I. PASSION FOR JESUS—OUR HOLY PURSUIT
A. The question that we ask of “How do I obtain passion for God?” is answered very simply yet walked out much more
rarely. Only when our hearts ascertain and are personally apprehended by Jesus’ passion do we respond in passion
toward God—we love because He first loved.
Jesus said to him, " 'You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.'
This is the first and great commandment.” (Mt. 22:37-38)
B. Loving God with all of our heart is the great commandment because it is the one that encompasses all else. It
is the one that steadily takes over every area of our lives, from our thought life, our words, relationships, to the way we
spend time and money. If we truly give ourselves to loving Him entirely, we will in time love our neighbor as ourselves
and be given to extravagant service, yet with a heart burning in the sustaining fire of intimacy.
C. The only way to fulfill the Great Commandment is to fall in love. Love is the only way into such extravagance.
The command demands a holy lovesickness, a fierce passion for God. And we know that with every command God
gives is the inherent promise of His grace to fulfill it. He was not only commanding, but prophesying: “You shall love
the Lord your God…”
D. Cultivating a responsive heart of extravagant devotion to Jesus takes time and deliberate effort. Love does not grow
automatically but rather it automatically diminishes unless intentionally cultivated. A responsive heart to God, renewed
in freshness and tenderness, is precious and rare, to be guarded with great care and renewed day by day.
E. Satan’s first priority against the Church is to lead us astray from cultivating the ability to be responsive to God with
wholehearted love and extravagant devotion. If Satan leads us astray from the purity of devotion to Jesus then our
service and love for others will eventually fail.
I am afraid, lest as the serpent (Satan) deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds should be led astray from the
simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ. (2 Cor 11:3, NAS)
II. THE UTTER GIVENNESS OF LOVE’S NATURE
A. The Father gave everything to us in His only Son: The Father gave of His only, the Son of His love, the only
begotten. He drew out of the bowels of His eternal being and spared not that which He held most precious, most costly,
most beloved. In the giving of His only Son, He gave all without reserve (Rom. 8:32; Jn. 3:16).
B. The Son gave everything to us in His own life, death and resurrection: Christ, the Son, poured Himself out in
love unto me, giving Himself up for me utterly, not just in the giving of His physical life unto death, but in the free offering
of all of His excellencies, His beauties, His preciousness and His own righteousness, indeed the essence of all that He is,
He has entrusted to me, giving me His Holy Spirit (Gal. 1:4, 2:20; Eph. 5:25; Tit. 2:14).
Sacrifice and offering You did not desire…A body You have prepared for Me. I delight to do Your will O God” (Heb. 1:5)
“By this we know love because He laid down His life for us…In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent
His Son…” 1 Jn. 2:16; 3:10
C. The nature of the God of love from everlasting—both in the love shared within the Godhead and the love poured
forth unto mankind— is found in its utter emptying of itself for another. It is not just that He has loved us in everlasting
duration. It is not only that the quality of His affections is immeasurable, but that the amount of His love is entire.
III. JESUS HAS GIVEN EVERYTHING
A. We know and think of Jesus from our first sight of Him, a helpless Baby lain in a manger in an environment so
primitive and crude. The Baby that we find in the manger was the same One who was eternally the Possessor of All, the
Author of Life, the uncreated One who was with God from everlasting (Mic. 5:2). He did not consider His eternal exaltation
as something to be grasped and used for His own gain, but rather He chose in transcendent love to empty Himself of so
great an exaltation, making Himself of no reputation and taking on the form of a bondservant (Phil. 2:6–7).
B. At times, our familiarity with the story is our greatest enemy of growing in love for God. We recite the drama so
effortlessly that our own knowledgeableness keeps us from greater entrance. For love to grow, wonder must pervade
every part of our lives.
C. Jesus, the Living Word, was God from eternity, begotten before time, dwelling in the unapproachable light with the
Father, inhabiting the everlasting ages before the world was made in all glory and majesty (Jn. 1:1–2).
D. Jesus is the only One who has ever chosen the poverty of being human. All mankind is born poor in his distance
from God’s manifest presence, his depravity, and his far-ness from glory. But Jesus, He was wholly wealthy from eternity
without a touch of weakness or frailty—and He left this perfect prosperity in order to embrace an endless poverty—His
endless humanity.
E. When He gave us entrance into His own inheritance, it is not as though He drew a line in the sand and said,
“Thus far and no more.” Rather, He opened wide the riches of His glory and said to all those who are His, “All that I
have is yours” (Jn. 16:15).
F. In the pouring out of His soul unto death, love was given an eternal depiction, as if God the Father, who is Love,
were to say for all eternity, “Look upon this rendering of My affections and therein come to recognize My love”
(1 Jn. 3:16; 4:9).
Greater love has no one than in the laying down of the whole of his life for another. Jn. 15:13
G. In our desire to love Him, one of the things we must do is to consider with loving devotion what He has eternally
given in the gift of Himself. What begins as familiar language must strike our hearts in wonder once again. We must
take that familiar cross to our hearts and meditate upon it day and night, until the dullness that we know is replaced
with a sacred devotion—until we can begin to see, with hearts flooded anew in love, why this Cross stands at the
center of human history, the climax of our story, the focal point of Love for all the ages (Song of Sol. 1:13).
