Think about those in your life who you're devoted to: your spouse, your family, your friends. What about God? After all, He's certainly devoted to you. Today on Turning Point, Dr. David Jeremiah considers the importance of fostering devotion as he continues his series, "The Battle for Your Soul." If you need help in this area, stay tuned as David introduces today's captivating message: "Devoted Souls." The Bible says in Mark twelve thirty, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your soul." That's what it means to have a devoted soul.
Is your soul devoted to God? Are you completely committed to Him, or is He just sort of Sunday by Sunday for you, convenient for you? The Bible tells us what happens when our souls become devoted to God. This is from the twelfth chapter of the book of Mark, and we'll look at that in just a moment. But first, if you don't have the book already, the battle for your soul came out just a couple of weeks ago.
It's brand new, the latest thing from the Turning Point Ministry, and it's yours for the asking. When you send a gift to Turning Point during this month to help us with the cost of getting this message to you every day, and your gift is so important during these days, you know. We understand that things are tough for a lot of people right now. It costs a lot to drive your car. It costs a lot to do a lot of things, but don't forget.
That this ministry depends on you. We're all in this together, so let's be faithful. And when you send your gift, ask for your copy of the Battle for Your Soul. It will be mailed to your home, and you'll have it in a short time, so you can follow up on all of this and get ahead. And obviously, we can't teach all of these messages.
There's thirty-one of them. We have about ten or twelve that we can do on the radio.
So the rest are just in the book, available for you and for your own. Research. Ask for your copy of this book when you send your gift today. Here is part one of devoted souls. There are times when the whole course of our lives can be condensed down to a single moment—a moment of decision.
That was the case for Pastor David Lousy on March twentieth. In 2025, David and his wife Jill were driving down the M60, which is a major highway in Great Britain. They were headed toward the town of Swinton, and suddenly, a large semi-truck moving toward them began to swerve violently. The driver had lost control, and with terrifying speed, he crashed through the barrier dividing both sides of the road. And barreled into oncoming traffic straight toward David and Joe.
In the driver's seat, David didn't have time or space to avoid the collision, but he did have time to spin the wheel, so that the oncoming vehicle struck his side of the car rather than his wife. Their family car was flipped; it rolled several times. But that initial moment absorbed most of the damage, and when the car came to a rest, David has sustained multiple critical injuries. He was transported to the hospital, where he died a short time later, in spite of receiving medical treatment, emergency wise. But because of his quick thinking, his wife Jo, she survived with only a few minor injuries.
Days later, as the news of his sacrifice spread throughout Europe, his family put out a statement describing him as a devoted father and proud grandfather who adored his family, and the way he loved his wife was something truly special, filling their home with warmth, kindness, and steadfast devotion. David's son-in-law Reuben later added that David was a strong, loving. Devoted husband, son, father, grandfather, brother, pastor, and was deeply loved by so many. If you listened carefully, you heard a word being repeated in the statements that were made about David and his life. The word is devoted.
His final act highlighted the devotion he had for his wife and for his family each and every day. I was thinking about what a wonderful thing it is to have people say that about you. He's devoted, devoted to his wife, devoted to his parents, devoted to his grandparents. Maybe a devoted employee, devoted friend, a companion, and more. What a great thing to have somebody who's devoted to you.
But what about being devoted to God? Over the last several messages, we've talked about the soul, and in some of the struggles we all face, we've discussed that sometimes the soul faces temptation, and discouragement, and exhaustion, and spiritual thirst. We've seen that God doesn't leave us there; He can restore our souls. But that raises a question: What's next? God restores us so we can know Him better.
So we can trust him more.
So we can follow him more closely. In other words, he wants us to be devoted to him. He's devoted us. He wants us to be devoted to him. He restores us so that we can do that.
And that is why we are going to talk about what it means to be a devoted soul. Do you have a devoted soul? Let's begin. With the context for devotion, our text today is in the twelfth chapter of the book of Mark, and Jesus, in this chapter, is fielding a series of hostile questions that are being posed by critics who are trying to trip him up, to get him caught in a trap that he couldn't get out of by the things they asked him. It was the final week of his ministry, just a day before Calvary, and Jesus had entered the temple to debate his foes.
