Loving God with All your Heart and Soul

Loving God with All your Heart and Soul

Mark 12:30

A Sermon Delivered by Pastor Jim Scott Orrick

May 6,2001

If I were to ask you to think of the worst sin you have ever committed, you probably would not think, “My greatest sin is failing to love God.” But the greatest commandment is that we love God, and so when we fail to obey the greatest commandment, we are guilty of the greatest sin. Our obvious failure to obey the greatest commandment ought to make us so conscious of our sin that we will turn away from any hopes of pleasing God by our own righteousness, and flee to Jesus Christ for His perfect righteousness. We have failed in the fundamental duty of life.

In our text we notice that we are not merely instructed to love God, but we are to love him, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. This is the first (or the greatest) commandment.” It very well may be—in fact I think it’s very likely—that the Lord is using an extended figure of speech that is essentially equivalent to his saying, “You are to love the Lord you God with everything you are and everything you’ve got. If that is so, if this is an extended figure of speech that is equal to everything you are and everything you’ve got.” In that case then this figure of speech is roughly equivalent to some of the phrases that we have in English such as I bought the whole thing lock, stock, and barrel. Now some of you have probably used that phrase and haven’t even thought about what it means to buy a lock, a stock, and a barrel, but now that you think about it, you could probably figure out that it names various parts of a primitive firearm. A muzzle-loader rifle or a muzzle-loader shotgun has a lock. That’s the part that has the hammer on it. The stock is the wooden part of the gun, and the barrel is the thing you stuff the bullet down in. But when we say lock, stock, and barrel, we don’t mean for someone to stop and analyze it and say, “What do you mean you bought the stock? Or you bought the lock?” “Oh,” we say, “You’re not supposed to analyze the individual components of this extended synecdoche. You’re supposed to just take it as a general figure of speech, which means that I bought the whole thing. It means the same thing as I bought it hook, line, and sinker. You’re not supposed to ask, “What do you mean you bought a hook, etc.?” It’s just a figure of speech that means everything.

But even if when the Lord says, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength, He’s talking about the whole person, I think that we are, nevertheless, warranted to break down each of those component parts of this figure of speech and ask, “What does He mean when we are to love God with all our heart and with all our soul? How can we do that? What is meant by heart and soul?” Because the whole includes the parts. So Jesus may mean more than heart, soul, mind, and strength, but He means at least heart, soul, mind and strength. In this sermon I will ask, “What does it mean to love God with our all heart and all our soul?”

Once again I need to make some clarification and tell you what I intend to talk about when I talk about heart and soul. Sometimes the word heart is used in Scripture to refer to the entire person. For example, in Romans 10 it says that a man believes in his heart that God has raised Jesus Christ from the dead. In the English language, and in the Greek language, and in the Hebrew language, the word heart is sometimes used to refer to the entire person. Similarly, sometimes the word soul also represents the entire man. Jesus says in Matthew 11, What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? There I think we can see that He is not just talking about one component of humanity, one component of your humanity, but He is talking about your entire being as a human. What will it profit you if you gain the whole world, and yet you lose yourself in hell? But while the word heart and the word soul are sometimes used in this extended way, sometimes they have a more specific use. They are sometimes employed to represent the seat of emotions. In other words, when you feel sad, it’s your heart that is feeling sad. Or when you’re happy, you’re happy in your heart. Or you are grieved in your soul, and there are many biblical instances of heart and soul being used in this specialized way, and that’s the way that I’m going to talk about them this morning.

In this chapter I intend to interpret heart and soul as words that are used interchangeably to refer to emotions and affections. You may consult with a concordance of the Bible and readily verify that I am warranted in making this application of the words heart and soul. Allow me to remind you of some familiar instances of the words being used to refer to emotions and affections. In 1 Samuel 2, Hannah says, “My heart rejoices in the Lord.” Rejoicing is an emotion. She says she experiences it in her heart. The book of Proverbs says, “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.” So where does he experience merriness? In the heart> Jesus said, “My soul is exceedingly sorrowful unto death.” Where was He experiencing sorrow? In His heart. As I said, examples could be multiplied.

