Welcome to the Daily Blade. The word of God is described as the sword of the spirit, the primary spiritual weapon in the Christian's armor against the forces of evil. Your hosts are Joby Martin and Kyle Thompson, and they stand ready to equip men for the fight. Let's sharpen up.

All right, welcome back to the Daily Blade. This week we are going to take a look at evaluating ourselves. It is the New Year. Happy New Year. I know we're a couple weeks into it, but hey, it's still the new year. Oftentimes you'll hear this phrase, uh, New Year, New Year, and that's fine. I'm actually in Christ Jesus, you are a new creation. So the real question is, are you living that way? And while I'm not a big New Year's resolution guy, I do think this is a good time of year to evaluate your life based on what Jesus said was most important. In the Gospels, a lawyer comes up to Jesus and says, All right, Jesus, of all the commandments in the whole Bible, and there were 613 to choose from, what is the most important commandment? And then Jesus is going to quote Deuteronomy chapter six. It's called the Shema. And then he also quotes Leviticus 19 and says, Love your neighbor as yourself, and kind of tacks that on. But I want to go back to what Jesus says the most important commandment in all the Bible is, Deuteronomy chapter 6. It's called the Shema because the first word of it is here, and the Hebrew word for here is Shema. And it doesn't just mean like listen, like, do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth? It was like when my daddy used to tell me, listen to me, boy, that means heed and hear. You're going to hear what I say, and then you're going to do something about it. So here it is. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Now here's what you have to understand. That word one here in Hebrew is echad. It doesn't just mean number one, it means one in essence. It's like not just God is number one on your list, but God is the page on which you would write your list. And so he says, Here it is, hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down and when you rise. So here's what the Shema is saying is that when you see God for who he really is, the one true God, then the normative right response is that you shall love your God. Now, let's talk about that for a second. It's interesting in almost all of the creeds, the creeds talk about what we are to believe. Almost none of them even mention that we are to love God. Now, I know the point of the creeds was to point out right belief about God, and right belief is important, but right belief without love is worthless. And so Jesus says the greatest commandment, first and foremost, is to love God with all, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might. You see, the reality is that in our Western way of thinking, we have these bifurcated lives. We think we have like a work life, an online life, a social life, a gym life. And Jesus basically said, no, no, no, you have one and only life, and you are to love him with all. In in the Gospels, when this when this commandment is repeated, sometimes the word is mind is added. It'll say heart, soul, mind, and strength. You see, it's not like you have a heart and have a soul and have a mind and have strength, but the totality of these things, that's what makes up your one and only life. So the question is, are you loving God with all of your heart, all of your soul, all of your mind, and all of your strength? Now, what's interesting is there's only one verse in the whole Bible to describe the development of Jesus from 12 years old to 30 when he begins his public ministry. In Luke chapter 2, verse 52, the Bible says, and Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man. Here's what this means: that Jesus, his whole young adult into adulthood life, he was living out what he said the great commandment was. That we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, that Jesus increased in favor with man, that we are to love the Lord our God with all our soul, he increased in favor with God, that we are to love the Lord our God with all of our strength, that he increased in stature, and that we're to love our Lord our God with all of our mind, he increased in wisdom. So, what I would encourage you to do is take a diagnostic this week. It's going to take us all week to go through it, and take these three different areas of your life that make up your one and only life and ask yourself, am I living this kind of life? And if not, what changes do I need to make this year to love the Lord my God with all of my heart, all of my soul, all of my mind, all of my strength? Come back tomorrow and we'll begin the heavy lifting.

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