“All of You”                                   “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” Mark 12:30

We live in a pretty sectionalized and compartmentalized world.

We divide our time into work time and free time, weekdays and workdays, day and night, and even personal time and family time.

We divide our day further into mealtimes: Breakfast, Lunch, snack time, dinner, and bedtime snack….

Something tells me that our ancient ancestors didn’t have these strict times to eat.

We can divide our heart, mind, and strength as well when it comes to our faith.

We may have a Sunday morning faith and then a rest of the week faith.

Does that sound familiar?  If the only day of the week you find yourself studying scripture, praying, singing and praising Jesus through song is Sunday, you might have divided God into a certain part of your life.

The tricky part is that we are encouraged to do this, correct?  We typically work 5 or 6 days a week-usually from Monday to Friday or some combination of days.  We go to work and it is STRONGLY discouraged to talk about God, our faith, or our mission to make disciples of Jesus Christ.  In fact, many of you would get fired if you were to be so blatant about your faith.

So, we compartmentalize God for certain days and certain times.

We find ourselves doing this for convenience, for job protection, and for what seems like the best time management, but it can quickly become problematic.

Jesus never intended for our faith to be a weekend faith but rather a 24 hour a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year faith!

Our scripture today is reminding us to love God with all of our ourselves, all of the time.  Love God when we put on the work hat, the free time hat, the family time hat, even the “it’s Saturday afternoon and I ain’t doing nuthin’” hat.  Our scripture says love God with all of our hearts, souls, minds, and our strength because let’s face it, life happens and sometimes we need all of our strength and heart and minds to see the good in some of the bad things that happen.

I pray you experience melting away those divisions of your faith this week, whatever they might be.  May you find yourself worshiping God in all that you do and experience this week from the mundane to the glorious to the difficult.  Love God with all your being, all the time, no matter what’s happening.  It’s exactly how God loves us.

May it be so,

Rev. Lou Ward