INTERNATIONAL HOUSE OF PRAYER–KC   DANA CANDLER

37 Jesus said to him, " 'You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.' 38 This is the first and great commandment.” (Mt. 22:37-38)
 
A.    We stand before a real Person who extends to us this invitation of the highest order. It is a call to fervency that flows from the fullness of love. Just as His eyes pierced through the crowds of old, Jesus summons each single heart out of its lethargy into wholehearted givenness to God. He beckons us to the only foreseeable future, the only plausible outlook, if we desire to live in the fullness of His highest for us. He calls us to give Him everything.
 
B.    Wholehearted love is who God is, what He gives and what He demands. God does not love inside boundaries or up to a certain point, but fully. And this is how He invites us to love Him and to love others, with the very same love (Jn. 17:26). He is not—and has never been—a God of fractions but of fullness. He has always been jealous for all and has not changed in the nature of His all-consuming desire for our everything.
 
The radiant Image of the Father’s glory has come to light a fire in us, a burning love, a consuming yearning.  There is nothing lukewarm about the God of revelation.  Always radical and total, never does He reduce what He expects of us to fractions.  Our communion with Him is to become a blazing fire, a perpetual ecstasy.  These strong words will sound strange and exaggerated only to those who have not tasted that the Lord is good.  They may have studied and read, but they have not drunk deeply.

C.    Bernard of Clairvaux stated, “It is true that the creature loves less because she is less. But if she loves with her whole being, nothing is lacking where everything is given.” To love Him with only portions of our heart, soul, mind and strength is to love Him in ways counter to the nature of love. Though our love is not perfect in the sense of maturity, He asks us to love Him now in the way that Love loves—comprehensively and fully given to Him in every area that we know and perceive, with no conscious place of compromise yet remaining.
 
D.    This divine summoning to wholeheartedness does not only have to do with who God is but who we are and how He created us to live.
 
1.    The truth is that we were made to abandon ourselves, made to give all in love without compromise. Innate in our makeup is dissatisfaction with half-heartedness and a yearning to love and be loved to the uttermost.
 
2.    Only in the safety of wholeheartedness will we will be kept secure in the hour of delusion that will sweep the globe before the Return of Jesus. In the day when lawlessness abounds, the love of many will grow cold (Mt. 24:11, 12). Divided hearts will give way to their shifting foundations and only lives built upon the lifestyle prescribed by Jesus—the pursuit of the First Commandment as spelled out in the Sermon on the Mount—will stand firm and be prepared at His Return (Matt. 7: 24-27; Rev. 19:7).
 

A.    The invitation to wholeheartedness, or abandonment, the call to the first commandment, is a PRESENT TENSE invitation. When God asks us to love Him wholly, He is not demanding immediate maturity but rather complete response in the here and now.

B.    On this particular day we can yield to Him fully and in so doing love Him with a love that comes before the Throne of God as whole and complete.
 
C.    Every season will give reasons why not to be wholehearted for God.  Commonness. Immaturity. Difficult circumstances. We might say, “When I get beyond this, I’ll be wholehearted.” Some in busy seasons are continually saying, “When things settle down I’ll give Him my heart in the way that I want to.” Others experience seasons of regret and think that they gave up their opportunity already. Jesus says, “It’s about right NOW.”
 
D.    Loving God wholly is not something done or something offered once and for all. Nor is it just a vow made in the heightened moments of sincere desire—delayed in its fruition until the end of one’s life. We live this out in a thousand times a thousand moments, day after day after day.
 
E.    Often we delay in giving God the final fractions of our lives because we want Him to first change our circumstances. We imagine that, when our conditions are different, then finally we will be wholehearted. Yet He has actually put within our paths each circumstance according to His perfect leadership to create the pressures and difficulties necessary to produce a new level of response in us. God has allowed each circumstance to be part of the plan to actually bring into being our full-givenness to Him.
 
F.    The enemy would love to seduce us into the fantasy of the future or the romanticism of the past if only to keep us from radical love and obedience in the here and now. If we perceive today as only a neutral point in time—than we will fall into the deception laid out for us, becoming utterly powerless both in the present and in the days ahead.
 
