Mike Bickle emphasizes the commandment to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, as stated in Mark 12:30. He explains that loving God in these four areas requires intentionality and a shift in our identity, moving away from seeking validation from others to finding our worth in God's love. Bickle highlights that our love for God should be holistic, involving our emotions, thoughts, resources, and sense of self, and that this love is a response to how God loves us. He encourages believers to prioritize this love above all else, as it is the greatest commandment and the foundation of our relationship with God. Ultimately, Bickle calls for a deeper commitment to loving God, inviting those who desire prayer for this journey to come forward.

Turn to Mark chapter 12 in your Bibles. Father, I ask you for the release of your spirit upon our minds. I ask you for the spirit of inspiration. I ask you for might in our spirit. Holy Spirit, we recognize your presence in this room right now. We acknowledge you, we ask you to touch us. In the name of Jesus, amen. Amen. This morning I wanna talk about loving God with all of our heart and all of our soul and strength and mind. Mark chapter 12, verse 30, Jesus said, you shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart. You shall love him with all of your soul, all of your mind and all of your strength. Now, God created us with the capacity to love him in these four spheres of our life. We were designed to respond to him in these four distinct ways. Now, these four spheres of human life, they do overlap, but there are distinctions in each one of them. And the reason God wants us to love him with all of our heart and mind, et cetera, because that's the way he loves us. Can you imagine the God who created the universe, just look up on a starry night, and he loves you with all of his vast mind. And so he only asks us to love him the way he loves us because he wants us to be equally yoked in love together. Not that the size of our love is equal to him, but the all of our love is equal. Our all is small, but it's still our all. That we would love God in this way because that's the way he loves us. Paragraph B, we're gonna give a brief definition for each one of these, and we'll take a couple minutes on each one and spend the majority of our time on the loving God with all of our soul. Because I think that's the most challenging and even the most invasive. It touches our inner man in a way that's distinct. Well, all of them are distinct. Number one, to love God with all of our heart has to do with setting our affections upon God. Loving him with all of our mind has to do with filling our minds with things that inspire love for God instead of things that diminish love for God. Number two, loving God with all of our strength has to do with serving him with our natural strengths, our natural resources. Not just money, but our time, our physical energy. We take our strength or resource and we invest it into serving God deliberately, consciously. To love God, we give our resource to him. And to love God with all of our soul, that's talking about, that's related to our identity. It's related to our identity. We shift the way we define success. Because our identity is the way that we, it's how we define success and how we define our worth and our value. And by nature, naturally, we define success by what we accomplish or we define ourself by our failures. But the Lord says, if you will shift the way you define success, you will love me in a far superior and a deeper way. Because when we change the way we carry our soul, the way we define ourself, the way we see ourself, we get rid of so much emotional traffic and we love God far better. Because the atmosphere in our soul is so much more focused and clear. Now each of these four areas, they are distinct, number one, yet they do overlap. But each of the four areas require our involvement. In meaning, we don't love God in these four areas don't develop automatically. They develop as we deliberately give ourself to God in these distinct ways. So the reason Jesus commanded us in this specific way, because there is not an automatic development, but it takes a response from us. We have a significant role in it, in all four of them. Paragraph C, Matthew 22. Now Jesus, I mean, Matthew added another sentence that Mark did not have. And it's verse 38. Mark added what Jesus said when he defined the, love the Shema is what it's called in the Old Testament. To love God with all of your mind and heart and soul and strength. He called it the first commandment and he called it the great commandment. He added that those two definitions to this commandment. Paragraph D. Now, being the first commandment, that means it is the first priority to the Holy Spirit and to God. This is what he wants first. This word first is not accidental. The Holy Spirit's saying above everything else, this is what I want first in your life. This is on my agenda, number one. See, often what's first on our agenda, which is natural, I'm not saying it in a negative way, is Lord, what is the will of God? We wanna know the will of God for our life. We wanna know what we're supposed to do. And God has a will for us. I mean, he has a plan for us. But before, I mean, of greater importance on what we're supposed to do, it's what we're supposed to become. And Matthew 22, verse 37 gives us insight on what we're supposed to become. Lovers of God with all of our