LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD

Excerpt from  The Unseen World of the Holy Spirit

This passage of Scripture describes the greatest commandment and responsibility contained in the scriptures. It also contains the greatest blessing for Christians. When we begin to actively and passionately love the Lord, we are launched into another realm of freedom and liberty. Most Christians are bound with rules, programs, and rituals. These rituals come in Protestant and Catholic forms. They come in Evangelical and Pentecostal forms. Only when we learn to love the Lord with our spirit, soul, and our strength can we step out of religious bondage into the glorious liberty of Christ. First, we must love the Lord with our heart and our spirit. Man is created in the image of God. We are not animals but spirit beings. Because we are spirits, we can fellowship with God who is also spirit. This is what Jesus meant when He said, “God is a spirit and they that worship him must worship in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24). This present revival is causing people to be- come aware of the spiritual realm. We are becoming aware of the angels, who are spirit beings, but most of all we are becoming aware of the awesome Holy Spirit. He is pouring Himself out on the earth, and we are learning how to tap into His presence. So what does it mean to love the Lord with all of my heart? It means pursuing His presence and worshiping Him with other tongues and with my understanding. It means opening my heart up to this new intimacy. It means pursuing fellowship with the Father of Spirits, the wonderful Holy Spirit.

God also said that we must love Him with all of our soul. Our soul is our intellect, our will, and our emotions. The Body of Christ has had great teaching on renewing our minds and yielding our wills to the Lord. We have stressed those areas of the soul for many years. But the realms of the emotions have gone almost totally unexplored. In revival, people are discovering that we are emotional beings, that the Lord created us to laugh and to cry. It is OK to love the Lord with all of our soul, including our emotions.

The Lord also instructs us to love Him with all of our strength. He wants us to get involved physically. You can love Him by raising your hands, clapping, shouting, dancing, or running in His presence. I am learning to be more physical in my love for the Lord. During many songs, I will lie on the floor as I begin to worship the Lord. Initially I feel nothing, but before long I am lost in the realm of God’s presence. Recently in one of our services, many of us began to prostrate ourselves before the Lord. As we loved on Him and expressed our humility before Him, His glory came down like a heavy blanket in the building. When the anointing began to lift, we realized that one and a half hours had passed. I remember being shocked, thinking I had been on the floor for only about 30 minutes. Time does not exist in His wonderful presence.