I am convinced that many of us need instruction on how to love God with our emotions and our affections because there is a danger that we will, like a pendulum, go to one extreme or the other in our emotional experiences, and both extremes are wrong. One extreme of the pendulum swing is that we behave as if emotions are the great goal of Christianity. It appears that, for some, the great goal of singing is only to stir emotions. Singing is intended to stir your emotions, but that’s not its sole purpose. Some would think that the great purpose of preaching is only to get the congregation worked up to some feverish, emotional pitch. Again, preaching is intended to stir the emotions. If any of you are interested in reading a prolonged and very thorough treatment of emotions and affections and their proper place in Christianity, I recommend to you Jonathan Edwards’ treatise on Religious Affections, but don’t plan to read it in one afternoon. Plan to read it slowly and think about what you’re reading. It is a magnificent work, and in that work he points out that singing and preaching are intended to stir the emotions, but that’s not all that singing and preaching are supposed to do. The great goal of Christianity is not to make us experience great exhilarating emotions. That’s one danger, and so we need clear instruction regarding the proper place of emotions and affections in the practice of our religion.

What’s the other extreme of the pendulum swing? The other extreme is seen in those who apparently believe that the great goal of Christianity is that we should not experience emotions at all. I know of someone who once said, “Since God is unchanging, as we become more like God, then we, too, will become more unchanging in our emotions.” Boy, that’s goofy, isn’t it? You know who said that? I did! I remember preaching something like that many years ago. I began to preach when I was only 17 years old, and there are many advantages to being called to preach when you’re 17, but I made a few statements that I am not exactly proud of today. But many Christians apparently arrive at the same erroneous conclusion without the benefit of youthful ignorance. They think there’s no place for emotions, and somehow you’re unspiritual if you feel sad. Or, you’re unspiritual if you get really happy. That was the twisted perspective of Saul’s daughter, Michal, as she looked out of her window one day, and she saw David dancing with all his might before the Lord. She despised him in her heart. She could have been a Reformed Baptist because that is the way that many reformed people look upon lavish and extravagant displays of emotion. They just think that’s out of place. There’s no place for that at all. That is an extreme that we must guard against. I am nauseated at contrived emotional displays. I think most people share my disgust, especially young people. So I’m not saying that we’re supposed to try to work up our emotions, or fake it when emotions are not real; but when we are spontaneously overjoyed by some truth of God, then we ought not to be ashamed to express it with vigor the way David did. And similarly, when there is something that has grieved us very deeply, it is not unspiritual for us to experience deep sadness.

As I will say later on, all our emotions and affections are to be governed by the word of God. But right now I’m showing you that there is a need for some clear thinking on the place of emotions and affections in the Christian’s life because we do have a tendency to swing to one extremes: making emotionalism the great end of Christianity, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the insistence that Christians must just be cerebral; they must just be thoughtful people, and the more they can stomp down their emotions, the better. An explanation for the extreme to which many reformed people have swung—the lack of emotionalism— is found in that it is the tendency of most reform movements to overreact against whatever abuses they perceive to be present in the unreformed institution. So sometimes, regrettably, reformed preaching turns out to be unnecessarily boring because reformed preachers think, “Well, I don’t want to be emotional; I don’t want to tell any stories or use any illustrations; I’ve just got to speak the simple truth. After all, if I make it interesting, then maybe I’ll get some of the credit for God working and not God. I want to make it just as dry and boring as I possibly can so that if anyone gets affected by it, God will get all the glory.” Of course that is an over-reaction and something that we as persons who call ourselves reformed should be eager to avoid.

Having shown why it’s important that we should think about these things, let me give you my main points. First of all, I’m going to talk about heart and soul, emotions and affections. Then I’m going to emphasize that word all. You are to love God will all your heart and soul, with all our emotions and affections. They all are to be under the guidance and the governance of God’s Word. And then I’m going to emphasize that word your, love God with all your heart and soul. And I’m going to make the point there that you, as a believer, have some unique emotional and affectional fingerprints that give you some special unique opportunities to praise God in a way that no one else does. Then fourthly, I want to make some points of practical application on how we can love God with our heart and soul.