strength and mind and soul and heart, et cetera. That is the will of God for your life even before what you're supposed to do. Now we wanna understand God's will in both capacities. But why am I on the earth and what is this, what is the unfolding of the years about? You're supposed to become something at the heart level. That's what I'm after. It's first in my agenda is what the Holy Spirit's saying. Paragraph D, it's not only first, it's the great commandment. It's the greatest calling upon your life. It has the greatest impact on God's heart. It's the great commandment because it has the greatest impact. It's the great commandment because it has the, it is the greatest calling for your life. It is the greatest way to live. Sometimes somebody will say, I want the highest and the greatest calling. And I go, what do you think that is? And as I talk to young people through the years, typically what they mean is a big stadium and a lot of power. The highest calling means the most visible calling to other people. Now, I wanna tell you the greatest calling is the calling to develop love before God at the heart level. And of course, that love always overflows to people. It's not the size of the stadium. It really is the size of our heart that is our greatest calling. And if we lock into that, well, we're in line with the Holy Spirit. It takes a whole lot of pressure because we're not trying to achieve something that God says that's not even on my agenda for you. What are you doing? Well, I read the magazine and the Christian magazine said, this is what's the big thing. So I'm gonna go try to do that. And the Lord says, I've already given you a great calling. It's my first calling on your life. It's that you would grow in love. The size of your love is far more important when you stand before God than the size of the stadium that you might minister in one day. Paragraph E, let's look at the first one. Sphere number one, to love God with all of our heart. Now, the Bible is clear that we can affect, we can determine what happens in our emotions. Not 100%, but we can influence our emotional development. We are not just slaves to whatever emotion comes to us. We can actually have a role in developing and determining how our emotions develop. The Bible makes it clear, Psalm 91, verse 14, we can set our love, we can set our affections upon loving God. There is a deliberate setting, a choosing to grow in love and your affections will eventually, your emotions will get stirred up by that choice. Now, when our emotions are involved, I'm not talking about emotionalism, but loving God in a way that touches our emotions. The very impulse of our desire that affects all of our life decisions, that colors every, the way that we view life, this is what happens as we set our heart upon the Lord to love Him. It is a choice and God will make the choice for you and it's not automatic, it's a choice we make. There is a time where you say in your heart, I am going to make the primary dream of my life to love God with all of my affections and we begin to aim at that and over time, our emotions actually reflect that decision. We feel love, we actually feel it. Not all the time, every day, but we feel it much more over time if we set our heart upon the Lord and the Lord wants that. He doesn't want just cold service. He wants an emotional response, not emotionalism, but He wants our feeling to be involved. I'm not talking about a style, I'm talking about a connection from the heart with God. Paragraph G, our second sphere to consider, loving God with all of our mind. Now this is speaking of filling your mind with things that inspire love for God instead of things that diminish love for God. Our mind is the doorway to our inner man, our inner life, our mind. What you put in your mind determines the atmosphere of your inner life. Now what we do is we determine to fill our mind with things that are in agreement with the Holy Spirit, the things the Holy Spirit says yes to. Paragraph H, the language of the human spirit is images. The way that we think is by images, that's how we're created. It's not how we're supposed to think, it is how we do think. If I say pink elephant, you think pink elephant. The language of the human spirit is images or pictures. Our mind is like an internal movie screen. It's an internal movie theater that never, ever, ever stops. It goes 24 hours a day. When you're in sleep, the pictures never cease. And we picture, we catch just a fragment, a fraction of a percent of the pictures that go through our mind through the night, we call it a dream. But your mind never, there's never a time when your mind ceases. Your mind will be steady 24-7 pictures for billions and billions and billions of years. It will never stop. It's like a camera that stores our memories or our imagination where we picture what things might be like that we have not experienced. Our imagination is focused on what we haven't experienced yet. And our memory is a recall of what we have experienced. But those pictures are nonstop. Much of our life occurs, much of our life occurs in our mind. So much of our love occurs in our mind. It's a vast universe on the inside. Your mind, your human spirit, and your mind's the door to it, is a vast universe that's eternal, meaning it will go on for billions and billions of years. It will never stop. Those in hell, the movie theater will run forever. Those in the New Jerusalem, the movie theater on the inside