They ask him, believe it or not, about taxes. They ask him about the resurrection. They expected him to say something inflammatory that would incite the crowds. They didn't know what to do with Jesus because he spoke with such wisdom they couldn't find fault in him for anything. Finally, a scribe posed what would appear to have been an honest question.
Here was this question: Mark twelve twenty eight. Then one of the scribes came and, having heard them reasoning together, perceiving that he had answered them well, asked him. Which is the first commandment of all? In other words, this wasn't a trick question, and it wasn't idle curiosity. You see, the scribe was asking about an issue that had been widely debated among the Jewish teachers.
Of all God's commands, which one mattered the most? Jewish tradition identifies that there were six hundred and thirteen commandments in the Torah, which is the first five books of the Old Testament. Of that number, according to them, two hundred and forty-eight commandments required positive action, and the remaining three hundred and sixty-five negative action. And all Jewish teachers regarded all of God's commandments as important. There was considerable debate among them over which one stood above all the rest.
Was there one commandment that was more important than all the rest? Lord, could you tell us what commandment that was? And so Jesus provided his answer in these famous words of Mark twelve twenty nine and thirty. Jesus answered the scribe and said, "The first of all the commandments is, 'Hear, O Israel.'" The Lord our God, the Lord is one, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. This is the first commandment.
The passage Jesus referred to in his answer is called the Shema, and it is found in Deuteronomy six, four and five. That Hebrew term means "here," which is the first word of the text. The Shema is the central prayer in the Jewish prayer book, and it is often the first section of Scripture that little Jewish children learn when they first start school. Many Jews recite the Shema at least twice daily, once in the morning and once in the evening. It begins with the declaration about who God is.
You listen to him. He alone is God. The creator of the universe is not one deity among many. That is the air of polytheism. What Scripture teaches is that Yahweh alone is God, and that's what that passage says.
He alone is God. He is one. The second section helps human beings understand how to approach, worship, and serve this one and only God. Doing so means loving God. It says with all your heart, which in Jesus' day referred not to your physical muscle, but to the part of your natural internal workings which make decisions.
The ancient world viewed the heart as the seat of your feelings and emotions and desires and passions.
So you're to love God with all of your desire, with all your heart. And we're to love God with all our soul. There we are with the soul passage, and this is a reference to the vitality within a person—the real you. You're to love the Lord your God with the real you. Who are you?
You're not your body. You're your soul. Love God with everything that is within you. And what does it mean to love God with your soul? New Testament scholar David Garland says it is the motivating power that brings strength of will.
Together with the heart, the soul determines conduct. When we are commanded to love God with all of our soul, it refers to the power of our lives. And then the Bible says we're to love God with all of our strength. The Bible says that our body is a gift of God, and we're to love God with all of our strength. All of our physical strength.
The Old Testament refers to the heart, soul, and strength, but Jesus added a fourth one. He said, "And love God with all your mind." Wow, being devoted to God includes a mental element. As well as a spiritual and physical one, every sense in which God has gifted our minds can be turned back to Him in devotion and reverence. Aren't you grateful for the people of God who devoted their minds to Him and provided all of our great hymns and all of our commentaries and books that we read that help us understand God? They devoted their minds to God.
C.S. Lewis said, "God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than of any other slackers." He said, "If you're thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you that you are embarking on something which is going to take the whole of you, brains and all." And I think sometimes we should teach that to our children before they get too far into school that you're not just there filling a Require motor sitting in a seat, but you are there to use the brains that God gave you to bring glory to His name. What does it mean to be devoted to God or to live as a devoted soul? First and foremost, devotion to God requires us to love Him with all of our heart, with all of our soul, with all of our mind, and with all of our strength. I want to pause here to take the pressure off of all of us, if I might.
And when you read a passage like this, if you're like me, you ask yourself this question: Have I ever truly done that completely at any time in my life? Because it seems like such an absolute requirement, all of your heart. All of your soul, all of your strength, all of your mind, love God like that. And I'm reminded of something one of my professors taught me when I was in seminary. I will never forget this.
He said, "When you're a preacher, you're going to have to talk about a lot of things that you may not have fully experienced yourself. But just remember this: you don't have to be all the way down the road, but you need to be on the road." And let me say that to you today. Many of us here, we're going to say, "I don't think I've ever loved God like that." Can I love God with all my heart, all my soul? That's what the requirement is. But the question isn't, "Are you all the way at the end of the road?
