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Posts tagged with: Mark

A person taking a moment to think, strategize, and decide on things at work.

Loving God Completely at Work: With All Your Mind (Part 1)

It’s not hard for us to relate to loving God with all our heart, even in the biblical sense of thoughtful choices as we exercise our will to do what honors the Lord. And it’s not hard for us to conceive of loving God with all our soul, with all of our inner being, including our emotions. But loving God with all our mind may, at first, seem odd. We wonder what it means to love God with our mind.

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Someone working at a desk with a notebook that says "Love My Work" in Spanish.

Loving God Completely at Work: With All Your Soul (Part 2)

In yesterday’s Life for Leaders devotion, we began to consider how we can love the Lord with all our soul in and through our work. We focused mainly on the biblical meaning of “soul” (psyche in Greek; nefesh in Hebrew), which can refer to a living being, the life force that animates us, or the emotions at the core of our inner life.

So, then, how can we love God with all our soul at work?

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A stained glass window depicting a holy hug.

Loving God Completely at Work: With All Your Soul (Part 1)

In the last two Life for Leaders devotions, we were reflecting on how we can love God with all of our heart, that is, with our thoughtful choices, our decisions, and our will. Today, we move on to consider how we might love God with all our soul in and through our daily work.

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A person cleaning.

Loving God Completely at Work: With All Your Heart (Part 2)

How can we love God with all of our heart through our work? Yesterday, I began to answer to this question by focusing on what it means to love God with our heart. As you may recall, in the biblical understanding of persons, the heart was the center of the will rather than the emotions. Loving God with all our heart means choosing to obey and honor God above all else.

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Ballet dancers pose in a contrast of strength and grace.

Loving God Completely at Work: With All Your Heart (Part 1)

Last week, we began an in-depth examination of Mark 12:29-31. As you may recall, this passage records the response of Jesus to a question from a Jewish legal scholar. He asked, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?” (12:28). Jesus responded by quoting Scripture, beginning with Deuteronomy 6:4-5. This momentous Old Testament passage begins with the affirmation of God’s unique identity. Then it calls us to respond to God by loving God with all that we are. According to Jesus, we are to love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength.

In this week’s devotions, I want to consider with you how we might love God this way at work.

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A dirt road in Italy.

Parable of the Sower: Pay Attention to What Matters

We have been looking at Jesus’ seminal Parable of the Sower in the context of our work as leaders. In my last reflection, I noted that a Christian vision of human leadership is one where that leadership originates as a gift from outside us. More particularly, truly human leadership is a vocation. Someone else – God – calls us to our work and provides us the necessary gifting to carry out that work. In the language of Jesus’ parable, there is “a sower (who) went out to sow (seed).” (Mark 4:3)

Today’s text explores our response.

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A cookie cutter in the shape of a heart.

Loving God Completely at Work: Our Response to God’s Initiative

Christians sometimes get confused about how to respond to God’s commandments. Some of us think, for example, that all of the commandments of Scripture are no longer relevant for us since we are saved by God’s grace through Christ. Others of us pay lip service to salvation by grace, but we live as if we have to earn God’s love through obedience to his commandments. By loving God, we believe, we can get God to love us in return.

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A child reading the Holy Bible in bed.

Loving God Completely at Work: The Lord our God is One

If we want to love someone well, then we need to know that person well. The better we know someone, the better we will be able to love him or her.

So it is with God. If we are to love God, then we need to know God.

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Someone taking a moment to pause as they work.

Loving God Completely at Work: It Starts with Hearing

If we are to love God at work, and, for that matter, if we are to love God in any context of our lives, we need first to listen. Like the Israelites, we need to hear what God says to us about himself and about ourselves. We need to pay attention to who God has revealed himself to be and who we are as God’s creatures, made in his image for his particular purposes.

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Love and Work: Do They Go Together?

We often think of work as the place of toughness, whether one is doing tough physical labor or making tough decisions or dealing with tough HR issues. Work is a place for strength, endurance, commitment, decisiveness, strategic thinking, and, perhaps, visionary innovation.

But what about love? Is work also a place for love? Do love and work go together? Or should love stay at home and at church, in our personal lives, but not in the rough and tumble world of work?

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Denarius with the image of Tiberius on it.

Giving Back to Caesar and God: A Curious and Challenging Twist

In the last couple of days we have been examining Mark 12:12-17, an interaction between several Jewish leaders and Jesus. They had trap him, asking Jesus a question about taxation, which, no matter his answer, seemed to force him either to denounce Rome or to disappoint his followers. Yet, Jesus’s response to the trick question, using the image and inscription on a Roman coin, enabled him to escape from the trap.

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A baby exploring their reflection in a mirror.

Whose Image Do You Bear and Why Does It Matter?

What Jesus understood was that human beings bear God’s image, even as Roman coins bear the image of Caesar. We were created in God’s image and likeness, according to Genesis 1:26-27.

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A collection/offering box for ministry.

Are You Giving Back to God What Belongs to Him?

Then Jesus added something that reframed the whole issue: “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s” (12:17). How intriguing! It’s as if Jesus were saying that the whole taxation issue wasn’t the main point. What people did with Caesar’s money didn’t matter nearly as much with what they did with that which belonged to God.

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Was the Father a Fool?

Was our Heavenly Father a fool to send his beloved Son to save the Jewish people and, even more, the whole world?

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A heart shaped opening in a wooden door.

What Forgiveness Is Not . . . and Is

One of the reasons many of us struggle with forgiveness is that we misunderstand what it is . . . and what it is not. Yet, if we are going to follow Jesus’s teaching and forgive others so that God might forgive us, then we had better know what we should do . . . and not do.

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