will run forever. With something so dynamic as our mind that determines the quality of our love, it is surprising that people take what they put in their mind so casually. God says, your love for me is dynamically related to what happens in that vast universe of your mind that will go on. Again, it'll be moving forever. There's never a time your mind will stop, ever. Paragraph I, now through meditation on the Word, and this is what we do. We love God, we fill our mind with the Word. I'm not talking about being a theologian or memorizing Bible facts. I'm talking about influencing the atmosphere of your inner life by bringing the light of the Word and talking to God through meditating on the Word. We take the reins of our mind through meditation and we can rewrite the movie script that's going on inside of us that never stops. It stirs up new holy imaginations. It stirs up the daydream about loving God and obeying Him and connecting with Him. The holy daydreams, the holy imagination is fueled by the Word of God. Where we begin to picture very different things on the inside than what we would normally picture. We can rewrite the movie script. We can replace the wrong thoughts with new ones if we want to. And God says, if you will do this, your love for me will be enhanced. You will love me better if you love me focused on your mind. Let's go top of page two. The third sphere of our love. Loving God with all of our strength. Now this is to love God with our natural, just our physical and just natural resources, which are time, money. Physical energy is one of your great resources in life. Your talents, your words. Saying words is one of your great resources. Now we express our love to God in the way we invest these resources. Not just your money, but your time, your words, your physical energy. Now it's the most normal thing to use our resource mostly to enhance, to enrich our own personal comfort and honor. That's a very natural thing to do. I'm not putting that down because there's a part of it that's completely legitimate within the kingdom framework. We use our time, we use our money, we use our words, we use our physical energy to enhance our own comfort and honor. The Lord's not against that, but the Lord doesn't want all of our resource to be focused on that. He says, I want you to take a portion of your resource. Now all of it is submitted to him, but he wants our life to be enhanced and enriched. Even under his leadership, he will lead that. So that's not a negative thing intrinsically. What's negative is, is that we use all of our resource on ourself. And the Lord says, I want you deliberately to show love to me by taking your resource and sewing it into your relationship with me and to sewing it in specifically to serving others and building my kingdom. I want you to take your time and sew it. Your money, your words, your physical energy, your abilities. I want you to sew it into your relationship with me and into my kingdom through sewing it into other people. Now we do this because we, consciously because we love Jesus. I'm not just talking about just kind of generally sharing a little bit with other people. I'm just talking about, that's good to do that. I'm talking about because we've connected the giving of our resource to loving God. We're saying we're giving the time, the money, the energy because we're giving it to you. Your eye is on me because I love you. That's why I'm giving it to them. Yes, I love them too. But supreme, primary, I'm doing it as a transaction of my heart with yours because I love you and you want me to. So I'm doing it as a statement of love. And the exciting thing is God takes it that way. He records it in his book and he remembers it that way as love. Now we're to take our resource and we're to sew it into the Holy Spirit bank. The divine economy where we sew it and in the divine economy God will always return it back to us and he will multiply it. Always. When we sew it, we sew our time, our money, our words. He will always return it back, multiply it. Always. You can never ever outgive God on time, on energy, on anything. He will always return it. But here's the thing. When we put it in his bank and his divine economy, he returns it in his own timing and in his own way. But it's real. So we sew our time and in the immediate we've lost that time. Now when I sew time, when you do, we lose a certain amount of effectiveness in the immediate. But 10 years later our effectiveness is always multiplied because we sewed the time. And God says, you watch and see don't measure it by the weeks and months. Measure it by the decades and your effectiveness will be far better, far greater if you give me a portion of your time. Now all of our time is submitted to him but I'm talking about we're giving it away. We're sewing our time in that which does not immediately enhance our life. Paragraph K, 2 Corinthians 12. This passage I refer to as the, it's the foundational principle to the fasted lifestyle. It's the foundational principle right here. 2 Corinthians 12, 9. Paul was in a time of difficulty, of persecution. He was getting harassed and he was getting beat and people were saying things against him, being lied about, all kinds of things. And so he cried out to God and the Lord visits him and gives him, Jesus visits him and gives him a very specific principle. He said, Paul, my grace is sufficient for you and my strength, my strength is made perfect in weakness. Now what