Are you on the road?" Is this your heart and desire? This is what you want to do. There's something within you that says, "Lord, help me to be like that." Let's talk about the conduct of devotion from this passage. Devotion requires totality. There's a key word that's repeated four times in Mark.
Did you notice it? It is the word "all." You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. This is the first commandment. Within the battle for our souls, one of Satan's attacks. Involves suggesting that we can compartmentalize our lives into two buckets, one bucket labeled me and the other bucket labeled God.
And according to this way of thinking, we put a few of our resources and time and energy into the God bucket in order to help advance His agenda in the world, and we give much of ourselves to serve Him, but not all. Satan encourages us to reserve a portion for the me bucket, for my plans, for my goals, for my own little kingdom, and this is harmful because it inevitably creates opportunities for conflict between our agenda and God's agenda, our will and God's will. Consciously or unconsciously, we begin to resent everything that goes into God's bucket. Especially if it is in conflict with something we think we want to do, we forget that God Himself is the source of every single thing that we have in the first place, and we don't really have anything that isn't in God's bucket when it starts. He loans it to us, makes us stewards over it, but we have the choice then to use that in certain ways.
The more we grow in devotion to God, the more we will offer Him. All that we have, and all that we are, because devotion requires totality, and then devotion requires priority. This is the first commandment. Remember, the scribes said, "Jesus, tell me what is the first commandment? What is the most important one?" And Jesus said, "The most important one is to love God with all your heart, soul, and mind." When the Israelites harvested the fruit of the land through their crops and their herds, they set aside what they called the first fruits as an offering to God.
The earliest and best portions of their harvest were given back to God in recognition of His role as their provider. And when the prophet Daniel lived as a captive in pagan Babylon, he made is this practice. To kneel before God and pray three times a day, this was his way of setting himself apart from the idolatry that surrounded him in Babylon. In fact, Daniel was so public and so consistent regarding his prayer that his enemies became aware of it and decided to use it against him. They persuaded King Darius to pass a law that no person could pray to anybody else but to King Darius for thirty days.
And then they caught Daniel praying, and he was thrown into the lion's den. Do you remember that? Are you familiar with what happened after the king made the rule that you can't pray? I always thought this was an in-your-face thing that Daniel did, but it wasn't at all. The Scripture says, "Now Daniel knew the writing was signed, that he couldn't pray to anybody but to Darius, and he went home." And in his upper room, with his windows open towards Jerusalem, he knelt down on his knees three times that day and prayed and gave thanks before his God, as was his custom since early days.
And I remember when I first read that, perhaps even when I first taught that, I portrayed Daniel as the kind of guy. I'll show you what I'm going to do. You tell me I can't pray. Open the windows wide open. Pray as loud as you can towards Jerusalem.
I'll show you what I can do. But that isn't what happened at all. He just went home and did what he normally did. It says at the end of the text, as he had done from early days. He said, "Darius isn't going to interrupt my priority with God.
My priority is to pray three times a day, which I will continue to do." And so, he had to experience the lions' den, and you know the rest of that story. When we show God that He is first. In our lives today, we do that through our tithing. Did you know that's one of the things that happens when we put God first in our giving? We show God He is first through our worship.
We show God that He is first through our prayer, through our Bible reading, through our faithful service, through the things we do to help other people in and out of the church in our community. When we do that, we're saying by our conduct, God, You are first in my life. In John fourteen, Jesus tells us there is another way that we can show him that he's first, and I believe that it is the most incredible thing in the Bible, and maybe one of the most forgotten things in the Bible. I am going to tell you today, with absolute certainty, how you can prove that you love God in a way that no one will ever be able to dissuade you. Here it is, and it's not my words.
It's John 14. Jesus is saying, "If you love me, keep my commandments." He who has my commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves me. Do you know who loves Jesus? The people who do what he tells them to do. Jesus didn't say, "If you love me, tell me." He didn't say, "If you love me, sing a song to me." As important as that may be, he said, "If you love me, obey me." And John added to that.
Over in First John five three, we read, "For this is the love of God that we keep His commandments, and His commandments are not burdensome." God is loved by us when we keep His commandments. That's how you and I can show him that he is first place in our lives.
