Holistic Love: Worshiping God and Loving Others

1. "It reminded me that we all need to establish priorities in our lives. We need to decide what's the important thing. What is it that we need to be dedicating ourselves to? What should we be devoting ourselves? What should we be dedicating ourselves to? A lot of people who retire are simply waiting out the clock. You know, there's not a real purpose. There's not a real plan. There's not a passion. Others can become consumed with what on closer inspection seems to be empty, unimportant, busy work." [00:28:13] (37 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


2. "Sometimes it's tempting to look at life and take the view that the author of Ecclesiastes took, vanity of vanities. Everything is vanity. It's important for each of us, no matter what our stage in life is, whether you're retired or whether you're just entering the workforce or whether you're still in school, we need to step back and reassess what is the main thing? What is our priority? It was Socrates who once said, the unexamined life is not worth living." [00:28:50] (38 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


3. "Jesus declares that love of God has to be our first priority. Loving God holistically is the very essence of genuine worship. When we gather here, week after week, our purpose is to express our highest devotion and to love God. And we're not here to entertain you, I'm not here certainly to make you feel comfortable or to assuage your conscience. As I've said before, it ain't really about you. It's about God." [00:36:20] (40 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


4. "Worship without emotion is like inviting a congregation to come and chew Kleenex for an hour. It's just nothing to it. Or if you prefer to eat a bowl of grits without butter and salt. That's a good Southern way of saying it. That's what worship without emotion is. It's dead, dry orthodoxy, but it has no meaning whatsoever." [00:38:20] (31 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


5. "God is the creator of emotion. God wants you to be emotional about your relationship with him. And I might add that we've also given emotions away to sports enthusiasts. I can guarantee you, Ed was cheering his head off yesterday as Georgia gave Florida the what for. I'm sure you were quite emotional. We ought to be that way in worship. We ought to treat God that way, like our favorite sports team." [00:39:20] (40 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


6. "Worship is the place where we celebrate God's involvement in our lives, his eminence in our lives individually. The human personality is said to consist roughly of four-fifths emotion and one-fifth intellect. Emotions, in other words, make up 80% of our thought life. It's essential in worship and relationship with God to become emotionally engaged. If your faith is not emotional or emotive, then it is dead. It is dry and it is worthless." [00:41:01] (44 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


7. "God wants us to love him with our intellect, to question, to challenge, to look, to think deeply. There was a great book that came out when I was in seminary. It was called Amusing Ourselves to Death. And it was called that because the word music, amuse means to think, to think deeply. And the argument from the author was that we in America are amusing ourselves to death. We've allowed ourselves to become so distracted by temporal things that we no longer think deeply about God, about anything." [00:43:32] (43 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


8. "Our love for God is strengthened as we harness our physical bodies. And this works in really two ways. First, we love God with our body by restraining our flesh from evil desires. So one way that we love God is through restraint. We restrain ourselves from fulfilling appetites and desires in ways that are outside of God's plan for our lives." [00:45:02] (33 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


9. "We love God with our bodies when we restrain ourselves from fulfilling those appetites, and Satan takes our legitimate pleasures that God has graciously created for us to enjoy, and he perverts them by enticing us to look outside of God's plan. And the thing about it, when we begin to nibble on pleasures outside of God's plan, what we discover, is that those pleasures no longer satiate us, and it takes more and more of that pleasure to fulfill or to scratch that itch that we have." [00:46:37] (44 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


10. "To love God holistically and passionately and to love others appropriately. And, guys, when life is over, my question to you is will you look back with regrets? I shared with a class this morning, Dobson on the radio once said something that really impacted me. He said, I know a lot of corporate executives who have spent their whole lives climbing the corporate ladder only to discover at the end that it was leaned against the wrong building. What's your priority? What's the main thing?" [00:57:05] (40 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)