he's saying is, what he says my grace, grace me has the element of forgiveness but grace is much more than forgiveness. It's much more than mercy. Mercy is forgiveness and it's a subunit of grace. Grace is empowering or enabling. Choose the word you want. When the grace of God is touching you, it does have the mercy element but it's an empowering element. That's what grace mostly means, enabling or empowering. So he's telling Paul, my enabling on your life is sufficient. My enabling of your life. He goes, watch this, Paul. My strength will be made perfect or complete. It will be perfected in your life when you embrace weakness. Now the weakness that Paul, that God, Jesus is talking about, it's not moral weakness. It's not like if you lose your temper on a regular basis, you'll see how much I forgive you and then you'll magnify my grace. It's not talking about moral weakness and getting forgiveness for it. Though that's a great truth. I love that truth. It's talking about voluntary weakness. That if Paul, it's in context of persecution. So Paul, here he is holding the line on speaking various truths. And if he would only back away from those truths and just be silent, if he would only move into the comfort zone, he wouldn't have people persecuting him. But he won't back away. He holds the line. So he has people against him. And then instead of attacking the people, he blesses the people and he's silent and he lets the Lord defend him. That is called weakness. It's voluntary weakness. He will not defend himself and he will not draw back from that which is causing problems. We operate in voluntary weakness. We embrace voluntary weakness when we pray. What we're doing is, prayer is a commitment of time. It's more than that. But I'm just talking on one element. I remember when the Lord first called me to prayer some years ago. I was kind of all ready to go and gun hole. And after a little while, I started doing the math. It took me so much time. It was time that was the problem. I said, God, I love you. Prayer is a little boring. I wish you would talk back a little bit more, but hey, I can handle it. I can handle the boring thing. I'm sitting there. The thing that bothers me, the stumbling block to prayer was how much time it took. And I remember telling the Lord, you know, just young, young administrator. I said, Lord, if you would just like free me from this prayer thing and cut me loose, I could do a lot for you. And the Lord's answer, not that I heard it so clear, but I can see it now. His Lord, his answer was, here's what you do. You sow this amount of time in prayer. But Lord, when I give you that time, I lose my effectiveness because you wait and see. Don't measure it by the weeks and months. Measure it by the decades. Your effectiveness will be returned back for that time, but it will be multiplied. You're sowing it into my Holy Spirit bank system, my divine economy, your effectiveness. Now, it's 30 years later. I look back and I am sure I've had a far more efficiency in my time, my effectiveness of my time, my investment because I took time to pray instead of building what I would have been building. In the immediate, it's a loss. But in the thinking and timeframes of decades, it's always an increase, always. So, it's weakness because we're losing in the immediate part of our time, our strength. We're losing some of our strength. Lord says, watch this. Measure it by decades. Don't measure it by months. I will give you a multiplication of your effectiveness if you do this my way. It's a statement of humility to pray. Only humble people pray. I don't mean everybody that prays is humble, but only people in need. Only people that say, you know what? I need the divine economy because I don't have confidence that my own effectiveness is good enough. I need the divine element. Lord says, good, do it my way. Yeah, but I lose so much in the immediate of my time. He says, just trust me. Are my eyes on you? Am I watching you? That's called fasting. That's a form of fasting. Give you your time. It's a form of fasting not to strike back to your enemies, not to get even with your enemies, but to let the Lord settle it. It's like, ah, Lord, would you settle it sooner than later? Because I would like the honor returned to me that they're stealing from me. Lord says, the honor will be there within a decade. You'll see more honor. Maybe not for them. My time and my way. Trust me, do it my way. And it causes us to love God because we do it his way because we love him. We say, I wouldn't choose this except for you want me to and I love you, so I will choose it. Lord says, I take that personal. I take that very personally. You do it because you love me. Giving God our strength because we know his eyes are on us and because we know it pleases him. It connects our heart to him in love and he counts it as love. And that's a part of loving him. That loving him with our emotions, our heart and loving him with our mind. It's different. I mean, there's an overlap, but it has a distinction. Paragraph L, we fast in our strengths and there's five activities in Matthew 6 of the Sermon on the Mount that Jesus outlined. These five activities I refer to as the fasted lifestyle. We serve, we give, we pray, we bless and we fast food. All five of those are a form of fasting. When you serve people, it takes your time. It takes your energy. You could use that time for yourself, but you're giving it to God because you care because God