G.    We might think often that another season or another life might more lend itself to abandonment. Yet 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 must love Him with our all today.
 

A.    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 life as we would so often divide it. Loving God with all of the heart, soul, mind and strength can only ever be done in the context of the moments we have been given right now, however ordinary or weak.
 
“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
 
B.    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. The well-known Brother Lawrence lived a life that captured this truth profoundly.
“We ought not weary of doing little things for the love of God, who regards not the greatness of the work, but the love with which it is performed. 
 
C.    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.
 
God is not unjust to forget your…love which you have shown to His name… (Heb. 6:10)
 
Whoever gives one of these little ones only a cup of cold water in the name of a disciple, assuredly, I say to you, he shall by no means lose his reward. (Mt. 10:42)
 
D.    There is a certain violence of heart required to embrace the current moment of our lives as the perfect time and perfect environment to respond in full yieldedness to God.  To respond in the vulnerability and trust required in full abandonment to God necessitates a deep trust in the Lord’s leadership over our lives, confident that He has formed even these days and this specific season. It requires that we war continually against accusations about His heart and about ourselves and continually feed upon the truths that combat these lies. This violence of heart in the now prepares the way for violent love in future times.
 
“If you love Me, keep My commandments. He who has My commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves Me. And he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and manifest Myself to him. If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love, just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love.” Jn. 14:15, 21; 15:10
 

A.    How often have I looked toward some anticipated 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 am given to respond in love when no one except One sees.
 
B.    The love that fuels 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 moments. The key to winning the race is the marathon pace and the assurance of a right response in the pinnacle moment is the response of sincere love in thousands of ordinary and secret moments day after day after day.
If we sow to the Spirit we will reap the Spirit (Gal. 6:8)

A.    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. Jesus knew human experience. He knew monotony. He knew the mundane. He was acquainted with the common and not a stranger to the trivial. In all ways, He is our Brother.
 
B.    We cannot forget that Jesus Himself spent approximately 30 years in these caverns of the common. He saw it fitting to become prepared for both His public ministry and His ominous death on the Cross in near complete obscurity. Thus we know that there is no circumstance too small, no window of time too monotonous to be the opportune time to grow in love, the favorable setting to be prepared for all that we will face in our future.
 
C.    By Jesus’ embracing of the human plight, He has made way for each moment of monotony to be a doorway of fellowship. There is nothing too small, no circumstance too trivial to not bring our hearts to Him in love, hold converse with Him in the midst of and consecrate unto Him as something done unto the Lord. When we are cleaning our house, mowing our lawn, going to school, playing with our children, driving in our car, serving at our job, etc., He is deeply and intimately near and familiar.
 
D.    Jesus’ earthly life amidst common and ordinary people and circumstances should confront us every single day. In truth, it should invade our every moment and allow eternity to touch time continually.
 
E.    It is not just that Jesus did ordinary things and therefore our monotony is dignified. There is nothing intrinsically good about monotony and many people live all of their days in ordinariness without ever encountering, knowing, or loving Jesus. The truth of Jesus’ walking among us and embracing the commonplace finds its treasure in that God incarnate has joined Himself to the lowly and desires to encounter us and cultivate extravagant love in us amidst everyday contexts. 
 

A.    This truth of Jesus’ crowning the common and not distancing Himself from the ordinary expands even more to reveal the way He values the small and seemingly trivial parts of love. He is the God who not only embraced the common and gave me access to His heart amidst my everyday life, He is the One who allows His heart to be moved deeply by every choice made in love for Him, every word of affection I pray, every action done in love (Song. 4:9; Matt. 6:1–18; Heb. 6:10; Mt. 10:42)
 
B.    What we behold in the life of Jesus is that God hears our every word, takes into His heart our every action and holds no indifference over a single second of our lives. The One who did not turn His face from those who rejected Him and did not harden His heart from the despising ridiculers is the same One who He is deeply moved in His heart by even the smallest ways that I show Him my love, whether in word or deed or thought.
 
C.    Once again, we do not have to wait to be wholehearted, whether we are waiting for more noble circumstances to love Him in or more extreme expressions to love Him with. We love Him today in fullness and with all affection and in this context, nothing is lacking where everything is given.