Saturday 4 Jul 2020

July 4: Mark 12:28-33

Key Verse: Mark 12:30
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.

Devotion:
I wonder how frustrating it was for Jesus to go round telling people the truth about Heaven and for them to all question His every word. Many of the people who were not learned scholars of the Torah were willing to listen to Jesus and to learn – almost like they had not been given the chance to learn before… Sometimes we do get carried away with the intricacies of the details and we forget about the simple truth. So when Jesus brought it down to just these two commandments, it was about as simple as He could make it!

When we try to explain the gospel to others we should not be trying to give them the law according the scholars and priests, we should be giving them what we have in our hearts and what we have learned to understand ourselves. If we think it is still difficult to be a child of God, then we surely are on the wrong end of the rope…

God wants us to know it is very simple to love Him and to dedicate our lives to worshipping Him. We don’t have to try and invent a million rules and regulations so we can prove in some way we are worthy! God simply wants us to love Him with our whole heart and to love the people around us so they too can get to know Him. I love being able to help others and sometimes spend far longer helping others than I probably should, but it is my way of showing people a bit of the love Christ showed me!

I want to be able to allow people to see the simplicity of the gospel and not to get caught up in the many laws mankind tried to follow in order to prove himself worthy. We have shown on so many occasions we are not worthy, but because of Christ’s love for us, we can be worthy because He has made it possible. It really is that simple.

Points to Ponder:
Do you think you have broken too many rules?

How many can God forgive?