says, I care about it. My eyes are on you. Say, I love you and I'm doing it because it matters to you. I really wish I didn't have to do this. But the Lord says, I take it very personally and I write again. I write it in my book. When we give money, we give part of our money away. That's part of our strength. It's part of our influence. We're giving it away. We don't have it anymore. Lord, are you going to return that back? He says, watch, but measure it by decades. Don't measure it by months. When we pray, we invest time, but it's more than that. I'm not trying to give a comprehensive statement. When we bless our adversaries, I don't mean just, you know, real intense enemies. An adversary is just anybody. I mean, many of them are in the kingdom. They're friends that are blocking your goals in God. They're, they're getting in the way of what is on your heart and your mind and they're just messing it up. We all got a few of those folks in our life. The Lord says, I don't want you to answer it. I want you to bless them. Well, Lord, but they're, my reputation is hurt and my honor decreases because of their, what they're saying. Lord says, I'll take care of it. Like, would you take care of it sooner than later? I'll take care of it and you'll have more honor. Within the decades, you'll have more honor than you have if they change their mind right now. Watch, do it my way. And then when we fast food, that's not mostly about hunger. It's mostly about strength. And when you fast, you know, your brain is kind of half there and you're wobbly and you're kind of, Lord, I really have to be clear-minded today. Lord says, it's good to be clear-minded, but fasting is weakness. And in the overall, you will gain more by having fasting in your life. You will actually be more effective in life. But in the immediate, you'll, you know, jumble up and stumble over some things. I go, Lord, I'm just wobbly. I can't do my job. And the Lord says, you just keep doing it the way, you keep the fasting in there. And over 10 years, you'll be more effective than if you didn't fast. I will put a divine element of increase. Watch, paragraph four. This is the one I wanted to spend the most time on, loving God with all of our soul. Now, to love God with all of our soul has to do with the way we define ourself, has to do with our sense of identity. What Jesus is saying, we need to shift the way that we get our identity. Now, our identity is the way that we define success. Our identity is the way that we define our value and our worth. And the most natural way for all of us, we're born with this orientation to get our identity from people. And God wants us to get our identity in our relationship with him. And so just as fallen people, all of us are the same. Our natural identity that we want to get from people and from what we do, from our accomplishments and from the people we know, instead of from our relationship with God. So we have an innate automatic sense of feeling rejected and neglected. So there's already a negative in the equation. But the way we process life, well, they're going to reject me and overlook me anyway. So reject and neglect are the automatic default of the darkened heart. And then we get our success by what we accomplish. So we get it from people and we get it from our work, from what we accomplish. Lord says, I want you to deliberately go on a journey of shifting the way you define yourself, the way you define your success. I want you to get it from your relationship to me and from your responses to me. Paragraph N. Now the foundational principle of identity, this is very common. Is that God's love for us is what determines our personal worth. The fact that he chose you and he loves you, that's why you're worth so much. Not because people chose you, because the Genesis 1 God chose you. This is what defines your worth. This is what makes you successful. You're loved by God. That's one part. That's the foundation. But there is a second part that you have responded back and you love him. Now our love is weak, but our love is real because weak love is not false love. Still real. Of the near 7 billion people on the earth, only about a billion of them love God. The vast majority don't. They don't love God, not on his terms. They have not accepted his son. The vast majority. So you are of the minority that has accepted the love of God consciously and you're deliberately returning it. Again, our love is not very mature, but our love is real. So the fact that he loves you and you said yes and now you're loving him back, that makes you one of the most successful people in history already. It is true. You're of the minority of history that is successful. That is the core definition of being successful. And we could be anchored in this. And what we are typically anchored in is our relationship before people and what we accomplish in our possessions. So we get our sense of worth. Paragraph O. The confession that I've used for years. You know, when I get in a difficult time and I start asking when things are hard, I'm pressing into God I'm pressing in hard and working hard and yet it seems like I'm accomplishing so little. And we all know that feeling. That's common to all human beings. We work hard, but we seem like we're accomplishing so little. And so you start asking the philosophical questions. Why am I even on the earth? What am I doing down here? And that's what pressure does. It always makes you ask, why am I doing any of