Tag: Bible verses about loving God first and foremost

Matthew 22:37 (NKJV) 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.’

Of all the commands, this is the most important; to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind.

There is nothing above it. And this should be our priority every day that we live; putting God above all else.

As we were recently traveling, God dropped some questions into my spirit.

Let’s discuss them so we can learn and grow.

What is our walk with God built on?

It’s important for us to understand what the foundation is that’s supporting our relationship with God.

Is it built on routine or ritual?

Many times, our relationship with Him can fall into nothing more than a series of routines, habits, and rituals. We repeat the same behaviors daily, never stopping to ask ourselves why we’re doing what we do.

This leads to a dead relationship that is built only on rote, mechanical actions that involve only reflexive behavior, not our heart. There is no fruit in it.

Is our relationship built on what we’ve seen others do (mimicry)? Is it based only on what we have heard others tell us it should be?

If we’re not careful, we may tend to imitate what we have seen in the lives of other believers, mimicking their behavior. This often happens because we don’t spend the necessary time growing our own relationship. So, we simply imitate what we see in others.

Do we just fly by the seat of our pants, doing what we think is right?

If we fail to spend time in God’s word, learning of Him and maturing as a believer, we can wander aimlessly, having no firm footing and no direction. We lack understanding and wisdom that would be gained if we would only open His word and feed on it.

Our relationship with God is what we make it. It will grow to the extent that we want it to.

We must put forth the effort. We will see growth when we put in the work.

And in the end, it comes down to one factor; our heart.

Do we love God with all our heart, soul, and mind, putting Him above all else, even when that means laying down our old habits, routines, and rituals?

Only we can answer that question.

Pastor Curt & Pastor Ellie

Seven Seas Ministries
49 N Lamplighters Walk
Hampstead, NC 28443

401-439-3780

If you know someone who will enjoy this or be encouraged by it, please feel free to share it with them!

To have the Bible Verse of The Day delivered to your inbox each day, please Click Here and then enter your email address in the box near the upper left corner of the page. 

Psalm 102:25-27 (LSB) 25 Of old You founded the earth, And the heavens are the work of Your hands. 26 Even they will perish, but You will remain; And all of them will wear out like a garment; Like clothing You will change them and they will be changed. 27 But You are the same, And Your years will not come to an end.

Our lives are temporary.

The earth is temporary.

The heavens are temporary.

Everything we pursue and chase after while we are here is temporary.

What is not temporary?

God.

God is eternal. He always has been, He is now, and He will be forevermore.

Understanding this changes our perspective. It rearranges our priorities.

It shows us where our energy and efforts should be directed. And it is not on the things of this world.

So many times, we lose sight of the fact that our life is but a moment; a mere flicker that is momentary.

Does all of this seem morbid?

It isn’t. It is factual. And it should grab our attention. It should jar us awake us if we are serious about our walk with God; our eternity.

Where our time, attention, and money are spent shows us where our heart is. It reveals our heart, and shows us our priorities.

Let us love God more. Let us learn of Him and seek Him daily, drawing closer to Him with each day that passes.

This is not cliche’. It is truth that we must understand and embrace.

We love you all.

Pastor Curt & Pastor Ellie

Seven Seas Ministries
49 N Lamplighters Walk
Hampstead, NC 28443

401-439-3780

If you know someone who will enjoy this or be encouraged by it, please feel free to share it with them!

To have the Bible Verse of The Day delivered to your inbox each day, please Click Here and then enter your email address in the box near the upper left corner of the page. 

1 Samuel 15:22 (LSB 22 And Samuel said, “Has Yahweh as much delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices As in obeying the voice of Yahweh? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, And to heed than the fat of rams.

Happy Wednesday!

Today we’d like to continue with a topic that we discussed on Monday; obeying God.

As we also mentioned on Monday, everything about our lives flows from the heart; our thoughts, our speech, and our actions.

So, whether we obey God or not also stems from the condition of our heart.

A hard, angry, or bitter heart is unlikely to conform to God’s will, and more apt to follow our own will. Things such as anger and similar emotions almost always lead to rebellion.