First of all then, let me talk about heart and soul, emotions and affections, and here are

the three sub-points. Firstly, God made us this way; God made us emotional beings.

Secondly, I want to ask a question: Does God have emotions? Thirdly, an assertion:

Jesus has emotions, He loves God with them, and He sets us an example of how to love

God with our emotions.

First, note that God did make us with heart and soul. I don’t think that I have ever watched a complete episode of Star Trek in my life; but I believe that I am correct in saying that one of the main characters on Star Trek, Dr. Spock, has no emotions. He is exclusively logical and has no emotions at all. God did not make us like that. He could have made us exclusively logical, but He made us with emotions. It is a fact, and it is a blessed fact that you are an emotional being and that everyone around you is an emotional being, and you ignore that fact at your peril. It’s not very long until most married men find out that their wives are considerably more emotional than they are. There may be times, early in our marriage and even later in our marriage for those of us who are slow learners, when we try to reason with our wives, and we do it in such a way that we ignore the fact that she is an emotional being. We say, “Listen to what I’m saying.” And she’s crying and says, “You are just saying it in such a mean way. I can’t understand it.” You say emphatically, “Don’t pay any attention to the way I’m saying it; listen to what I’m saying; listen to my words! I love you!” That just doesn’t work. If you ignore the fact that other people are emotional beings, you are going to make a lot of enemies in your life. Similarly, if you ignore the fact that you yourself are an emotional being, you’re going to experience a lot of trouble in life in general and in the Christian life in particular.

Read the book of Psalms. What kind of emotional roller-coaster rides do you see in the book of Psalms? Sometimes the Psalmist is extraordinarily exuberant. “I will call upon the Lord who is worthy to be praised. I will praise the God of my rock and my salvation!” He’s obviously on a great spiritual high, but then there are other times when he is so low, and he says, “Why is it God, that you treat wicked people so well, and you treat nice people like me so poorly? Why is that?” I’m referring, of course, to the ₇₃rd Psalm, and even in that one Psalm you find a great depth of emotional sadness and perplexity, and then he comes out of it, and he ends on a high note. “Whom have I in heaven but You? Being with You I desire nothing on earth.” That is an about-face from the first part of Psalm 73. If we are well acquainted with the Psalms, then we will know that there is a great gamut of emotional experiences that are normal for some Christians, but to hear some people talk, if you’re not happy all the time, you’re some kind of a sub-par Christian.

No one wants to be sad, but is there a place for sadness in the Christian life? Jesus said, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” It is not a good feeling; it’s

not a good emotion, we think, for us to be angry. But is all anger sin? The Bible says, “Be angry and sin not.” “Don’t let the sun go down on your anger.” God, then, has made us emotional beings. It’s plainly taught in the Scripture, and if we ignore that fact in dealing with other people, we will bungle relationships, and if we ignore that fact when thinking about our own Christianity and our own lives, then we’re in big trouble as well. It is a fact, but it is a blessed fact. I enjoy the changing of the seasons, and I am enjoying sunny warm days like today more because I lived through January. But do you remember those days back in January when it was below freezing? It was so cold with the snow and the ice, and there was a beauty to that. We enjoyed some of that, but in contrast to that, a warm spring day like today, filled with the fragrances of all the flowers, is all the more pleasing. I enjoy the changing of the seasons, and it’s like that with the God-given emotions that we experience. Joy is all the more sweet because we have experienced sadness. Appreciation is all the stronger because we have experienced fear or deprivation. A warm comfortable bed is sometimes only appreciated when you’ve spent a night or two in conditions that weren’t warm and comfortable. That’s the way it is with our emotional lives as well.

