I don’t know what that next level is or was for you. I don’t know what that thing is that you want or wanted so bad that you can almost taste it. I don’t know if it’s a new job, a new title, or a new product.
But I do know this, just like there is a next level for your carrer, for your station life, for the next thing you want. There is also a next level for your spiritual life.
And what I want more than anything today, is for you to have that same drive, that same passion, that same insatiable desire for the next level of your spiritual life!
There is nothing God wants more for you than for you to take that next step of faith, for you to go to that next level spiritually. And that is true for you today whether your here this morning just exploring, trying to figure out this whole God thing or whether you started following God decades ago. There’s a next level, a next step for us all.
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Last week we learned about the next level of prayer and fasting and this week we’re going to learn about the next level of love!
Jesus has some very interesting things to say about love. Right in the middle of the Gospel of matthew (ch. 22) a lawyer comes up to Jesus and asks him a very hard question: “what’s the greatest commandment in all the scriptures?”
Jesus doesn’t even blink an eye, he says the best thing you can do is …
Matt. 22:37 ¶ “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’
Matt. 22:38 This is the first and greatest commandment.
Matt. 22:39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’
So, if I could paraphrase that for us this morning I’d do it like this, the best thing we can do in life – is love like God!
Let me say that once more, so I know that we all caught it – the best thing we can do in life is to love like Jesus!
Jesus loved people on a higher level. Jesus loved people in a new way.
And this was his secret, this was the thing that Jesus knew that no one else around him had picked up on yet – and this is what allowed Jesus to love and a different level. This what allows you and I to love at the next level!
Jesus understood that God’s love is abundant!
See, Jesus’ disciples, the people Jesus meet on the street, the religious leaders, the famers, the fishermen, you and I – we have a scarcity mentality when it comes to love!
Jesus in Matthew chapter 5 says (my paraphrase), “if you only love those who love you, what good is that. Doesn’t everyone do that, don’t even criminals and the greedy do that? But if you really want to show the world, my kind of love – love those who are mean to you and pray for those who make your life hard.”
Jesus can say that, because he has figured out what no one else has – God’s love is abundant. Jesus doesn’t have the scarcity mentality about love like you and I do.
In fact Jesus is working in a completely different system, Jesus knows that God’s love is abundant – and that the more he gives away, the more love there will be!