Pride will also cause us to rebel, preferring ourselves over others.

And a higher opinion of view of ourselves will also cause us to put others lower on our list of priorities than we place ourselves.

This is why it is so important that we humble ourselves before God.

Humility will make us more pliable in God’s hands, causing us to conform to what He wants, instead of what we want.

And as we remain humble, the Holy Spirit will begin to transform us, so that our desires heed to God’s will, and we begin to honor His desires instead of our own.

We transition from selfish to selfless.

This is typically a gradual progression that can take years to happen. Realistically, it is a lifelong process that has seasons of growth spurts as we walk through various trials and situations that cause us to put our roots down deeper in Him.

And what is at the root of our obedience? What causes us to begin putting ourselves second, and Him first?

Our love for God.

Our love for Him grows as we mature and purposely make the effort to learn of Him.

And when that love is in full bloom, the only thing that will fill our heart and make it feel complete is more time spent with Him, studying His word, communing with Him, and drawing ever nearer to Him.

Jeremiah 29:13 (NKJV) 13 And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart.

Pastor Curt & Pastor Ellie

Seven Seas Ministries
49 N Lamplighters Walk
Hampstead, NC 28443

401-439-3780

If you know someone who will enjoy this or be encouraged by it, please feel free to share it with them!

To have the Bible Verse of The Day delivered to your inbox each day, please Click Here and then enter your email address in the box near the upper left corner of the page. 

2 Kings 22:11 (NKJV) 11 Now it happened, when the king heard the words of the Book of the Law, that he tore his clothes.

Our sincerity in our walk with God is more important than we know.

And if we look at it closely, we will understand that it revolves around what is in our heart.

In the verse above, king Josiah had realized that the nation of Judah had neglected God and their relationship with Him.

They had abandoned Him.

It happened by no fault of their own. The generations preceding them had slowly left God behind, trading Him for idols and false gods.

But when Josiah discovered the truth about their situation, he immediately tore his clothing as was the Jewish custom when something terrible had happened.

More importantly, though, he took steps to rectify the situation and get the people of Judah back on track.

So it should be for us.

Our walk with God should be the highest priority in our life. Everything else must come after.

And when we see that we have lapsed somewhere, fixing it must be what we focus on.

As with Josiah, the state of our heart must be one that is soft and pliable; moldable by God.

Life, and the things we encounter, can cause our hearts to become hard and callous. A heart in this condition does not easily respond to God’s promptings or the conviction of the Holy Spirit.

The best remedy for this is for us to recognize our condition and to lay ourselves repentantly at the feet of Jesus, asking Him to teach us His ways.

And He will willingly do that for each of us, no questions asked.

Pastor Curt & Pastor Ellie

Seven Seas Ministries
49 N Lamplighters Walk
Hampstead, NC 28443

401-439-3780

If you know someone who will enjoy this or be encouraged by it, please feel free to share it with them!

To have the Bible Verse of The Day delivered to your inbox each day, please Click Here and then enter your email address in the box near the upper left corner of the page. 

1 Samuel 16:18 (LSB) 18 Then one of the young men answered and said, “Behold, I have seen a son of Jesse the Bethlehemite who is a skillful musician, a mighty man of valor, a warrior, one who is understanding in speech, and man of fine form; and Yahweh is with him.”

The life of David would be perfect for a case study of someone used by God for his qualities, and despite his faults.

He is an example of someone who loved God, working diligently to do what was right and honorable in His eyes.

The verse above listed David’s attributes; skillful musician, a man of valor, a warrior, sensible, physically attractive.

And finally, it was said that God’s presence was with him.

As I have recently been working my way through 1 Samuel and 2 Samuel again, I have been paying close attention specifically to David and the things he did.

He was truly a man after God’s heart. An honorable man who, despite being a warrior, also displayed God’s mercy and compassion toward Saul, who had tried to kill him numerous times.

On multiple occasions, David had opportunities to easily kill Saul. But he refused to do so, knowing that Saul was anointed by God as Israel’s king.

