If you do this then keeping the ten commandments is much easier.

I have come to realize that the devil makes sin look fun, but the problem with sin is that we are not made for it.  See we are made by God.  And while it might look like God made us with a sinful nature, God actually made us to love Him.  Now where we have problems is when we are distracted by sin and give in to it.

We are born with a hole in our hearts that goes undetected by medical testing.  The only way this hole gets detected is by how we live out our lives.  This hole is God sized.  Now some of us fall into temptation and then try to live our lives stuffing that hole with our addictions.  We may try to stuff that hole with sexual immorality.  We may try to stuff that hole with alcohol or drugs. We may try to stuff that hole with evil and wicked plotting against others. But you know what, none of those things will fill that hole.  All of these things will just leave you miserable and frustrated. Why? Because this is how God made us.

You see it looks like we are made to want to sin because in reality we do want to sin.  Sin looks good for a short while but then it leaves us with even bigger problems.  An example of this is the fact that I would love to have a diet that consists of brownies, Cheetos, M&Ms, Dr. Peppers and chocolate malts.  The problem with this type of diet is that before long I would not only gain an enormous amount of weight, but I would be miserable for other reasons as well.  This type of eating causes a hosts of problems physically.  Why?  Because our bodies were made to eat lean meats and vegetables with an occasional treat here and there.

So spiritually we are made to need God.  We are made with this God sized hole in our hearts.  That hole can only be filled with a love for God.  We may not realize it, but when we live our lives in a way that separates us from God we become miserable.  I look around me today and I see so many people that just refuse to turn to God and they are living miserable lives.  Oh they are smiling and living it up on the outside.  Their social media pages look like they are having a grand old time, but those of us that talk to them know the real story.

We are made to love God with our whole heart, our whole soul, and  our whole mind.  Doing so brings us into that place where we experience peace that passes all understanding (Phillipians 4:7).  When we fill out hearts with God, we experience unending joy.  This is because this is what we were made for.  God made us to love Him.

Think about it this way, you wouldn’t drive your car into the water and expect to travel down the river in it, right?  Of course not, cars are not made for water travel.  You wouldn’t drop your boat out on the interstate and expect to be propelled down the interstate, right?  Of course not, because boats are not made to travel on land.

Well, we are not made to be sinners.  We are not made to be sexually immoral and promiscuous.  We are not made to hurt others.  We are not made to cause trouble and strife.  We are not made to plot evil against others.  We are not made to be boastful and proud.  We are not made to be liars.  We are not made to be angry and volatile.

We were made to love the Lord God with all our heart, all our soul, and all our mind.  We were made to love others just as much as we love ourselves.  We were made to have joy in our hearts.  We were made to have peace.  We were made to be kind and good.  We were made to have self-control.

If you are not living the life you were made for, you can change that.  Turn to God ask Him to come into your heart and fill that God sized hole.  If you are a Christian but you have fallen into sin, ask God to help you.  If you have turned bitter, angry, or are unable to forgive, ask God to replace these things with love.  Love covers a multitude of sin (1 Peter 4:8).  We were made to love.  If you fill that hole in your heart with junk, you are going to get junk.  If you fill it with God and His love, you will get peace and joy.  The choice is yours, my friend.

Have a great day!