So you may be in a crisis, maybe something's going on in your life where you're facing something you really are being drawn to do, but you know it's not pleasing to the Lord. You know how you can love the Lord? Do what He tells you to do. Do the right thing. When you do the right thing, when you do what God tells you to do, you're saying to God, "I love you, Lord." And I am going to do what you tell me to do.
Devotion requires totality; it requires priority, and it requires thirdly ministry. Here is another thing that's tied to this passage in Mark: the more our souls are devoted to God, the more we will find ways to invest all of ourselves in His kingdom. To make him our first priority and to love others as he loves us. That's what Jesus added to his conversation with the scribe. Remember, the scribe said, "Lord, tell us what's the first commandment." And Jesus came back and said, "I'll give you number one.
I'll give you number two." And verse thirty-one says, "And the second like it is this: You shall love your neighbor as yourself." There's no other commandment greater than these. The scribe had asked Jesus to identify one command, and Jesus said, "Love God and love your neighbor." In his letter to the Romans, Paul summarized the last five commandments under the heading of loving your neighbor. Watch this. Here's what he wrote: "Owe no one anything except to love one another. For he who loves another has fulfilled the law." For the commandments, you shall not commit adultery.
You shall not murder. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness. You shall not covet. If there is any other commandment, all are summed up in this saying: namely, love your neighbor as yourself.
When a lawyer asked Jesus what it meant to love his neighbor, you know what Jesus did. I love this. Jesus is such an illustration and teacher to me as a pastor. He told a story. I love Jesus stories, don't you?
The reason I tell so many stories is I'm trying to be like Jesus. Jesus told stories, and stories are like windows that open your eyes to truth that you wouldn't know otherwise.
So Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan.
Now let me just review that a little bit. The Good Samaritan is the story of a man who had been beaten, robbed, and left for dead among the roadside, and several religious people saw the wounded man. But chose to walk by. A Samaritan stopped to help. He treated the man's wounds.
He transported him to safety, and he paid for his care. And Jesus is saying to these scribes and Pharisees, "That's what a neighbor does." In other words, Jesus says, "Love for our neighbor is more than a feeling. It's seeing a need and doing something about it." Now we all pay lip service to that. We all agree with that. When you love somebody, you want to do something to help them.
That our neighbors are anybody we find who needs help. We all agree with that. But the problem is, we don't do it. If we're good neighbors, we help those who are in need. We know it.
But the Apostle John said, "Whoever has this world's goods and sees his brother in need." And shuts up his heart from him. How does the love of God abide in him, my little children? Listen to this. Let us love, not in word or in tongue, but in deed and in truth. In summary, what does it mean to love our neighbor as ourselves?
It means we are to have time for, be interested in, and deeply desire the welfare of our neighbor, in the same way. We have attitudes toward ourselves, and that's something we end up learning little by little throughout all of our lives. And I think the older that we get, the more we realize how important relationships are, and how vital it is for us to see others with the spirit we have spoken about today here on Turning Point. The Bible teaches us to love our neighbors as ourselves, and our neighbors are any. That we know, who don't know the Lord, any that we know who are near us that we have influence over.
These are our neighbors, and God calls us to be responsible to them with the way we act in their presence and with the words we share with them as we have opportunity. We'll talk more about this tomorrow as we return to Mark chapter twelve. And the discussion of devoted souls. Hey, friends! Don't forget to get your copy of the Battle for Your Soul available from Turning Point for a gift of any size.
Ask for your copy. Give your best gift, but whatever you send, we will give you this book as our way of thanking you for your investment in the ministry of Turning Point. I'll see you tomorrow. Thanks for listening. For more information on Dr.
Jeremiah's series, "The Battle for Your Soul," please visit our website, where we also offer two free ways to help you stay connected: our monthly magazine, Turning Points, and our daily email devotional. Sign up today at davidjeremiah.org/radio. That's davidjeremiah.org/radio, or call us at eight hundred nine four seven nineteen ninety three. Ask for your copy of David's helpful new book, *The Battle for Your Soul: Thirty-One Biblical Secrets of Spiritual Warfare*. It's yours for a gift of any amount.
You can also purchase the Jeremiah Study Bible in the New International and New King James versions, complete with notes and articles from Dr. Jeremiah's decades of study. Get all the details when you visit our website, DavidJeremiah.org/radio. This is David Michael Jeremiah. Join us tomorrow as we continue the battle for your soul on Turning Point with Dr.
David Jeremiah.