this anyway? And then I get into that, why am I even doing this? Pressure brings you to that question all the time. Different versions of that question. And then I go, wait a second. The Genesis 1, God loves me. He chose me and he likes me. I'm one of God's main guys. But a billion of you are. Everybody who loves Jesus, you're one of his main guys. Because he loves you as much as he loves you. He loves you more than he loves Jesus. That's what John 17, 23. And he can't love you more because he can't love you more than he loves Jesus. Because he said, I love you the same way. So I say, okay, you love me. Like, wow, that's cool. I'm one of your main guys. I'm one of your favorite ones. Because God doesn't, I don't lose anything in God because he loves you. I don't lose anything in his love because he shares it with others. He gives it to others. I go, this is really, this is like really good. I got it made. But it's more than that because God loves lots of people who don't return it. But by the grace of God, I actually want to love him. By the miracle of grace, you actually have a yes in your heart because the majority don't. So I'm gonna live forever in his presence. Like, wow, you know, for billions of years. Like, okay, I am loved by God. I am a lover of God. I'm loved and I'm a lover. Therefore, I'm already successful, already. I'm not trying to be successful. I already am successful. Beloved, when that connects with your spirit, that anchor in your soul, then what happens is you shift. You're working because you're successful. You're not working to become successful. You already are. So when we work from success in our ministry, our assignment, in the marketplace, when we work from success, because God already loves us, that's the plane of success, place of success, our relationship with God. When we labor from success instead of labor for success in the eyes of men, it changes the whole nature of the work. So I do my ministry not to be successful. I do my ministry because I already am successful. See, we don't get burned out by hard work. We get burned out by working with the wrong spirit. That's really why we get burned out. When we work from a core reality that we are already successful, then we find strength in our spirit in the work. Our body's tired, but our spirit actually gets strengthened. When we do our ministry or whatever assignment we have in life, to get success, to finally be successful, that work will burn you out every single time, no matter what it is. Whether it's the work in the home, in the marketplace, the church, it does not matter. Working to be successful will burn you out. Working because you are already successful actually strengthen your spirit, though you'll get tired in the process, your body, but your spirit will actually get stronger. That's what Colossians 1.10 meant that in every good work, you're fruitful. You increase in the knowledge of God while you're working because you're actually connecting with the eyes of God in your work. Even if your work is small and unnoticed by man, you're connecting with God. You know His eyes are on you and your spirit is enriched because you're doing it before His eyes. Nobody else would pay attention, but the rigorous interaction with your heart and God's heart, you're actually built up in the knowledge of God, Colossians 1.10, while you're doing the work of ministry. And the work may be real small and completely ignored by everybody, but your spirit's getting stronger. Roman numeral two, paragraph eight. We're gonna look at Jesus for a few moments. Jesus is the premier example of loving God with all of his soul. Loving God, the Father, from a completely perfect and right identity. Jesus did not act in humility because He wanted to prove something. Humility was not something He did. Humility was something He was. He was humble. He wasn't just putting a show of humility. He actually was showing the truth of who He was. From eternity, who He is. Jesus' humility did not begin at the incarnation when He became a man. Jesus was humble billions of years ago. Jesus didn't become a man and therefore become humble. It was the other way around. He was humble, therefore He became a man. The doctrine of the humility of God. God is humble far before Genesis 1 ever happened. He's eternally humble. He's infinitely humble in His disposition. Now Philippians chapter two, verse six to eight. These three verses are the greatest statement in the word of God on the humility of Jesus. Now they're waiting and there's just levels and levels of thought on this passage, Philippians two, verse six to eight. Let's read it. This is the humility that He expressed when He became a man and then died on the cross. Philippians two, six to eight. It says in verse six, Jesus who being in the form of God, He did not consider it robbery to be equal with God. Okay, that's an interesting phrase. And there's books written on that phrase. He did not consider it robbery. That's a complex concept. Verse seven. But He made Himself of no reputation. And the NIV is, you know, the New International Version, the NAS, the New American Standard. I just put the other translations in there. He made Himself, verse seven, of no reputation. Taking on the form of a bond servant, He came in the likeness of man. Now to come in the likeness of men meant He came in the limitations of humanity. Now we think it's cool to be in the likeness of a human, but when you're the Genesis 1 God, to