IV. JESUS INVITES ME TO GIVE ALL
A. Bernard of Clairvaux stated, “If we love with our whole being, nothing is lacking where everything is given.” God has
loved us with all that He is, emptying Himself in love to the uttermost, and though I am yet weak and broken, when I love
Him in this same way, giving Him all that I am in the here and now, nothing is lacking where everything is given.
B. When the piercing eyes of Jesus address me and beseech me to love Him with all of my mind, heart, soul and
strength, He asks of me only what He Himself has already given (Matt. 22:37). He wants my everything for His everything,
my all for His all, my entirety for His entirety.
C. God bids us to love Him wholly, yes. But this bidding is laden with a love that has from all eternity poured out its
everything for us.
D. For those of us that might have heard this beckoning of God in the First Commandment with any tinge of
harshness, feeling it to be too difficult, too hard or too extreme, we have yet to understand the Person behind the
plea, the heart behind the appeal. When His eyes meet mine, I am pierced by the beseeching born out of His own living.
V. LOVING GOD EXTRAVAGANTLY EVERYDAY
A. Why do we love Mary of Bethany? Because she was so ordinary—just like us. Yet in the midst of her ordinariness
she did something so extravagant and extraordinary. Mary poured out her entire inheritance over Jesus, her whole
future. There was no price high enough, and the only offering worthy enough was her entire inheritance.
B. Rare acts of devotion, as revealed by Mary of Bethany—a portrait of profuse devotion—come from cultivating a spirit
of radical devotion as a lifestyle. The extravagance revealed in public on rare occasions can only come out of an entire
life of secret extravagance unto God.
C. Wholehearted living does not occur somewhere far ahead in the future when we are finally godly and
circumstances are such as to bring about our greatest display of meekness. Nor does it happen in only the “spiritual”
parts of our lives as we would often divide it.
“For this commandment… is not too mysterious for you, nor is it far off…the word is very near you, in your mouth and
in your heart, that you may do it.” Deut. 30:11, 14
D. The only window we know we have is right now and that window encompasses both the “spiritual” and the
“common” parts of life—for all are holy to the Lord if offered in love. Commonness is the nature of human life in the
age of time. It is the only sort of context we are given to love God within. According to the divine brilliance of everlasting
wisdom, this is the environment in which love for God and man is cultivated, maintained, and offered.
E. Perhaps the greatest testament of the nobility of the smallest parts of common life is the commonness that Jesus
embraced in the incarnation, the everyday duties and tasks that He did not see as unfitting or too insignificant. When
we are cleaning our house, mowing our lawn, playing with our children, driving in our car, He is deeply and intimately
near and familiar.
F. Unless He is the One most meek and most humble, I’ve not a chance at knowing Him. For I am steeped in poverty
and my life filled with all that is mundane and ordinary and common. There is no other avenue to Him for me except His
broken body and His humble heart.
G. The future that we think of so often may or may not happen—we cannot be certain. We cannot plan with sureness on
what we will do tomorrow, always planning as if we could guarantee that we even have tomorrow. (Jas. 4:13–15). We have
but one window that we are sure of in which we might offer the Lord the whole of our hearts, all that we are, and that
window is now. The problem with right now is that it seems so ordinary, so non-mysterious, and so commonplace.
H. Martyrdom begins in monotony and the power to give all for God does not come in the limitation of a heightened
moment of testing but through the cultivation of a thousand ordinary moments. So often I have looked toward some day
in my future and wondered “what will my response be in testing, in persecution?” This is a question I do not have to
wonder about. My response will simply be the same as it is today—for better or for worse—in the hundred daily choices
I make.
VI. WE LOVE HIM ENTIRELY AS WE LOVE OTHERS
A. Loving others is the great theater of real life drama that our love for God is enacted and played out, thus the
Lord referred to this second commandment as “like the first” (Matt. 22:37).
B. When we lay down our lives in love, from small ways to substantial, we are pouring out our offering of devotion
unto God, loving Him by loving another, turning every act of service, every dying to self, every lowering of ourselves for
the lifting of another, into an act of love.
C. We would often like to separate our love for God from our love for others, finding comfort in our seeming
abandonment to God while our love for others might be on the neglected side. Yet these divisions are not accurate
measurements.
D. Within the heart, we do not reach for one river to love God with and another to love people with. It is all the same
river. My love for God is no higher and no greater than the love displayed in the weak and at-times tense moments of
relating to those I love.
E. In the dying to me, the laying down of my rights, my desires, my wants, and the offering of my life to another,
be it God or people, a certain freedom enters that was never there before. That life is ascertained and that freedom
is found only when we cease the frenzied fight of self-promotion, self-absorption and self-gain.
F. The greatest joy flows directly from full givenness in love. We were made to be abandoned and to live, truly live,
in the context of genuinely giving ourselves on behalf of another. In this offering of our life comes the greatest joy. In
the faithfulness to full abandonment the ease of love sets in and the commands become no longer burdensome
(1 Jn. 5:3).
G. The One with gladness above all His companions knows the secret of greatest freedom and highest joy
(Ps. 45:7). He gave all for love and invites us to so great an abandonment. His joy so surpassing is not separate
from His sacrifice so exceeding. As we love with our everything, we will find joy immeasurable. The two realities go
hand in hand and cannot be separated.