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EVERYTHING
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, March 10, 2025 – Every problem in the world today could be solved by turning back to God and following Jesus.
There isn’t one problem that can’t be solved this way.
In turning back to God and following Jesus, you’d realize that what you thought were your problems are actually not your problems, and you’d let them go. The rest of whatever issues are plaguing you, you’d deal with through God’s guidance, in his way and in his time, following the example of Jesus.
Every problem can be solved by turning back to God and following Jesus.
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It could have been so simple. God means for it to be simple for us. He means for it to be so simple that even a child can understand.
It could have been so simple if we’d just turned back to him, like he invited us to do, all those years ago. It would have been so simple if we’d just turned back to him like he invited us to do, and then like he urged us to do, and then like he warned us to do.
And now, here we are, well past the warning phase. It’s become a Command now, to turn back to God; it’s do or die.
And it could have been so easy.
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I see this countless times, in deals that are offered to me or to someone else. You never get a better deal than the one that’s first offered you, because the one that’s first offered is made from a position of wanting. The people making the offer want you to want what they’re offering. And so they buff it and shine it up and lay it down tenderly at your feet, thinking of you as much as themselves, of what you want as much as what they want. They lavish their love on you and offer their best. The first offer is always the best, from a spiritual standpoint.
But if you decline that first offer, it’s all downhill from there. It might seem to you that you’ll get a better deal if you haggle, if you hold out until you’ve worn them down a bit, and then a bit more. But the deal doesn’t get better. It might seem to you that it gets better, but it doesn’t. The terms may seemingly shift in your favor, but the deal starts to rot from the inside. It changes into something that’s not quite as good, that rankles and sours and turns bitter whatever initial love and goodwill there could have been between you and the one making the offer. There is a palpable cooling of affections. One way or another, you lose if you don’t take that first offer, because the first one is always the best.
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I hadn’t realized that in loving God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, as Jesus taught us was the first and greatest Commandment – I had not realized that to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength means to love him like that, too. Every love song ever written we’re to sing to God, and to God only. We’re to give him everything that he’s given us to give.
Everything, like Jesus did.
EVERYTHING
NIAGARA FALLS, Ontario, January 3, 2023 – Jesus tells us that we’re to love God with all our heart and all our soul and all our mind and all our strength.
In other words, we’re to love God with everything we have and everything we are. We’re to give him everything, holding nothing back.
That is a Commandment, not just a directive.
If we love God with everything we have and everything we are, God will take that love and return it to us purified and amplified. God’s holy love then works through us so that we’re able to love like him, see like him, think like him, and operate in his strength, depending on the measure of our love that we’ve given him.
If we instead choose to invest our love in someone or something else, giving God only a little bit of our love (our leftover love), God will only be able to give us a little bit of his love back. So then, when we try to love like God, we’ll only be able to love a little bit, and when we try to see and think like God, we’ll only be able to see and think a little bit, and when we try to operate in God’s strength, we’ll fail, because we’ll have only a little bit of his strength. We’ll mostly be operating in our own strength, not God’s.
Loving God means giving him everything, like Jesus did. God advises us to do that because we were made to function optimally only when we give him everything. The more of ourselves we give to him, the more of himself he can give to us; the less of ourselves we give to him, the less of himself he can give to us, keeping in mind that when God works through us, so, too, does his joy and peace.
But remember – it’s up to us, how much we want to love God and how much of ourselves we want to give to him. God leaves that choice in our hands. We can give him all our love, or we can give him just a certain measure of it and give the rest to our spouse or our children or our friends or our job or our hobbies or our possessions or our money or our comfort, etc. We can invest ourselves in anything we want during our time on Earth. We have the God-given free will to do that. We can give God everything or we can give God nothing or we can give him something in between.
We can even give all our love to the devil, if that’s what we want to do, to the devil or to one of his earthly representatives. We’re also free to do that.
But the right thing to do is what Jesus modeled for us and what the Commandment commands us, which is to love God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, and to give him the full measure of everything we have and are. What God then chooses to do with what we’ve given to him is up to him, but I don’t think we have to worry that we’ve invested unwisely. I don’t think anyone has ever regretted loving God with all their heart, soul, mind and strength, or felt in any way short-changed by giving him their everything. I think that if we do love God as he commands us to love him and if we do give him our everything, we will not be unlike Jesus or Paul or David or Abraham or any of our other brothers and sisters who followed the Commandment to the letter and gave God their everything.
You cannot lose when you invest everything in God.
Even if you lose everything else in doing so, you still come out ahead.
A BORN-AGAIN BELIEVER 