be in the likeness of a man is really a significant restraint. It's downsizing beyond anything we could imagine. Now we love being human, but for the Trinity, for one of the persons of the Godhead to become human, it's a massive statement of condescension and humility. He became to the likeness of man, I mean, the angels would have shuddered the first time that this idea entered their brain, like inconceivable that He could become a man. Verse eight, He was found in the appearance of a man and He humbled Himself to the point of death. Top of page three. We'll just look at a few of these paragraphs on page three and end with this. Paragraph C, Jesus did not consider robbery to be equal to God. Now there's two ways to take this passage and I think both of them are valid. Two different sides of the spectrum that are real different. And I believe both of them are valid. Number one, Jesus did not consider robbery. It didn't take anything from God the Father for Him to claim and to insist on having all the privileges of being equal to God. Like it's not like Jesus, if He would have claimed all the privileges of while He's on the earth, of living equal to the Father. It's not like the Father would have looked over the balcony of heaven saying, hey, what are you doing down there? You're acting like me. It would not have been robbery at all. There would have been nothing wrong with Him insisting that He had all the privileges that the Father has to be treated equal to God. Then on the other complete other side of the pendulum, it didn't take anything from Him for Him to abstain or refuse the privileges. The Father says, you don't steal anything from me because you're acting like me. And Jesus could say it the other way. I don't lose anything because I abstain from the privileges and I live in the restraints of humanity because I'm still being true to who I am. I am a humble servant who lives for love. I don't live for honor in the sight of men. I'm not down on the earth for 33 years to have everybody applaud me. I'm down on the earth doing the will of God. And so for 33 years on the earth, though all the privileges of God were rightfully His, He didn't and not only did He not insist on Him, He abstained from them. He refused them so that He could live in the restraints of humanity, the limitations of humanity, so that He could qualify as a human high priest to pay the price for our salvation. Because God doesn't die for man, a man dies to pay the sin for man. And Jesus had to live in all the restraints of humanity to qualify as the high priest to pay for our sin. Jesus said, that's not a problem because I'm not losing anything. It's not robbery. I don't lose anything by abstaining from the privileges of receiving honor in my 33 years because I live for love. I live for humility. Humility is who I am. It's not just what I do. It's who I am at the heart level. Paragraph D, after the incarnation or after He became human, that's what it means by the incarnation, Jesus then had two natures. He was fully God and fully man. And so for His 33 years on the earth, He was never, ever less than God, never. He was always fully God. As a one-year-old baby, as an infant, He was fully God the whole time. He was never, ever less than God in His 33 years on the earth, but He never lived as though He were more than a man. He restrained using all of His divine power and He lived in dependency on the Holy Spirit. And He said, Holy Spirit, anoint me when you want me to make an impact on people. I won't on my own go and do it. I will do it under your anointing and under your leadership. He lived His whole 33 years like you and I would, dependent upon the Holy Spirit. That was a massive expression of humility. Paragraph D, being in the form of God, He had all the power to influence the nations on His own. He didn't technically need the Holy Spirit to anoint Him. He goes, I got the power, I created the earth. But He laid aside the privileges of all of that power and ability He laid it aside and He only used the power to affect the nations when the Spirit led Him to and anointed Him to. This was a new relationship that He had with the Holy Spirit and with the Father. It was a different dynamic when He was walking on the earth as a man. He lived like we did. He prayed, He obeyed, He fasted, He waited on the Holy Spirit and then the Spirit would direct Him and then He would do an act of power. Now the angels could have come along and said, wait, you could do that act of power without waiting and praying and listening to the Spirit. You've got all the power yourself. He goes, no, I will not use it. He didn't empty Himself of deity but He emptied Himself of taking the initiative without the Holy Spirit leading Him. Now, why am I saying all this? Paragraph E, here's why. When He denied Himself of all of His privilege and power in His 33 years, He wasn't denying His identity. He was a servant. He was being true to who He has been for billions of years. He was being true to Himself. This wasn't new to Him. He didn't find His identity in power. He found His identity in servanthood and love. He goes, I'm being true to who I've been. I was this humble when I did Genesis 1. I'm the same. It's no different to me. I live the same on the inside as I did when I created the heavens and the earth. Paragraph E, Jesus did not grasp at the unique privilege of being God when He walked on the earth. He did not insist on the right to live free of pain and