The second sub-heading under this first point, while I’m talking about our heart and soul, is a question. Does God have emotions? Some people will say, “No, God does not have emotions because emotions are changeable. You fluctuate when you have emotions. God is unchanging, and so He has no emotions.” That doctrine is called the impassibility of God. Impassible—He has no passions. Others will say, “Yes, God does have emotions because the scriptures categorically say that God was angry, or that God rejoiced, for example, or that God was grieved. Don’t grieve the Holy Spirit.” So others will say, “Yes, God does have emotions.” Well, answering that question is something that I don’t intend to do right now. It is far more involved than I want to take time to talk about now. I mainly asked the question and gave those two answers to make this point:

Whether God has emotions or not, the scriptures certainly describe Him as having emotions. It may be that in describing God as having emotions the biblical writers are merely using figures of speech to help us to understand what He is really like. But think of it this way: if God, who inspired the Bible, thinks that describing himself as an emotional being is the most effective way of revealing himself to us, then we shouldn’t be ashamed to think of God that way. For example, if God doesn’t really get angry, but yet He uses that word and that emotion to describe what is actually going on inside of Him, and He did that so that we could understand, surely it’s a little bit arrogant of us to say, “Well, we’re beyond that. We don’t need to take advantage of this kind of human language that God has given to us to help us to understand Him. We can actually think deeper thoughts than the scriptures allow us to think.” Instead of arrogantly taking that position, let those scriptural descriptions of God’s having emotion be an encouragement to you to lead a holy life and to draw closer to Him.

For example, when does God get angry in the scriptures? Why, He gets angry against sin. And so what effect should that have on us? It should make us want to avoid sin. You don’t want God angry with us, and so we want to live a life that is pleasing to Him. Or take that verse of Scripture in the book of Zephaniah, one of my favorites in the entire Bible. The Lord God will rejoice over you with gladness. He will quiet you with His love. The Lord will rejoice over you with singing. I suppose that Scripture means so much to me, for one reason because, my earliest recollection of anything in life is being cradled in my mother’s arms while she sang over me, and I have had babies in my home for the last twelve years, and I love holding those babies in my arms and singing over them. Sometimes when I put them to bed at night, I’ll sing them a verse or two of some hymn or some other song to them. I sing little songs to them all the time because I am delighted with them. The Bible says that God sings over you. He will quiet you with His love. He will rejoice over you with singing. What effect should that have on you? It makes you feel pretty comfortable, doesn’t it? And it should.

Well, whether or not God has emotions, there’s no question that Jesus Christ did, and I see no reason for saying that He still does not have them. But we know that while He was on earth, He experienced emotions. There were times when Jesus was angry. You remember that time when He was in the synagogue, and all the religious leaders were watching Him to see if He would heal someone on the Sabbath day? They thought He shouldn’t have healed someone on the Sabbath day, but Jesus asked them, “Which is right, to do good or to do evil on the Sabbath day, to save life or to destroy it?” They wouldn’t say a word. They wouldn’t answer Him. The Bible says that Jesus looked around at them angrily, and then He said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” And he stretched it out. But Jesus was angry at the selfish, shortsighted, religious bigotry of these men who would not even allow that good could be done on the Sabbath day. Or you think about that time when Jesus went into the temple, and He found the temple courts filled with those who were selling sheep and cattle, and others sitting at tables exchanging money, and so Jesus made a whip out of cords and drove all from the temple area, both sheep and cattle. He scattered the coins of the moneychangers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves, He said, “Get these out of here! How dare you turn My Father’s house into a market!” Now you cannot read that and imagine that Jesus is cleansing the temple in an unemotional manner. He demanded, “How dare you turn My Father’s house into a market.” He is obviously angry when He says that

There were times when Jesus wept. At the tomb of Lazarus, Jesus wept. He wept over Jerusalem. There were times when Jesus experienced dread. When He was praying in the garden he said, “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me.” Why? He was dreading what was coming. And then Jesus was filled with eager anticipation, hopeful for what was coming in the future. The book of Hebrews says that Jesus endured the cross, despising the shame for the joy that was set before Him. Now that word despise means that He counted the shame as a relatively small thing in comparison to the great joy that was set before Him, and so as He was redeeming us and going through the agony of the cross, and facing that shame, He was filled with eager anticipation at what He was going to accomplish through His work of redemption. So Jesus experienced a vast array of emotions, and He loved God with his emotions because He kept the greatest commandment all the time. He always loved God with all His heart, with all His soul, with all His mind, and with all His strength.

