FRESH START |

today because I do wanna open up God's word in Deuteronomy and talk about prayer and fasting a little bit. But let me just share with you the reason we do this. The reason we do this is to weaken ourselves. And fasting is a gift that Jesus well, God gave to us to be able to weaken ourselves and and to really be able to depend more on his strength, to be able to remove distractions around us, to focus on his strength, that he is the one who gets us through. So fasting kind of recalibrates us. It it goes in and finds all the self dependent areas of your life.
And sometimes it's as simple as just food. Food we are self dependent on food or caffeine. Sometimes it goes much deeper. And and through our weakness, other sins come to light or other emotions come to light that we haven't dealt with. And so that's why a lot of people don't like fasting because they don't like what comes out of them when they are weak.
It made me think, man, we do that in our lives. Right? We we try to fix things all we can. And the problem is, like, sometimes our our relationship with God is like that. Right? Because I I think about Nate, they were out there picking, scraping, shoveling, beating, like, everything, but the ice wasn't gonna go anywhere until things start to heat up. Right? Our relationship with God is just like that. When we keep putting off our relationship with God, we keep putting off reading our bibles, we keep putting off praying, we keep putting off being in church, we keep putting off being in community. When we do that, our hearts begin to grow cold. And the longer we go and the longer we wait to to heat our hearts up and to let them burn, the colder it becomes and the greater the ice becomes. And pretty soon, there is nothing we can do to fix it.
And even if you do all the right things, even if you, you know, say, I'm gonna be a good person, I'm gonna really try to stop sinning, I'm gonna give this person money. I'm gonna like, you can try to do everything you can to fix it. But, ultimately, only the spirit of God can come into our hearts and give us a fresh start. So what we need is a fresh start in our relationship with God, and that begins with prayer.
But then Moses comes through and says, but, actually, you're not gonna be able to keep any of that without keeping this greatest commandment. This is in fact what Jesus in the New Testament called the greatest commandment in all of scripture. Because if we don't get this one right, you can't follow the other 10 commandments. You can't follow anything else in the Bible. And this is what Moses said. Love the Lord your God. It wasn't like, go make these sacrifices. It wasn't go to these distant lands. It wasn't give more of your money or your time or be a more moral upstanding citizen. Moses said, love the Lord your God.
Man, it sounds so simple. So if you're if you're writing things down, write this down. What we learn is that before God's people can move forward, God moves them inward. Before God's people can move forward, God moves them inward, which means they're on their way to the promised land. But God says, before we're gonna march forward, I need to make sure you guys understand something. The most important thing you can do is to love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength.
And there's that means there's nobody else like him. It doesn't matter what you wanna worship. Doesn't matter what other gods. There is no god like Yahweh. Yahweh is the the name for God. And and so we start off here. So Moses is like, listen. I'm about to tell you this this great command that's gonna help you follow all the other commandments, but you need to listen. Remember, our God is the one true God. And, guys, sometimes a heart of worship and prayer and inwardly with the Lord starts with just remembering who God is, that our God is the one true God. There is no one that compares to him. There is no one as strong as him. There is no one as wise as him. There is no one who can do what he can do. There is no one as faithful as him. No one as loving as him. No one as God like our God.
And so the Israelites knew this, and and so then Moses tells us, therefore, like, love the Lord your God. Like, love him. And I I love that he doesn't start with obey. He starts with love because God knows that we will obey whom we love. And God doesn't want our obedience without our love. And so I love that it starts out with love.
That word love is actually not the same word as we would use for love that is overly emotional. Like, a lot of times when we talk about love, we are thinking about a warm, fuzzy feeling. We're thinking about some sort of emotion, or we are expecting emotion. Right? But, actually, this word love, was actually more like enter into covenant, like, a covenant love or maybe we would call it an everlasting or an eternal love. And so this is focused more on the promise of love and the covenant of love than it is just the emotion of love.
So, guys, I think one reason that we back away sometimes from our relationship with God is that we just aren't feeling it. And, guys, I mean, honestly, there are you should feel like like, I don't wanna take emotion away from our relationship with God. I think emotion's very important. I think God has given us emotion to be able to respond to God and hear from God, but we can't depend on our emotion for our love for God. What we do is we depend on the covenant with that God has made with us. We depend on the fact that he is everlasting, that he is eternal, that he's not going anywhere. And that is what draws our heart to him. So so this is when we talk about covenant love, we're talking about love that before it is emotional, it is loyal, it is obedient, and it is personal.
This needs to be written inside of you. Love the lord your god. Like like and that sounds crazy. Right? Like, if I went up to my wife and I was like, you know, hey. And we were talking and she's like, hey. I noticed you've got a, you know, you've you've got a, you know, sticky note that you're carrying around. I was like, yeah. It's a sticky note. Well, what's it say? Well, it just says, remember to love your wife. Like, that wouldn't be the most romantic thing ever. If I'm walking around mumbling to myself, like, I love you. I love you. I love you. And she's like, what are you mumbling? I'm like, I'm just practicing telling you I love you so that I don't forget to do it. Like, we wouldn't think that that is the most, romantic expression of love, but that's exactly what God says because he knows that our hearts are prone to wander away from him, that our hearts are prone to forget to love him, and we will start attaching our hearts to love other things.
like, teaching someone else the bible is actually gonna reinforce the bible in her life. And so we teach our children and and not just biological children, but, like, teaching the next generation, whether you're married, single, have kids, don't have kids, like, we can all be a part of teaching somebody else, the next generation, a spiritual child, someone spiritually younger than us. Like, we can take responsibility for that. And but here specifically, God is telling the Israelites, his people, teach teach this to your children.