Seeing this really impacted me and got me thinking. It caused me to examine myself and ask if I would have been able to do the same had I been in David’s shoes at those moments.

And it caused me to ask God to continue to do a work in my heart and life, transforming me more each day as I surrender myself to Him, that I might be as David was; a man after God’s own heart.

May we all have a heart like David’s, wanting to please God and bring glory and honor to His name in all we do, even despite ourselves.

Pastor Curt & Pastor Ellie

Seven Seas Ministries
49 N Lamplighters Walk
Hampstead, NC 28443

401-439-3780

If you know someone who will enjoy this or be encouraged by it, please feel free to share it with them!

To have the Bible Verse of The Day delivered to your inbox each day, please Click Here and then enter your email address in the box near the upper left corner of the page. 

Deuteronomy 6:5 (NKJV) 5 You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.

This is the greatest commandment of all.

It should get our full attention.

And it should be where we put our greatest efforts.

All else comes after this. For if we get this right, many other things will fall into place in our lives.

With that said, we need to look at some of the ways this is overlooked and improperly prioritized.

Humanity has a sin problem. We wrestle with lust, fornication, drunkenness, pride, thievery, etc.

We fight loneliness, anger, bitterness, and we hold grudges. We struggle with forgiving others.

And then one day someone tells us that God is the solution to these things. And they are correct. He is.

But if we pursue a relationship with God solely to ask Him to fix our problems, we are in it for the wrong reasons. We have a mistaken perspective.

Our pursuit of God should be for who He is, seeking forgiveness and the redemption of our sinful selves, not just for Him to fix our problems.

When we pursue Him with mistaken motives, our relationship with Him is doomed to failure before it even starts.

Why?

Because if we go to Him looking only for solutions to our problems, and those solutions fail to come, or come more slowly than we hoped for, many will walk away claiming that “it didn’t work” for them.

But when we seek Him for who He is, learning to love Him more than life itself, He will help us overcome our sin in ways that defies human understanding and logic.

And our lives will be transformed because He is moving and working in us as we draw near to Him and seek Him with our whole heart.

It all comes down to having the right motives and the proper perspective. And as our love for Him grows, and we learn to fully surrender to Him, He will begin to set us free from the things that had held us captive for so long.

Jeremiah 29:13 (NKJV) 13 And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart.

Pastor Curt & Pastor Ellie

Seven Seas Ministries
49 N Lamplighters Walk
Hampstead, NC 28443

401-439-3780

If you know someone who will enjoy this or be encouraged by it, please feel free to share it with them!

To have the Bible Verse of The Day delivered to your inbox each day, please Click Here and then enter your email address in the box near the upper left corner of the page. 

Mark 12:30 (NKJV) 30 And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ This is the first commandment.

If we love God with all of our heart we will truly prosper in this life.

Loving God with all our heart will cause us to live righteously. And that, my friend, is what a “Christian Walk” is all about. Our walk with Christ is an example to others.

As I ponder today on the beautiful verse above, I realize that loving the Lord God with all our heart is a place we will grow into if we truly go after Him with every ounce of our being!

In doing so, we must want to invest our life in Him. We must let go of some things that stand tall in our hearts, and He must be the tallest, towering above everything else.

Why does this have to be?

Why can’t we have other things that we love and cherish? We absolutely can have those things that we love and cherish if they remain in their proper place.

If we have things in our life that we put before God, they are the things we must focus on putting in their proper place.

It takes time to realize this, and time for the adjustment, but we must start somewhere.

Now, the result of making these very hard adjustments is that we will begin to see our life change. A little at a time we will begin to make God-led, righteous choices.

Why?

Because we reach a point where what matters to Him means more than what matters to us.

And because we want what He wants, we will ask Him more and more for His answers, and He will show us great and mighty things as we rely on Him! Amen.

Jeremiah 33:3 (NKJV) 3 ‘Call to Me, and I will answer you, and show you great and mighty things, which you do not know.’

If you know someone who will enjoy this or be encouraged by it, please feel free to share it with them!

To have the Bible Verse of The Day delivered to your inbox each day, please Click Here and then enter your email address in the box near the upper left corner of the page.