And so that leads me into my second point. If Jesus loved God with all of His emotions, then we, too, ought to be loving God with all emotions and with all our affections. You say, How can I do that?” Here’s the general principle, and then I’ll give you some examples. The general principle is that with every emotion that you experience, you have an opportunity to appreciate a complementary attribute in God and love Him for it. Here are the examples. Let’s say that you are really angry because someone has mistreated you, so you’re experiencing anger over having been mistreated. What should that help you to appreciate about God? Well, He’s a God of justice. You know that you’re not supposed to take revenge when you’re angry, and so you look to God, and you say, “God, if there is any revenge to be done here, if there is any retributive justice that you need to administer, then I leave it entirely in Your hands, Lord, and I rest in that, and I love You because You are a just God.” Do you see how it works? You experience anger. You look to God. You appreciate His justice, and you love Him for it. Or let’s take the emotion of sadness. You’re feeling sad, and you look to God, and you know that He is the God of all comfort. You remember times in the past when He’s comforted you, and He’s smoothed over your aching heart. You look to Him and you say, “God, my heart is broken over this; I just don’t know what I’m going to do, but I know that You are able to comfort me; you have in the past. I look to You as the God of all comfort, and I trust in You.” You think about the Lord being your shepherd, His supplying everything you need, and you love Him because He is the God of all comfort. Or when you, like Jesus Christ, experience dread, and you’re afraid of what’s coming, you might think of that verse in Scripture, “When I’m afraid, I will trust in You. I will run to You, my fortress and my high tower, my rock in Whom I find refuge,” and then you appreciate God for being so strong and so powerful, and you love Him for it. Do you see that something that was a negative emotion—dread—has a positive result in that you’re loving God because of it? When you’re happy, let that happiness overflow in loving and appreciating and praising God for the goad things that you enjoy from Him. He is the giver of every good and perfect gift. He’s entirely good. When we experience happiness because of good times or good gifts, then it ought to result in our giving thanks to God, who has given them to us. So every emotion that we experience is an opportunity for us to appreciate a complementary attribute of God and love Him for it. So we can love God with all our heart and with all our soul.

If anger is compatible with love, and if dread is compatible with love, we’re starting to learn that the definition of love that the world has given us is bogus. It’s not a good definition because the world defines love as a purely emotion experience that one can fall in and out of. Mostly what they’re talking about is that feeling of spontaneous exuberance that you feel when you’re around someone that you admire, love, or appreciate. It usually happens in a worldly context when someone starts thinking about me in the way that I’ve always thought about myself. It works like this: I meet this girl who thinks that I’m great and strong and handsome and intelligent, and I think, “She’s right! That’s what I’ve always thought about myself! This is a great girl, and because she makes me feel so good, I think I must be in love with her. I should marry her.” So I do marry her, and then a few weeks pass, and she doesn’t think that I’m quite so wonderful and so intelligent and so handsome, and then I don’t have that good feeling anymore. According to the world, what has happened? “I’ve fallen out of love. I just don’t have the feeling anymore. I can’t fight it. There’s no point in my pretending. I don’t love you like I once did. We might as well break up. We might as well get a divorce.” But the whole relationship is founded on a lie, a false definition of love. Love is not merely an emotion.