rejection, humiliation. I mean, can you imagine somebody who created the heavens and the earth ever being hungry? How could you have the power to create the heavens and earth and be hungry or be rejected or have somebody say something bad about you and you don't set the record straight? How is that possible? You're God. You can set the record straight, but He was silent. The reason Jesus delights in mercy is because He delights in humility. That's why He loves mercy so much. Paragraph G, Isaiah 53. It says He had no form. He had no comeliness. When we see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him. He is despised and rejected. The people in His day did not esteem Him. Now, everywhere that Jesus went, the people all underestimated. They underestimated His abilities. Everyone who saw Him, they saw Him as average, as ordinary. We're talking about nobody. His mother did not esteem the fullness of His abilities. But that didn't bother Him at all because He was living by another definition of success. I mean, we have such a urge in our spirit to make sure we are distinction and our uniqueness is recognized and esteemed. And people look at us and, wow, aren't you good at this? Or don't you have that? We want to be, we want to relate to people based on our uniqueness and distinctions that we're better in some areas than most people in something. Jesus was better than everybody in everything, but He walked and everybody thought He was an ordinary guy. They saw no form or comeliness in Him. There was nothing they esteemed. When He was in high school, when He was 20, nobody's head turned in the neighborhood when He walked by. Talking about living with the right identity. He had no urge in Him to get people attracted to Him for any other reason but the will of God. That's loving God with all of His soul. He was happy to be seen as an ordinary man with no special form. That means that He had no status. He had no place in society. He had no special attractiveness that made people's heads turn and they went, wow. And He was completely happy in God living that way at the heart level. He didn't say nobody recognizes me because nobody did. He was used to the applause of the myriads of angels and He came and there's a silence. Nobody in the neighborhood got who He was for 33 years. But His identity was in love and humility, not in making an impact before people at His time on the earth. If His core identity would have been power, then His incarnation would have been a denial of Himself. But it wasn't. His incarnation was an expression of His true heart. Now, this is how I imagine it. That when Jesus thinks of Himself. Now, whenever you talk about how God thinks about God, you better be pretty soft on it because we don't know that much about the vastness of how God thinks about everything. But I imagine that when Jesus thinks about Himself, He doesn't say, wow, look how much more power I have than you. But I think when He thinks about Himself, He says, wow, I love to love you. I love serving you. That's what I love. But in our natural way of thinking, we would be wowed because we had more power than everybody else. Jesus is wowed because He loves. He loves in perfection. That's the wow in His spirit. That's how I imagine when He walked on the earth. Jesus didn't serve because He had to prove something. He served to express the truth of who He was. It was not ungodlike for Him at all to kneel down and wash the disciples feet. He was perfectly at home washing feet. This is something He was always like. It wasn't like, well, I guess I'll kind of suck up and do this one time, this one event once. He was as at home washing feet as He was creating the heavens and the earth. He was exactly the same in His heart. The application of this, just to end with paragraph J, we'll close with this. To love God with all of our soul. The Lord is requiring that we establish ourselves in a new identity. That our identity, that it's a process to do this. There's a shift that takes place. We get our identity from our relationship to Him instead of our identity by our relationship to people and what we accomplish. We shift it and it takes a while to shift it. And I don't know that we ever do it perfectly in this age, but we deliberately go on that journey. And as we go on that journey, the deeper we get in the reality of this, the emotional traffic that distorts our love begins to diminish. And we love God with greater clarity and greater fullness because so much of all the discombobulation on the inside, all the storm is quieted. And Jesus said, you love me with all of your soul. And the Lord's calling us to love Him in these four ways. With all of our heart, all of our mind, all of our strength, and all of our soul. Amen. Let's stand. Now I'm going to invite folks to come forward that want to respond to this publicly because you can respond in your chair because God's eyes are on you. But maybe you want prayer or maybe you just want the privacy of just kind of not being by the people you're sitting with. You just want to just be before the Lord. And you're saying this issue of loving God with my soul. I want to break through. Now we all want to break through on that. Of course we do. I mean, I need to be at every prayer line. But you're saying, no, I want people to pray for me today. I want a prayer for this today. Not just I want to break through. I want to stand with people. If that's you, I want you to come forward if you want.