Also available on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dT3l3uvKz_YDeuteronomy is filled with verses that mention loving the Lord in a very full way. For example Deuteronomy states “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.”The Lord met with Moses on Mt. Sinai amidst fire and smoke and earthquakes during a time which has never been repeated since. During this time the Lord spoke and wrote words that He gave Moses for the people concerning the covenant relationship He wanted to form with them. This is the same covenant that He wants to form with us.Besides the succinct pattern in Deut. So what are these commandments? Well, despite that the Hebrew words “shama kole”, translated as “hear [My] voice” or “shama shama kole” (indeed hear [My]voice) forms the foundation of God’s instruction to us, there is a prevalent doctrine spread by Christians today (including some Adventists) which seeks to discourage faithful obedience by replacing God’s voice with man’s. This is not new. The religious leaders and even some in the early church were not showing love for God and were not obeying His Word, even as they thought they were. They were really practicing a blasphemous type of idolatry by distorting God’s commandments into their own list of rules and traditions which they were then using as a type of club to manipulate others. By misrepresenting God and His commandments and symbols they were corrupting God’s name and discouraging others from even wanting to form a close relationship with God. This was similar to practices within the Catholic church which required a person to do penance (usually profiting the priests) in order to earn forgiveness for sins. Such doctrines were so detrimental to the spreading of the gospel and to our understanding of God, that Christ pointed out the hypocrisy on numerous occasions, Paul preached sermons on it, and the Protestant reformation lead to the promotion of the “Justification by Faith alone” doctrine.However, in recent history the pendulum has swung the other way such that any act of faith that is not popular or sanctioned by church leaders gets ascribed unrighteous motives. For example, “Salvation by Faith” was first misapplied to label Sabbath-keepers as “legalists” accompanied by the false teaching that everything God spoke on Mt. Sinai was “nailed to the cross”. Now it is being used even within the Adventist church to discourage the type of diligent and prayerful Bible discovery and adherence that Ellen White and her small group modeled so well. Right at the time in history when hearing (shama) God’s voice (kole) is so critical, some of God’s most dramatic and clear proclamations to man are dismissed as obsolete, and those who dare attend to them risk being ostracized.This lesson asks the question of what loving the Lord with all our heart and all our soul and with all our strength looks like. Well, we cannot and should not judge the hearts of others, but there is a way we can peek inside ourselves to examine the depth of our love for God.I believe if (1) we can call the LORD our “Praise” and our God (our One and Only) as in Deut --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/from-the-top-ministries/message