Thankfully, in a long-term love relationship, there often are pleasing spontaneous emotions. My wife and I have been married for almost 13 years. There have been times when we were not filled with spontaneous exuberant emotions, but did I cease loving her when I was void of those feelings? I did not. Did she cease loving me when she never had those warm, fuzzy feelings? She did not. There are times when we still have intoxicatingly wonderful emotions for one another, but that is not the only times that we love one another. Love is the willing commitment of myself to someone else whom I value. And that is something that stands strong in the midst of fluctuating emotions. Emotions may fluctuate, but that is not the destruction of love. In the case of a person, my commitment to them is made with their good in mind. In the case of our love for God, our willing commitment to him is for his glory, not for his good. We cannot help God to improve. Perfection cannot be improved. In that steady, strong commitment of myself to God, there are emotional fluctuations, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t love God anymore. Or when you feel like you’re deserted, that doesn’t mean that God doesn’t love you anymore. Sometimes we sing a dear old hymn that says, “When darkness veils His lovely face, I rest on His unchanging grace. In every high and stormy gale, my anchor holds within the vale.” So learning that all of our emotions can be dedicated to God teaches us to refine our definition of love. Love is not merely an emotion.

Let me say this one more thing about all of our emotions being consecrated to loving God. All of our emotions must be under the direction and the government of God’s word. You can legitimately be angry, but more often than not, when I get angry, I’m sinning. There are times, I trust, when I’ve been angry, and it’s been a righteous indignation, but usually that is not the case. Is it okay for me to feel that way? My emotions must be under the control of God’s word. Be angry and sin not, in this case. There is a danger when we learn that emotions are legitimate, that God has made us this way, and we can love God with all our emotions. There’s a danger that we’ll feel free to explode whenever we feel like exploding or to be emotional even when it is inappropriate to be emotional. It all must be under the government of God’s word. So we have heart and soul, emotions and affections and we are to love God with all of them.

Now let me move on to this third point. You have a unique emotional fingerprint, and so you are to love God with all your heart and with all your soul. Had God wanted to, He could have made us emotional beings who experience the exact same emotions, but we’re not that way. That’s really apparent to me as I stand up here and preach. I know it’s almost impossible for anyone to listen intently to someone talking for forty-five minutes, so it’s almost inevitable that you’ll be tuning in and out. I hate it when large groups of you tune out at the same time. In fact, that reminds me, I had a dream last night that I was preaching, and the whole congregation was not paying any attention. That is a dreadful thought to me. It happens sometimes! And those are times when you just want to say, “Lord, if you let me out of this, I’ll never preach again.” So I know that everyone is tuning in and out, but there are times when I’ll say something that five or six of you will find humorous, and you’ll smile. Maybe someone will just break out in a little giggle. Perhaps most of the congregation does not find what I’ve said funny. At other

times, part of the congregation will be really touched by something that is said, while the rest of the congregation is apparently unmoved. I just expect that that’s going to happen because each of you has a unique emotional makeup. Preaching is a little bit like shooting a shotgun. Everyone is not going to get hit with the same number of pellets, and sometimes God will just specially direct a pellet to you, and there may be only one thing that really means something to you out of this sermon this morning, but I hope it’s at least one thing. And then there may be someone else here this morning who is getting hit with the whole load. It’s in God’s hands.

So it’s apparent to me that all of you have different emotional make-ups. That’s a good thing. There are advantages to that. For one thing, as the people of God, you have different areas of giftedness, and some of those areas of giftedness are determined by your emotional make-up. There are certain things that you prefer, and those preferences can be a tool in God’s hands to direct you into what you’re supposed to do in your life. Let me give you an example. I told you that I began preaching when I was 17 years old. For several months prior to my announcing publicly that I had been called to preach, I struggled with whether or not I was being called to preach. I wanted to preach. I enjoyed studying the Bible. When I had taught at church and in youth groups, I seemed to have a gift for doing it, but was God calling me to preach? I just didn’t know because I had heard some preachers say, “When God calls you to preach, you’ll know it. There will be no mistaking about it.” And they would talk about running away from God’s call to preach, and they would talk about some pronounced emotional experience that they had when they were called to preach. Now I trust that they’re telling the truth and that they really did experience something like that, but to be frank with you, I never did, and I still haven’t. When I was 17 I ran into a family friend who was a pastor. He knew that I had just graduated from high school, and inquired about my future plans. I confided in him that I had a strong desire to become a preacher, but I was not sure that it was God who was calling me to preach. After all, I had not had the emotional experience that so many preachers claimed to have had. This very wise man said to me, “Oh, I believe that if God has given you the desire to preach, that may be a good indication that He has called you to preach.” God used that in my life, and maybe he’ll use similar statements in your own life.