This is we are to be obsessed with loving God. Why? Because our hearts are tempted always to love other things, which make our make our heart grow cold to our relationship with God. Loving God can't be compartmentalized. Like, loving God can't be something you just okay. I do this. I do this, and this is where I love God.
Out of loving God should come everything else in your life. And so, guys, for some of us, we need to make some tweaks and recalibrations. But for others of us, ma'am, some of us, you may say, Brandon, my relationship with God has only been based on culture. It's only been based on what I grew up with. It's only been based on thought that's just what everybody did was become a Christian. You your relationship with God may be based on legalism. Right now, I just grew up going, you gotta you gotta make God happy. So you better go to church and you better tithe and you better you know? But, guys, listen. Our relationship with God is is is is based on love. It's based on receiving his love and us loving him back. So for some of us, we don't need to recalibrate.
We need to lay our life down and say, God, I need you to give me a fresh start all through my life so that your love, my relationship with you, is not just another compartment in my life, but it is literally my life that everything else flows out of.
So what so here's the problem. Alright? We've all broken this covenant love. Like like, if I if I looked around and was like, hey. Everybody just drop drop in the comments an emoji letting me know that there's ever been a time you haven't loved God. Everybody be dropping emojis. Okay? And and we're not gonna do that. Obviously, please don't do that. I don't wanna shame anyone because the fact is that we've all broken this this covenant. We have all not loved God the way that we should. And the biggest way we do that is sin. Guys, anytime we sin sin is a a word from the Bible that just means disobeying God.
Guys, anytime we disobey God, it's actually not as much of a sin problem as it is, like, a disobedience problem as it is a love problem. Because when we disobey God, we are saying that we love our sin more than we love God. So it's really a a love problem. What we're saying is in that moment, I could have chosen to love God more, and that would have walked me away from that sin, but I chose to love this more than God.
And so we've all done that. There's all been times in our life where our love for God has grown cold. And and, honestly, like, for some of us, you say, yeah. I do love God, but the fact is your relationship with God has gotten stale. Like, you're just doing the same things. Every time you pray, you just pray the same things. Like, you can't remember the last time that you just sat down and freshly poured your heart out to God.
Guys, like, we gotta remember, if that's us, we need a fresh start in our relationship with God. So the way we get there when we know we've broken this covenant is we remember the covenant God made with us, not that we made with him. And so the covenant doesn't start with us loving God. The covenant starts with that God loved us. Listen to what first John chapter four verse 19 says.
So, church, I wanna remind you today, you are loved. You are loved. You you are not forgotten. You are not forsaken. God knows your name. He has not left you. He has not turned his back on you. He has not gotten bored with you. He has not upset with you. God loves you. God God is is opening his arms. And and through the cross of Jesus, through what Jesus did on the cross, God is inviting us and welcoming us back to him to be in a real, loving relationship with him.
So when I think about how God loves me and I think about his his covenant, you know, calling me to love him back, I think, man, that's a real relationship. And when I think about relationship, the fuel for our relationship with God is prayer. The fuel for our relationship with God is prayer.
Fasting helps us reorient our lives and get back to prayer. Fasting helps us reorient our lives and get back to prayer. See, what can happen is our prayer life can become really stale. It can become really routine. In fact, it can become so much that we just think about God sometimes and count that as a prayer. But, guys, remember this. Remember, I wanna give you a few things about prayer. Number one, prayer is active, not passive.
So it's weird because sometimes we say, well, I stopped praying because I didn't feel close to God. But yet praying is the one thing that gets us closer to God. So don't stop praying. That's actually a command in scripture Jesus tells us. Number three, remember that prayer is God's sovereign way to act in our lives. God could just do things in your life, but he has chosen relationship with us as a way to move and act in our lives. And so when you are praying, God is using your prayers to enact his will in your life and in the world.
Number four, prayer allows God to work in you before he works through you. And sometimes we're like, I feel like God's not using me. I feel like he's not working through me. I feel like I'm not seeing fruit. Then he's probably not done working in you. Get back in the prayer closet. Like like, lay bare before the Lord. Ask him to do a work in you. Number five, prayer provides protection from sin. Prayer provides protection from sin. Prayer gives us that intimacy with God that keeps us from sin. It gives us that conviction of the Holy Spirit. Number six, prayer increases our faith in God. Like, you pray for something and you keep praying for it, and then you see God answer that prayer. And then now you're going, man, I wanna do that again. And that's your faith increasing. And so so pray because it increases your faith in God.