If God has given you the desire to do something and the ability to do something and the opportunity to do something, He has almost certainly called you to do it. Desire, ability, opportunity. If those three things are present, you almost certainly have the calling from God. So your various emotional make-ups are good in that they can be directors sent from God to lead you into what you should be doing.

And then as each of us pays attention to the way God has made us and the opportunities and gifts that God gives to us, then we all together as a body will fit together and be complementary to one another. We’re not all called to do the same thing. You have special gifts, and part of your special equipping for the job that God wants you to do is your unique emotional fingerprint.

Now it’s a good thing, for one more reason. You have a unique opportunity to worship God and to love God that no one else in the world has because there’s no one else in the world who is exactly like you. No one in this room will respond to this message exactly the same way that you will, and so you have the privilege and the responsibility to respond to God speaking to you in this message in a way that no one else will. You have a unique opportunity to love God in a way that no one else can.

Let me conclude now with some practical observations. In the first place, if we are to love God with our emotions and affections, and we want to do that better, how can we do it? Here’s the general principle. I don’t think that you can directly and immediately change your affections and emotions. I think that they have to be changed and affected indirectly. If you want to experience joy in the presence of the Lord you must learn more about the Lord that you admire, then this spontaneous emotion of joy will come in you. But you cannot simply say, “Okay, since I’m supposed to be joyful and love God with my joy, I’m going to right now be more joyful than I’ve ever been before,” and work it up. You can’t do it. Or you say, “I know that I should love to pray more, and so right now, I am going to muster up more affection for prayer than I have ever had in my life,” and then just grit your teeth and do it. You see what I mean? You cannot directly influence, you cannot directly change, your emotions and affections. You have to influence them indirectly through the mind, through environment sometimes, sometimes through bodily posture. It’s one reason why we have people stand or kneel when we pray. We are trying to help the congregation to experience reverence, a feeling of awe in the presence of Someone who is infinitely greater than we are.

That’s the general principle, but if that is so, then what are some of the soul-shapers that will help us to more effectively love God with all our heart and with all our soul? I have two answers to that. There are some general soul-shapers, and then I want to talk about some specific or unique soul-shapers that you’ll need to find out for yourself

Some general soul-shapers are effective for all God’s people. Bible reading should affect you emotionally. Bible reading should be a training tool that refines and strengthens your emotions in the right way. As you think about the scriptures and as you meditate and memorize the scriptures, it is a powerful tool. This is true for everybody in the kingdom of God. I know that some people can’t read, but still the word of God will have that effect if it’s read to you; it will help to shape your emotions in the right way. And then, of course, along with Bible-reading, there is praying. That also is an effective soul-shaper that all God’s children are experiencing. Whether or not you can read, you can pray; and as you enter into the presence of God, there are some things about your emotional life that you start feeling guilty about, and, in many cases you see with a new perspective whatever it is that has been making you angry, or sad, or happy. Just being in the presence of God and praying to Him has a powerful effect on our emotions. And then a third general soul-shaper is public worship. Anyone who neglects public worship is doing an extremely foolish thing. There is a chemistry that happens when the people of God meet together and worship God corporately and hear God’s word preached. Pastor Whitney and I were talking yesterday about some great men of God—C.H. Spurgeon and George Whitefield. When you read the sermons of those men, they are great. They have wonderful content, but it is apparent from contemporary descriptions of their preaching that their sermons do not affect us to the same degree that they affected the people who heard these men preach in person. I mean, when Whitefield would preach, thousands and tens of thousands of people would break down crying like they would never gain control of themselves. That’s never happened to me when I’ve read a sermon of Whitefield’s. Or you read about the humor of Spurgeon. After you’ve read a lot of sermons by Spurgeon, and you’ve read several biographies, you begin to pick up his humor, but if you just read ten or fifteen sermons of Spurgeon, you will rarely find anything that will make you chuckle. But from contemporary descriptions, he often caused people to laugh. What was happening? There was something that was happening when the people of God met together under the preaching of the word of God from a man of God. Public worship helps us to refine and strengthen our emotions to the glory of God. I’ve mentioned public worship. Now let me mention finally under general soul-shapers, family worship. This is especially important for children because the right kind of literature, (and the Bible is the very best kind of literature), is one of the most powerful soul-shapers to which we have access. So even if you simply read the story of Joseph for the pure drama of it, that story will have the right kind of effect on your child’s emotions. Or if you simple read the story of David and Goliath, even if you make no spiritual applications whatsoever, the sheer drama of it, the sheer heroicness of it, will begin to shape your child’s emotions and affections in a way that is good. And all of this soul shaping ought to be going on regularly in family worship.

Now having mentioned several general soul-shapers, let me mention some specific soul-shapers, and I’m going to have to be personal here, but some of you can relate. One of the great soul-shapers for me has been music, and there are some of you that can nod a hearty agreement. Musk can be a powerful soul-shaper. I’m not just talking about music with text. This will sound strange to you, and some of you will think I’m stretching the truth, but there are times when I have heard Mozart or Beethoven, that I will break out in tears and praise God and say, “Thank you, God, for Beethoven!” No doubt there are differing music styles that will appeal to you more than they will appeal to me and perhaps that musical style can help you to get in a proper emotional state to worship God. There was a time when one of the prophets was asked for a word from the Lord and he said, “Bring someone here to play the harp,” and when they played the harp, then the Spirit of God came upon him and he prophesied. Music can be a powerful soul-shaper. Again, on a personal note, poetry can be a powerful soul-shaper. I had Nancy order several copies of the complete English poems of George Herbert. This is my favorite English poet, and all of his poems are about God or about relationship with God. I thank God for the writings of George Herbert, and he writes about the great roller-coaster ride of emotions that he experienced in the Christian life. I encourage you, if you have any inclination towards poetry, to pick up a copy of the English poems of George Herbert and take a look at them. But you don’t have to read that sort of poetry. There is some wonderful poetry in some of our hymns. You think, for example, of Charles Wesley’s hymn, And Can It Be, especially that third stanza. He uses very poetic language. He says, “Long my imprisoned spirit lay, fast bound in sin and nature’s night.” Now, he could have said, “I was a really long way away from God and hated it,” but instead he used very poetic language, and it affects us. Or you think about that line from Isaac Watts, “Was it for crimes that I had done, He groaned upon the tree?” That word groaned is a poetic word. It opens up a whole view of thought for me that would not have been opened up if Isaac Watts had simply said, “Was it for crimes that I had done, He died upon the tree.” He uses the word groaned, and that makes a big difference to me. Music and poetry are powerful soul-shapers for many of us. Again, the created world--nature, is something that moves many of us to cry out with praise to God. Do you know certain Christian writers that move you and ennoble you emotionally? You should. I love to read Alexander White, the great Scottish Presbyterian; he affects me, and I think he ennobles my emotional life. There are other people that may affect you that will not affect me, but I urge you, in your reading, discover those authors that refine your emotions and turn them Godward, and then read them to the glory of God.

So we’ve seen that God has made us emotional creatures and that, as Jesus loved God with all His emotions, we, too, can love God with all our heart and with all our soul. And then we’ve seen further that we have a special and unique opportunity to worship God like no one else can because we have a unique emotional fingerprint. And while we cannot directly affect our emotions, yet there are some soul-shapers that God has given to all of His children: Bible-reading and prayer, public worship and family worship. And then there are some unique soul-shapers that God has given to us; we should be eager to find out what they are and utilize them to the glory of God so that we will be able to worship God and love God with all our heart and with all our soul.

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Scripture from The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Copyright 1982 by
Thomas Nelson, Inc.

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